No Time Like Mardi Gras

by Kimberly Lang

  Those few inches, though, were all it took, as someone tried to move into the opening between them, forcing them farther apart. Colin’s grip on her wrist tightened as he tried to shove the person out of the way and pull her back to him. Now she was trapped: a surge of cross traffic pulling her one way as Colin was pushed in the other direction, and the idiot who’d started it all was pressing against the arm Colin held, causing pain to shoot up from her elbow to her shoulder as though she was being stretched on the rack.

  She could barely see Colin’s head above the crowd. His lips were moving, but the sirens and crowd noise drowned the words out. Her grip on his wrist began to fail and while Colin’s grip tightened more, pressing her watch painfully into her skin, his hand began to slip, too, until the connection was broken.

  Jamie had no choice but to go with the flow. Her ears were ringing, her wrist was burning and her shoulder felt loose in the socket. Unable to see over the shoulders of those around her, she followed the crowd blindly, figuring eventually it would have to break. It was a slow-moving crowd, but a very thick one, and with all of her attention required to remain on her feet, she lost track of how long she’d been in the surge. There was a scuffle to her right and she caught an elbow in the head, causing her to see stars, and she began to panic a little.

  The panic actually motivated her and she began to elbow her way out of the pack, finally reaching clear air and less congestion. Nothing looked familiar, and the street signs didn’t help much beyond their distinctive style telling her she was still in the French Quarter.

  There was no way in hell she was going back the way she came—even assuming it would be a straight shot back to familiar territory. About two blocks to her left, she could see a traffic light and figured that had to be Canal Street, so she headed that way.

  Her head hurt, her ears were ringing, her heart was still pounding and her wrist was burning. She looked down to see that her watch was gone, the skin scratched and raw. It must have come off when Colin lost his grip.

  Colin. She nearly turned around, but good sense prevailed. The exodus from the Quarter would be nearly impossible for her to fight against, and if the police were clearing the streets, did that mean she could get in trouble by going back in? She really didn’t want to get arrested again.

  Automatically, she reached for her phone, only to realize she’d never gotten his number. She hadn’t needed to.

  She could go back to the Lucky Gator; surely someone there would know how to get in touch with him...

  What am I doing? It was bad enough she’d hooked up with Colin—who, now that she thought about it, she knew absolutely nothing about. She’d been enthralled and under his spell all day, but now that she was out of proximity, good sense came roaring back.

  As if she didn’t have enough going on right now. This was not how she needed to start off in a new city.

  It had been a fun day, one for the memory books, but it was probably best it had ended like this. She should take it as a sign, an omen, that like all the other Mardi Gras celebrations, it had ended at midnight.

  After all, the last thing she needed right now was to get involved with anyone. A new relationship of any sort had to be way down the priorities list, as she had to focus on the really important things right now.

  So she should probably just go home.

  Canal Street was a relief—still crowded, but the crowds were smaller and contained to the sidewalks. Without Colin’s energy to feed from, weariness settled in on her quickly, and her feet began to drag. In front of a hotel, she stopped a cab driver who had just dropped off guests and begged for a ride home, offering triple the fare. When he finally agreed, she sank into the back seat with a sigh.

  But what about Colin? He’d probably be worried about her, and she couldn’t just let it end like that. As the cab crawled slowly through traffic, she looked up the phone number for the Lucky Gator on her phone.

  The bar noise was so loud on the other end, the person who answered couldn’t hear her, no matter how much she shouted—earning her sour looks from the cab driver. She tried three more times on the drive home, finally getting the answering machine on the fourth try. “I’m trying to get a message to Colin, um...” She searched her memory banks for his last name. Sweet mercy, you had sex with the man and can’t even remember his last name. “Colin, the bartender. This is Jamie, and I just wanted him to know that I’m okay and made it home safely. I’ll—” The machine beeped and cut her off.

  She cursed, telling the machine exactly what it could do to itself in graphic terms, earning her another sour look from the driver. But he was easing to a stop in front of Kelsey’s building, and Jamie figured that the signs were piling up, unable to be ignored. She paid the driver with the emergency fifty she’d stashed in her sock that morning and climbed the steps with heavy feet.

  Only to find that her key had been lost somewhere in the Quarter, Kelsey wasn’t answering the bell and her phone went immediately to voice mail. Near tears, Jamie sat on the stoop and dropped her head into her hands.

