Shopping for a Billionaire 4

by Julia Kent

  In a flash, I’m on my back and he’s over me, poised to claim me, my legs opening of their own will, my body so primed. So ready. So—

  Beep beep beep.

  My heart pounding, my hands fisting the sheets, and a puddle under me the size of Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg (yes, it’s a real lake in Massachusetts), I wake up mid-climax, thrashing a bit and shaking myself out of what is, disappointingly, just a dream.

  Another damn dream.

  Third one in three days.

  All my pink bits are hot and wet, all my other bits are cold and tingly, and my brain bits are embarrassed as hell that I can have the female equivalent of wet dreams against my will by thinking about a man who will never touch me again.

  Never.

  There’s that word again.

  I am covered in a sheen of sweat, and oh, if only you could sweat disappointment and unrequited love out of your pores. I’d live in a sauna for a month if it could exorcise the demon of heartbreak that lives inside me, teasing me with subconscious fantasies of reunion, of unconscious motives that make me google Declan, follow him on Twitter, wish for one brush with him so we can talk it out and reunite.

  I’d take a drug to make the pain go away. So far, copious amounts of chocolate have done nothing but make the pudge around my waist a little softer. If only I could drive the pain out with a master cleanse. Someone should make a protein shake and market it.

  The Breakup Smoothie.

  Declan’s taste is in my mouth. The touch of his lips is between my breasts, so real I reach up my shirt to chase his fingers. The lingering sense that he really was here, that he really did travel across my skin and give himself to me in my curves and hollows, makes me feel haunted.

  Haunted.

  As the cool morning air fills in the space between dream and reality, it chases all the vestiges of my Dream Declan away, leaving me bereft.

  Chilled.

  Unmoored.

  I grab my phone and shut off the alarm, then check my calendar. I have a mystery shop today, one in person about two hours away.

  Two hours? That’s a rare one. Why would I—

  Oh.

  Yeah.

  That one.

  The sex toy shop. We’re being paid travel time plus our mileage to handle a series of sex toy shops, to make sure they’re not selling pornographic materials to minors. And if they have a tobacco license, we’re checking on cigarette sales to minors, too.

  As my lady parts stop their Gangnam Style dance imitation and I catch my breath, I remember the worst part:

  Mom is my partner on these.

  Thoughts of Mom and a naked Declan doing unmentionably delightful things to me do not mix. It’s like Baileys Irish Cream and sloe gin: warning! Warning, Will Robinson!

  You throw up when you combine the two.

  Chuckles climbs on my bed, sniffs my crotch, and gives me a mildly disgusted look. It’s not rivetingly disgusted, though, which is alarming.

  That means he’s come to expect to be disappointed in me.

  Or I need a shower.

  Either way, even my cat thinks that my dreams are deviant.

  And you can’t sink much lower than that.

  Or so I thought.

  * * *

  “I thought Amanda was doing this shop with me. Not you!” Mom grouses as we pull into the parking garage in downtown Northampton. I love the rare mystery shop that brings me into this college town, where the coffee shops are fabulous, you can find the best smoothies anywhere, and street buskers are as conversant about American foreign policy as they are about the best pad Thai in town.

  But I don’t relish the idea of comparison shopping vibrators with my mother. That’s up there with looking forward to getting a pap smear, a root canal, and a colonoscopy at the same time.

  Which I’d prefer over this.

  “Me too, but she tricked me.” Tricked is a tiny confabulation. Okay, a huge one. She offered to spend a few hours snooping on my behalf and getting some dirt on Declan if I took Mom on this sex toy mystery shop.

  No bleeping way.

  “Fine, then,” Amanda had said. “If you don’t take the sex toy shop with Marie, I’ll tell her you the truth about that taping of Rachael Ray.”

  “You wouldn’t!”

  “Try me.”

  My mother is the biggest Rachael Ray fan EVER. I had a chance to go for a customer service evaluation last year, and Mom had begged, pleaded, and cajoled, but I’d stood firm. Being embarrassed is one thing, but on television?

