Kittenfish: An Enemies-to-Lovers Romantic Comedy

by Brenda Lowder

  “Did you bring more wine?” I ask when I hear the door shut.

  “Sorry. Didn’t know there was a cover charge,” a deep, male voice answers, and the bottom drops out of my stomach.

  I crane my neck in case I can shoot lasers out of my eyes at him. Tarek. The home-wrecking bastard.

  “What do you want?”

  He ignores the question and hunkers down near my head. His voice gets softer, but he doesn’t fool me. He’s no nicer at low volume. “What are you doing on the floor?”

  “It’s where I live now. Don’t judge.” He’s the last person who should be judging. Tarek, all polished surface and slick veneer. No warmth. No feeling. Nothing real. Just the image of reality with his tailored dark tan dress pants stretched over his muscular thighs, smelling of Sauvage by Christian Dior—bergamot and citrus with a lower woodsy layer—speaking soft and slow like he cares that he ripped the love of my life away from me and crushed every dot of feeling in my entire being.

  “I’m not judging,” he says, even though I can tell that he totally is. “Living on the floor is a valid life choice. Don’t let anyone change your mind.”

  I take a deep breath and blow it out, my pulse high and my patience thin. “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to see you, Duchess. See how you’re doing since the breakup.” He pauses and swallows. “Really well, I’d say. Yeah.”

  “Breakup?” The word hauls me to my elbows. “Breakup? Is that what you’re calling it?”

  He angles his head and regards me with a calculating gaze. “What would you call it?”

  I enunciate slowly. “Total emotional annihilation.”

  “Uh huh.” He rocks back and sits himself down on the carpet next to me, cross-legged. His shiny leather shoes squeak as they rub against each other. “Tell me about it.”

  I look at him squarely, and I swear he flinches. My heartbeat kicks up. He’s guilty of something, all right. “Why don’t you tell me? I was going to have the wedding of my dreams, and my perfectly happy, perfectly perfect soul mate runs away with a stripper the night before our wedding. You were there. What happened?”

  He nods, thoughtful, looking down at me with those blue-green eyes of his. I watch for the tell that he’s lying—his nostrils flaring—but it doesn’t come. “I…was…there. That is true.”

  “What did she look like?” Inside I cringe at my patheticness even as I ask. “Was she beautiful? Was she a redhead?” Liam has always had a thing for redheads. “Did she sparkle? I’ve heard strippers sparkle. Maybe he’ll come back once the glitter washes off.”

  The look he gives me is so raw with pity that I feel it like a punch to my solar plexus. I want to cover his eyes with my hands so he won’t look at me like that. So he can’t see whatever it is about me that’s making him look that way.

  He shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter what she looked like. The point is that he was capable of leaving you the night before your wedding all along and in the end, that’s what he chose to do.”

  Tarek’s words—he chose to—wrap around my heart like a blood pressure cuff and start squeezing. As if, when it comes down to it, no one would choose me.

  He takes a deep breath. “I think it’s time for some tough love, Duchess. I’m the closest thing you’ve got to a big brother, and I’m going to be straight with you. Liam didn’t love you.”

  The blood pressure cuff around my heart inflates further until I’m sure my heart will burst.

  “He wasn’t perfectly happy. In fact, he was miserable.”

  “What? No, we—”

  “He told me about medium spicy,” he interrupts. Medium spicy was my code word for wearing cotton instead of silk nighties and not serving him dinner on the good china after we were engaged—all the ways you don’t have to try so hard once you’re in an established relationship. It’s a good thing. No one can sustain super hot and spicy in everyday reality. Real women don’t wear makeup and stilettos to bed. But apparently Tarek disagrees. “No man wants medium spicy before he even makes it to the getting-your-balls-cut-off-at-the-altar part.”

  I suck in a breath. “That’s commitment. That’s love. That’s being comfortable with each other so every moment doesn’t have to be spicy.” I don’t even want to think about the heights of heat Tarek’s sordid love life achieves on the Scoville scale.

