The Paddock Club (Slipstream #2)

Chapter 1 En Passant

NEW YORK CITY

I’m not a good person. What I am, though, is a good woman.

You know what I mean—the difference. There’s an art to being a woman in this world, those little winks, the pencil skirts, the mauve eyeshadow.

Saying sorry when you’re not sorry, styling your hair within an inch of its life, choosing silence so you can be invisible, so you can do whatever you want.

I think I was fourteen the first time I realized that this body would require work.

My grandma was perched on her restaurant’s fake marble countertop, short legs swinging, the heels of her nonslip shoes banging softly against the purple cabinet doors.

I was in front of her, my chin in her hand as she applied eyeliner to my water line.

“This freaking hurts,” I whined.

“I know,” she replied calmly. “If you hand me the makeup remover, I can take it off. Your choice.”

Waterfield High School’s fall dance was that night, and I had a date with a soft-spoken writer in my class who all the guys called Nosferatu.

“No. I’m okay,” I promised Grandma, and when she smiled knowingly at me, I felt like I’d made the right choice: getting stabbed in the eyeball by a sharpened pencil so a boy nicknamed Nosferatu wouldn’t look away from me.

You don’t often notice those rites of passage in the moment, when life dunks into the darkness of one long tunnel before you’re out on the other side, brand-new.

But when Grandma let me borrow her stop-sign-red lipstick—Revlon’s Fire and Ice—I felt like I’d just become myself.

And then, at the dance, I learned the second most important lesson of my life.

When I overheard Nosferatu trash-talking my handmade dress to his snobby creative writing club friends, I didn’t tell him that it’d taken approximately five thousand hours to painstakingly sew hot-pink sequins to cotton.

Or that girls with red hair can wear pink.

Or that it’s really shitty to talk about my lack of strong female role models like I’m Bambi and he’s a guidance counselor.

I kept my Fire-and-Ice lips slammed shut and walked away, silently. All the way home. He’d hurt me, so I hurt him back, and that felt even better than lipstick.

And now, in a strange way, that’s kind of my job.

“This is ridiculous. How can the hotel cancel our Sugar Scrub Couples Massage? Don’t they realize we’re flying twenty hours to get there?

” grumbles my date, Winston. This isn’t new.

He’s a grumbler. And he’s been grumbling since he checked his email—during this black-tie wedding cocktail hour, notably.

In Manhattan, where you really have to overextend yourself to be noticeably rude.

“I’ve had this planned for a week, Cat. A week! I need to fucking relax.”

And if I have to listen to another billionaire monologue about how nobody wants to work anymore, I’ll need to dump my pinot noir on their head.

“That’s a shame,” I start. Just three words, and that low, fizzly excitement is building in my chest, my toes curling as much as they can in my death-trap heels. “But Winston, what if this is a sign?”

It takes a good five seconds for my words to breach his glazed-over face, knock around that big blond head of his, then compute.

His eyes flicker nervously between me, his phone, then back to me again.

“Do you not want the sugar scrub? We could do just a massage, once the hotel gets off their lazy—”

“It isn’t really that. You agreed that we weren’t a long-term thing.” I’ve dropped my voice to a low, sympathetic register. It masks most of my giddiness. “Maybe it’s our time to part ways?”

Winston’s face has gone pale. “Are you breaking up with me at my best friend’s wedding?”

“Yes, I am.”

“You—you can’t. That is so.” Winston gulps for air. “Bitchy.”

Against all odds, I stop myself from giggling. “Oh, wow.”

Let the record show that the groom, Bernard Baudelaire, isn’t Winston’s best friend.

I don’t even think Winston has friends, period.

But Bernard is a Formula 1 driver—which would’ve been exciting to younger me, who grew up glued to the television screen on race weekends, a bowl of cereal in my lap, Dad and the guys from the garage yelling happily around me.

But to Winston, this is just a public embarrassment.

Like his own mother or an honest job, my date hasn’t seen anyone in this wedding since he and Bernard attended some aristocratic French boarding school together. You know, the good old days.

The person who has seen the happy couple in the last decade is the maid of honor, Prestly, a lovely if not slightly Machiavellian venture capitalist who’d hired me to date and subsequently dump Winston right here. Right now.

Since he’d insisted on coming to this wedding after cheating on her, a member of the bridal party.