  I have to draw a line somewhere.

  And that line brought me here to Northampton to a nearby sex toy store with my mother.

  Being humiliated on the Rachael Ray show suddenly looks so much more appealing. Amanda stood her ground, and here I am...

  “I can’t believe they put a sex toy shop here,” Mom says as we get out of the car.

  “Here?” I look around at the quaint brick buildings, eyes catching the glint of sunlight off the large display window for an art gallery. “Oh, no. Not here. We’re just in the parking lot to grab a good cup of coffee.”

  She rolls her eyes but smiles and links her arm through mine as we walk across the bridge from the car park to the shopping mall building. “You and your coffee. Why not just stop and get an iced coffee from—”

  I stop her before she names a ubiquitous coffee and donut shop. I also shudder. “That’s what you drink when you have no choice.”

  “No, Shannon—that’s what you drink when you mystery shop for a living.”

  Twenty minutes later, good lattes secured, we pull out of the lot and head toward Smith College along Route 9, a slightly scenic route to our destination. I’m driving slowly, as traffic is thicker than usual, when the long, slim, swanlike body of a tall blonde catches the corner of my eye. I slow the Turdmobile down, and a guy hauling trash on a bike—a trailer full of actual garbage cans, five or so in a straight line—makes his way past me with effort.

  “Nice piece of crap,” he calls out in a jocular tone. Mom waves and says something friendly.

  My eyes are locked on Jessica Coffin. “Yep. She sure is,” I say.

  A group of pedestrians clogs a zebra-striped crosswalk and I’m forced to stop, my eyes eating up the scene. It’s definitely her. Without a doubt. She looks over and her eyes fix on a spot above my head, her nose wrinkling in distaste. She’s seen the coffee bean on the hood of my car and correctly determined it looks more like a piece of—

  Her.

  My impulse to give her the finger remains firmly suppressed, though what’s the harm? She can’t possibly realize it’s me, right?

  “What are you staring at?” Mom asks.

  “Jessica Coffin.”

  “JESSICA COFFIN?” Mom screams. And by “scream,” I mean bellows like a foghorn being amplified by a Gillette Stadium sound system.

  Blonde hair down in a white curtain around hips slimmer than my thigh, she shimmers as she turns and her eyes narrow. Eyes on me (or my car, or maybe my mother, who is wildly waving her arms and screaming, “Jessica! I love your tweets!”), Jessica slips her hand through the kinked elbow of a man standing with his back to the road. She leans in to his ear, whispers something, and then clings to him like a lover with casual access to her man.

  In profile, the two look like something out of a Vogue article. A giant banner across the courtyard between the buildings announces the opening of some new children’s wing near an art museum. Or a botanical garden.

  The man turns just enough for me to see that it’s Declan McCormick.

  Maybe that new children’s wing is in hell.

  Cars behind me honk as I sit here, frozen, going out of my mind. Jessica and—

  “DECLAN!” Mom squeals. “SO GOOD TO SEE YOU!” She’s half out the window, and if I push the button and slowly close it on her, maybe she’ll snap in half, ass remaining in the car with me and screaming head rolling down the street, scooped up by the next bicyclist carrying awa
y the trash.

  Speaking of trash, I look at Jessica once more, and a white wall of rage takes over my vision.

  BEEP.

  Mom pulls her body back in the car as someone behind me screams profanities about my feces-topped car. I hit the gas and thud into something, just hard enough for me to realize I’ve made a terrible error in the heat of furious passion.

  A barrel of garbage goes flying up in the air and lands on the top of my car, rolls down, spewing food waste of every kind imaginable, then chunks of used tampons, and finally a thick batch of slime-coated paper.

  And Mom’s window is open. Wide open.

  By some miracle of divine intervention (for Mom) or craptastic luck (for me), the open end of the trash can is on my side. I get an armful of what smells like composted marijuana mixed into about four cups of semen. Fermented semen, that is.

  Sprouted, fair-trade, organic, non-soy spooge.

  Or maybe it’s just vanilla pudding. I should be reasonable here.