  “No, that’s boring, and that’s not what men want.”

  I sit up and face him. “How do you know what men want?”

  “Oh, I know what men want. I am one, remember? Men want variety. A lot of different women. And they don’t want to be shackled to one woman for the rest of their lives.”

  “You’re a pig.”

  “And you’re naïve.”

  I feel like I’m running on sand. I want to fight him, but the ground is shifting under my feet. “It’s not naïve to believe in love.”

  “Oh, it is. It so is. And stupid.” He punctuates the word with a jab of his chin in my direction.

  “I’m not stupid.”

  “You’re being stupid. Loving Liam was stupid.” His lip curls. “And you smell.”

  “I don’t smell!” I probably do. I’ve lost track of how long I’ve been living on the floor.

  “You do. You smell terrible.” He shakes his head at me. “How long have you been like this?”

  “For as long as you’ve been an asshole! Forever! This is your fault. Tell me, did you hand him condoms on his walk over to the stripper?”

  “Duchess, he didn’t walk over to the stripper. He ran.”

  I feel the prickle of tears behind my eyes, but I choke them back. “Where’s Kya? I need Kya and you’re no Kya.” I shove hard on his muscular thigh with my two hands, trying to push him toward the door. He doesn’t move.

  “You’re damn right I’m no Kya. She’d just bring you more wine and wipe your tears.”

  “Yes, and that’s what I need right now. A friend.”

  He grabs my arm and focuses on me with strange intensity. “No, I’m your friend because I’m telling you the way things are and not letting you have stupid illusions that will keep you from moving on. You look pathetic, you smell awful, and you’re stupid for loving Liam. Get over it.”

  “You get over it!” I yell inanely. I turn and put my feet on his thigh and try to push him toward the door.

  “Oh, I’m over it. Believe me. And you know who else is over it? Liam. He’s over it. He’s over the nagging and the no makeup and the no-sex-before-work-on-a-weekday rule.”

  I gasp and sit up. “He told you that?”

  “Yes, he did. And when I told him life didn’t have to be like that—”

  My blood slows, freezing to crystallized ice in my veins. “You what?”

  Tarek closes his mouth. Oh, he knows what he said.

  I chomp down on my back teeth and feel the tightness travel down my neck and straight across my shoulders. I could pounce on him from my spot on the comforting floor. I am a caged animal, cornered by heartache and despair. And Tarek is in my home, where I live, attacking me.

  My voice gets low and dangerous. “You told him what, exactly? That he could do better? That he didn’t have to settle for love and commitment and a lifetime with a woman who doesn’t wear makeup to bed and might be too rushed before work to help him get it up?”

  “No, I didn’t mean—”

  “Oh, I think you did. I think you meant exactly what you just said.” I poke him in the chest.

  He flicks my hand away. “Stop it.”

  “I think you told him that a life like yours was so awesome. A life where you could have any woman you want, hell, two at a time, and things like feelings and love don’t enter into it.” I poke him again.

  He grabs my hand this time and holds it. Hard. He’s hunkered down next to me and puts his face right in mine. “I did. You caught me, Marissa. I told him the truth. I told him that marriage was for chumps and even a guy like him could tap some hot ass if he could get to it before all his hair was go
ne. In the next five years, maybe, tops.”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  I’d like to say that I jump on top of him and land a right hook, but it’s more accurate to say I kind of push him off balance and flop on top of him.

  He laughs. “Duchess, you still fight like a girl.”

  “I am a girl, you asshole.”

  He laughs again. “You don’t smell like one. God, you stink.”

  “Shut up.” I push off of him and struggle to put distance between us. Before I can, he grabs my hands and laughs again. I realize there are tears streaming down my face when I see the puddles of drips they make on his silk shirt. I won’t look up at him and give him the satisfaction of seeing he’s made me cry. I cry a lot nowadays. He shouldn’t get credit for it.

  “Let me go,” I growl.

  His voice is light, amused, but his grip is steel. “I don’t think I will.”