I cast Winston a sad look from beneath my heavy black lashes. “I can get my own ride home. Good—”

“But what about the trip?” he says, clearly not ready to call it quits. “It’s over Valentine’s Day, Cat. Who else is going to go with me?”

I drag in a breath. “Winston. Today is Valentine’s Day.”

“It is?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s always on the last day of February.”

“I think you’re thinking about Leap Day.”

“Leap what?”

I give up. “Don’t tell me you’re getting attached.”

Winston’s throat bobs with panic. Don’t tell me you’re getting attached is exactly what he’d texted Prestly after she’d discovered his online dating profile.

Sure, a bit on the nose, kind of a giveaway, but Prestly had offered to pay double my usual black-tie-wedding-breakup rate, and I’ve got sisters going to college.

And maybe he’s too stupid to remember how he dumped his girlfriend of three years, anyway, since he grumbles, “That’s kind of mean,” as he goes for his ice water.

I watch, biting back a bright red smile.

It isn’t that I’m heartless. If Winston were anyone else, I wouldn’t be dumping him at a wedding.

But he’s him, and I’m me, and the petulant anger blossoming across his face?

Ruining this billionaire’s picture-perfect night on the Upper East Side and upcoming White Lotus vacation? This is my job.

I’m a cat burglar.

And I steal time from horrible men.

“I can see you’re angry. I should go.” As I stand, Winston’s eyes follow my body up, lingering on the black tulle dress fluttering down my waist. It’s from Maria Grazia Chiuri’s first ready-to-wear collection with Dior, where the designer had sent her WE SHOULD ALL BE FEMINISTS T-shirt down the runway.

Winston might’ve noticed the bad omen if he actually knew fashion history like he’d told me he did—I know, a ridiculous lie, but he brags about knowing every “rich person” niche, from naval history to women’s wear.

He’s so misogynistic, he’s looped back around to sartorial hypervigilance.

“Happy hour isn’t over yet,” he says. “Don’t you want to stay for the ceremony?”

I arch an ice-blonde brow. Wella T18, the toner that you are. “Win, dear, the couple is two hours late and half the people in here are already smashed off their faces. I don’t think there’s going to be a wedding.”

“What about… saying goodbye in the bathroom? We never did, you know.” He leans forward suggestively, the squeak of his chair loud against the tasteful piano music. “Seal the deal.”

Wordlessly, I stare at Winston, wondering what would happen if I pointed out how entitled he is.

Would his head explode? Spontaneously transform into a whale and a bowl of petunias?

We haven’t even gotten close to sleeping together—I don’t ever sleep with my marks, ew—and he still booked us a couples massage.

But men like Winston don’t realize they have a Madonna-Whore Complex, of course; that would require critical thinking and self-awareness.

“I think I’m okay,” I say, smiling. “Hope you have the life that you deserve, Win.”

“Hey. Seriously? No? You know you’re just an influencer, right? Anyone would want to date me! Hey, I’m talking to—”

Ignoring him, I double-check that I’ve got my clutch and head downstairs, away from the happy hour floor.

Once I’m safely at the top of a ridiculously grand marble staircase—and pretty sure Winston isn’t going to airport-run after me—I slip out my phone to text his ex.

I don’t expect Prestly to see my message until later, since hello, wedding, but I like confirming when I’ve done the deed. A little present for the maid of honor.

It’s done. He tried to proposition me after I dumped him. Sorry you ever met him. Last quarter of the payment is due by midnight. xC

As soon as I hit send, her typing bubble pops up.

NOOO. EWWW.

Then—

Thank you for everything.

I usually stop replying to a client once I’ve sent their final receipt and/or apologized for their misfortune—ironically, I’m the person who can’t get attached.

Nor do I want to. At the end of the day, as much as I love helping womankind, I will not be splitting margaritas and queso with a venture capitalist named Prestly.

This is where our lives go in two separate directions.

She goes back to funding data-torture software named after Lord of the Rings villains, and I go back to funneling her money into charity, my family, and good clothes.

But I am lucky. To get to do this at all. To be someone who women thank. Stop and think about it long enough, and everyone agrees that the world is weird and nonsensical and, by all philosophical accounts, supremely fucked-up. I get to right a few wrongs while I’m still here. That’s real wealth.

Then another text from Prestly pops up on my phone screen and yes, right, here’s why I don’t stop for sentimentality.

Hey, actually, have you left the venue yet???