  Jessica’s derisive laugh can be heard over the screaming banshees in my head, and a thousand cars all start honking at me in unison. The people-powered garbage dude is apologizing profusely. It turns out the trash can popped out of his cart just as I hit the accelerator and it’s actually not my fault.

  Finally. Something’s not my fault.

  I fling my arm repeatedly in varying rotations of horror in an attempt to get the worst of whateverthehell that stuff is on my skin, while Declan gives me a pitying look that makes the white wall of rage come back. If small children didn’t dot the crowd around Jessica and Declan I’d ram the car into them, pinning her in place and shoving the garbage can on that perfect curtain of hair while doing some revenge-type thing of undetermined specificity to Declan.

  “Shannon?” Mom gasps. “Shannon, honey, you’re saying the F-word over and over again and I think we need to get going.”

  BEEP times a thousand plus composted garbage delivered by guys who only eat paleo diets and who think mashed dates in coconut milk are “dessert” is a kind of math problem that makes me shut down. Completely.

  Ignoring the mess, ignoring the honks, and flipping off the car behind me and—did she really?—Jessica and Declan, Mom storms out of her side of the car, pulls me out of the driver’s seat, throws a towel she found in the back seat over the driver’s side, plunks herself down, and waits for me to move all zombie-like into the passenger’s side.

  I’m covered in just enough slime to feel like Carrie, on stage at her prom. There’s a thought. My fingers on the door handle, I stop, the sound of ten thousand horns like Buddhist gongs being struck in unison. Eyes on the building next to Jessica, I will it to crumble and crush her to death. Or a manhole cover to split her in half. An intake vent to suck in her hair and scalp her.

  Thirty seconds of trying and all I get is a cloud of fruit flies in my eye. And when I go to wipe it, I get ganja-scented goo up my nose.

  “Get in the car, Shannon! We have sex toys to visit!”

  I am so done.

  Chapter Eight

  Pad Thai brought over to your bedroom by your best friend after a long day of listening to mystery shoppers give excuse after excuse for late field reports is the nectar of the gods.

  Amanda shoves a piece of chicken satay in her mouth and mumbles around the meat. “That’s it? He’s seriously just…done? He dumped you because you pretended to be a lesbian?” We’re reviewing the past week’s events because we’re all still in WTF mode over how my relationship fell apart.

  “No, he dumped me because he thinks I dated him just to get business deals.” Like that’s so much better.

  “And because you swing the wrong way.” Amy declares this around a piece of shrimp so big it could choke her.

  “I don’t swing the wrong way!”

  “There was that girl in college…” Amanda adds, making Amy’s eyes go wide, either from shock or maybe she really is choking.

  “One kiss! Everyone experiments at least once.” I told Amanda that story in confidence.

  Amanda and Amy shake their heads no.

  “Seriously?” Now I have to add this to my ever-growing list of Shannon faux pas?

  “I thought you were a little too good at the credit union,” Amanda says with an arched tone.

  “C’mon…well, anyhow, I’m not gay and Declan knows I’m not gay. He’s not upset about it. That’s a red herring. Mom keeps thinking it’s why he broke up with me and she’s wrong.”

  “Then…why does he think you were only with him for the accounts?”

  I retell his version of why he thinks that. By the time I’m done, Amy looks horror-stricken and Amanda is patiently picking lint balls off her cotton socks.

  “Oh,” they say in unison.

  “Ouch,” Amanda adds.

  “Yep.” What else can I say? Other than confessing my need to throw myself into a bottomless pit and enjoy the ride forever while thoughts of Declan torment me, there isn’t much more I can explain.

  “And then you saw him with Jessica Coffin at Smith College. Touching,” Amy says.

  Amanda waves a piece of chicken in the air and says, “But we figured that out. They’re both part of that charity. Her father and his father donated more than a year’s tuition at Smith to the project, so they’re just there.”

  “Together,” I groan.

  “But not together together,” Amanda insists.

  “They watched me run into a garbage can and cover myself with slime.”

  “There are worse things,” Amy says.