  I jerk my hands back, but he doesn’t let me go.

  He clenches his jaw and pulls me an inch closer. “In fact, I think you’re a danger to yourself and others.” His breath is hot on my hair. “I’m going to help you out by doing something you should have done a long time ago.”

  He lets up his grip on my wrists, and for a second I’m relieved, thinking that he’s only trying to scare me. Then he wiggles out from under me and gets smoothly to his feet. I keep my face turned away, anxious for him to leave so I can give in to my tears in peace.

  Instead of exiting, he bends down, picks me up, and throws me over his shoulder like a fifty-pound sack of flour at a warehouse store.

  I pummel his back with my fists. “Let me down, you son of a bitch!”

  He hoots like his usual charming self, but underneath, he’s fuming, the most angry I’ve ever seen him. “Now, Marissa, that’s not nice. You need to cool off while you’re performing that public service I talked about.” He stomps down the hallway and even though I’m mad as hell, I still marvel at his strength, carrying me with such ease. He opens the door to my bathroom and turns on the light. I pound on his back as hard as I can.

  “Well, now, that there’s starting to tickle!” He laughs and turns on the water in the shower. He pulls me forward by the waistband of my yoga pants and drops me on the shower floor.

  I bounce hard on my butt, and pain radiates from my backside. Cold water sprays in my face and all over my clothes. Shock immobilizes me. Tarek slams the clear shower door with a bang.

  “Clean yourself up and get back out there, Duchess. Love is a lie,” he yells.

  Through the water trails on the shower glass I watch him stride out of my bathroom. Five seconds later I hear the front door slam behind him.

  Really, Tarek? Really? Love is a lie?

  Okay, then.

  Guess what, Tarek?

  Karma’s a bitch.

  My backside is sore, but I pull myself up and endure the freezing water. I throw my sodden clothing over the shower door and turn the dial until the water is so hot I lose visibility in the steam. As I soap myself up, my anger at Tarek wars with my hurt over Liam to be the emotion buckling my knees and twisting my stomach into knots.

  It’s so easy for Tarek to say love doesn’t exist because he’s never been in love. He uses women to stroke his ego, and then he throws them away. He’s never had a long-term relationship. I don’t think he’s ever dated the same girl twice.

  He’s been that way for years, but it’s none of my business. Why would it be? He’s never gone after Kya’s or my friends—despite Blaire’s being vocal about lining up to get used by him—but overall his womanizing doesn’t hit us close to home.

  That was the case, of course, until he inducted Liam into his little club and ruined my life.

  What Tarek needs is to fall in love. To experience what it’s like to really love another person. To feel like he isn’t whole without her. That his utter happiness is wrapped up in someone else’s existence and not his own.

  And then he needs to lose that love like he made me lose mine.

  Tarek takes great pride in never having been in love. He has even boasted about not having feelings at all. The woman who’d be capable of capturing his heart would have to be someone really, really special.

  So special, in fact, she couldn’t even be real.

  And that’s when I get my idea.

  Chapter Five

  I hold auditions Monday morning.

  Showered and dressed in my best suit, I’m sitting in the front row of the local theater I rented. It was surprisingly inexpensive. Turns out there’s not a lot of demand for theater space at ten in the morning. Using my connections with my job at the paper, I was able to get an ad into both the print and online editions advertising the job opening.

  It’s an odd job.

  In the end, I decide to call it “acting for an avant-garde live theater production on film.” The ad mentions that promotional photos will be taken and the actress should be available to be on call to film future scenes in accordance with audience demands as needed over the next several months.

  It won’t take longer than that to make Tarek fall in love, will it?

  I instruct the women in line outside to come in one at a time—one in for every one that goes out—and tell them I’ll contact them later if they get a callback. An assistant would make this easier—Kya or Blaire or anyone—and could help me organize the candidates and answer their questions, but I don’t want to tell anyone about my plan for taking Tarek down a notch. Or all the notches.