  “Like what?”

  “Being caught with your hand in a toilet in the men’s room?”

  I hit her. Hard. With a piece of shrimp.

  “That can’t be all there is,” Amy insists. She’s in her running clothes, tight knee-length Lycra pants and a tank top with a built-in shelf bra, two other sports bras underneath. The Jacoby girls aren’t just well endowed. We have so much breast tissue that if left unleashed, one good sudden turn to the right and we could knock out a small village.

  She stretches. I reach for my ice cream. Both involve moving muscles, right? So I’m exercising right now, too. Hand, wrist, tongue, taste buds, sorrow-filled heart…

  “So the whole Twitter thing happens,” Amanda says in a contemplative voice. “Declan claims that he understands the lesbian thing was for work. But he says you told him in the lighthouse that you were only dating him for the account—”

  “That was a joke!”

  Amy holds up one hand to get me to pause. Amanda is deep in thought, eyes on the windowsill, staring so intently at a small basil plant that it might spontaneously turn into pesto sauce.

  “—and he quoted Jessica, and then something about Steve’s mother?”

  Ouch. “What I said to Monica about only dating Declan for money got back to him.”

  “I said that!” Amanda protests.

  “I confirmed it.” A sick wave of horror pours through me. Even at the time, when I said it, I had a premonition it was a bad idea.

  Now I know it. And I can’t let it go. Over and over, the memories of everything I ever said to Declan that might make him think I was manipulative and not earnest in my intimate moments makes me cry.

  I couldn’t just own up to the truth and blow the mystery shop, could I? Most people would. Instead, I tap-danced to please all the different people I thought I needed to please.

  And in the end I lost the one I wanted to please the most.

  “Still doesn’t make sense,” Amanda says, brooding. “He’s not that shallow.”

  “He’s that accustomed to being used by women for his money and connections, though,” I wail. “He told me I was special because I wasn’t trying to use him.” The memory of his vulnerability during that conversation makes me feel like I’m two inches tall and covered in excrement. He thinks I violated that. Violated his trust.

  That is what hurts the most.

  Amanda’s still shaking her head slowly. “I still don’t buy i
t. You guys weren’t together for that long—”

  “A month.” I wish it could have been forever.

  “—but he’s an eminently reasonable guy. You’re a reasonable woman. He should have heard you out. Should have listened.”

  “He’s overreacting,” Amy concurs. “And he was kind of weird at Easter. Uptight and shy. Mom said the butter lamb freaked him out. Maybe he has a dairy phobia?”

  I snorted. “No. It reminded him of his mother.”

  “Hmmm,” Amanda says, stroking chin hairs she doesn’t have. “Perhaps that’s part of this.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing. Let me think this through.”

  I’m kind of done with this conversation and now am absent-mindedly reading work email. It’s the kind of day where I can get away with working from home. I don’t have any mystery shops today. Just 115 emails from the people I manage.

  As I open emails and scan quickly, I see we have three new approved mystery shoppers. Amanda and Amy take over the Declan analysis, trying to understand his motives, while I check out. I’ve worried and wondered and analyzed this issue to death, and can only come to one conclusion:

  When you date a billionaire and something goes wrong, it’s always your fault.

  The next twenty minutes go by in a blur as I sit on the couch and process email, Chuckles eats a ficus leaf and then hairballs it up, and Amy and Amanda ignore us while strategizing.

  “Earth to Shannon!” Amanda says.

  “What?”

  “How did Declan’s mom die?”

  I halt. “I…I don’t know. I asked him twice and he never answered.”

  All six eyebrows in the room shoot up. Eight, if cats have eyebrows.

  Amanda snatches the computer from me and types furiously.

  And then she gasps in shock.

  “Oh, Shannon. Oh my God.”

  “What?”

  “Read.”

  The obituary Amanda pulled up on the computer screen has a breathtakingly lovely older woman’s photo front and center, a thick chain of pearls around her neck, her hair pulled back in a smooth updo. Lively, friendly green eyes so familiar my heart tugs at me stare back.