  Number one, it’s a secret and a secret can be kept only if no one knows about it. And number two, I’m not a hundred percent sure that Kya would choose my side. Sure, she knows her brother is the biggest player out there, but she may not blame him for Liam leaving like she should, and blood is thicker than best-friendship. And she loves him. She has never given him the beatdown he needs.

  The first actress hands me her résumé and headshot before climbing the three steps to the stage.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” I tell her. The pretty brunette launches into Ophelia’s monologue from Hamlet. She’s not bad. But Hamlet’s a little heavy for Tarek’s ADD-riddled attention span. Not that he’d ever know this was her audition choice—though I think it says something about who she is that she chose this piece. But she’s also brunette. Tarek prefers blondes.

  “Thank you. I’ll give you a call by Friday if you make callbacks.” I ask her to send in the next hopeful, and I’m off and running.

  After two hours, three more Ophelias, five Noras from A Doll’s House, and seven Midsummer Night’s Dreams, I’ve seen a lot of beautiful women. But it’s not until a striking blonde performing one of Rosalind’s monologues from As You Like It—why all the Shakespeare? Did the paper run my ad next to the one for Shakespeare’s Tavern?—that I feel I’ve found the woman who will make Tarek fall in love and begin to believe in the value of commitment, fidelity, and marriage. And hopefully stomp his heart.

  “Excellent!” I call out to her, interrupting her midsentence.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to go on? I’m just warming up.”

  “No, that’s great, thanks. Can you come down here? Let’s chat a bit.”

  She scurries down the short steps and stands in front of me. She’s about five feet nine, maybe an inch taller than I am but still well shy of Tarek’s six feet two so her height is good. Her hair is long and golden, longer than my shoulder-length hair and blonder than my honey blonde, which are both deep within the parameters of ideal Tarek-territory. Her eyes are big and blue and conspicuously sexy in the way of Gigi Hadid or Brigitte Bardot.

  She takes a seat, leaving an empty one between us, and we face off. I consult her résumé for her name.

  “Lexy Hunter.”

  “Yes.” She nods in a way that makes me think this isn’t actually her name but a stage name she’s trying out.

  “So this is a very avant-garde production.” I tap my pencil and avoid direct eye contact.

  She bobs her head
vigorously, and now I wonder if she knows what avant-garde means.

  “We don’t currently have a script, but I’ll be able to email you pages in time to learn your lines before each scene. And we’ll workshop. I’ll also be one of the actors in the production. The scenes will be filmed out and around Atlanta in a kind of guerilla-film-making style.”

  I chance a glance at her, gauging her reaction. My conscience twinges that since there is no film, I’m lying to this girl. On the other hand, I’m raiding my savings and what I could return of my honeymoon to pay her a real salary, and she is, after all, an unemployed actress. Also, although my “film” will lack distribution because in truth it will have an audience of one—Tarek—I’d be happy to give her a glowing recommendation, and maybe the experience will help her to go on and get a better fame-making gig in town.

  “One question.” She raises a finger in the air. “Will I be the one wearing the gorilla suit?”

  I pause, waiting to see if she’ll smile or say she’s joking. She doesn’t.

  “Um, no. In fact, there probably won’t be an actual gorilla suit in the film itself.”

  She nods and places a finger to her lips in contemplation. “I think it’s better that way. This is a romance, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Romances are better without gorillas. Just my opinion.”

  “Yes. You’re right.” I start to wonder if this woman is bright enough to pull off what I have in mind, but she’s a talented actress and Tarek has never liked being outshone in the brightest light bulb department. I straighten my shoulders and focus my professionalism. “And our producers agree. No gorilla suits.” I pull my clipboard up and pretend to consult it for details. “Like I said, there’ll be a series of scenes filmed in and around Atlanta over the next few months. Although you’ll receive scripts ahead of time, the film will be largely improvised.” I look at her searchingly. “How are you at improv?”

  She smiles with relief. “Oh, really good. I did an adult film—or two—and there was tons of improv in those. I was great.”