  Oh, yeah. This had to be a sign.

  * * *

  Rainstorm Games had a carefully cultivated image as an exciting and dynamic company on the cutting edge of gaming. They had a wall full of awards celebrating their creativity and innovation, but on days like today, Colin missed those days when he and Eric had been holed up in that tiny hellhole of an apartment, building worlds for fun, but not necessarily profit.

  Not that he didn’t appreciate the profit—he did, very much so—and he was proud of the success they’d had, but some days were just frustrating.

  Memory leaks were notoriously hard to find, but that didn’t change the fact that they needed to find this one pretty damn quick. Everyone at Rainstorm—from him and Eric down to the newest intern—was going blind examining code. If they didn’t release a patch soon, a horde of angry trolls—trolls he’d designed—was going to descend upon his office and feed him to the dragons as a sacrifice. This was not a problem he needed running up to the official launch, and the clock was ticking.

  Frustrated, he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

  “Trouble in your post-apocalyptic dystopian zombie paradise?”

  He looked up to see Callie in his doorway. “The zombies are fine. It’s Dungeons of Zhorg that’s glitching.”

  Callie shook her head in mock sympathy. “I just hate when that happens.”

  “So do several thousand users,” he said, but Callie didn’t take the hint, making herself comfortable on his couch instead. He knew her well enough to know that the quickest way to get her out of his office was to let her say whatever she’d come to say. “What brings you by, Callie?”

  “I was in the neighborhood. I’m on my way to scout a possible wedding location in the graveyard.”

  Callie specialized in planning themed weddings—the more out there, the better. “The graveyard? How romantic.”

  She shrugged. “The bride wants an Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire–type feeling, but elegant.”

  “And yet that still doesn’t tell me why you’re here.” Although they’d ended badly ten years ago, Callie had rebuilt her life pretty much from scratch, and that he had to respect. Now they were in a good, but weird, place—or at least he assumed it was weird, not having any other ex-girlfriends he would now call friends. Regardless, it wasn’t the kind of friendship where she would just drop by unannounced and for no reason.

  She leveled a hard look at him. “I’ve got a big favor to ask you.”

  “Now is not a good time to ask me for favors. My plate is rather full at the moment.”

  “I know, but you know I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important.”

  There was a fine line between being the kind of guy who was there for his friends and being a complete sucker. Why did he have a feeling he was about to be asked
to cross it? “You can ask, but I don’t guarantee I’ll be able to do it.”

  “I need you to take over The Ex Factor for a few weeks.”

  She had to be kidding. The Ex Factor was one of the most popular items on Callie’s all-things-love-and-weddings website. For some reason he’d never really understand, a column where he and his high school ex-girlfriend offered he-said-she-said advice to the lovelorn had proven wildly popular, and that popularity had helped Callie grow her fledging business into a success. He was glad he’d been able to help. “Absolutely not.”

  “Please, Colin? I want to go to that bridal show in Houston, and that plus everything else means I won’t have a lot of spare time. I can prewrite and load some other posts, but I’ll need someone to monitor the questions sent in for Ex Factor and answer a few.”

  He tried to appeal to her logic. “If you’re not writing your side, it’s not really an Ex Factor anyway. Put it on hiatus until you get back and caught up.”

  “It’s too popular to put on hiatus. And it’s a major promo tool for me. I might actually lose business if it goes dark for weeks. I’ve worked too hard to risk that.”

  Callie knew exactly where to aim. He’d gotten over the emotional part of their breakup years ago, but he’d lost respect for Callie when she’d blown that scholarship. Her determination to build her business and the way she’d done it had really been what had helped repair their friendship. He didn’t want to see her lose the ground she’d fought to gain. And damn it, she knew that. “You do realize I’m trying to launch the new game, right? We’re a little busy.”

  “You don’t have to do it all yourself. You have Eric and a staff to help. I’m a one-woman show. I’m begging you.” She arched an eyebrow. “Do you hear that? I’m actually asking for your help.”

  That was an old fight, one he was really tired of. He was supposed to wait until she asked for help before—as she put it—“butting into her life.” But at the same time, she acted as though asking automatically meant he had to do whatever she was wanting. “Can’t you just get one of your friends—one of your girl friends,” he corrected as Callie’s eyebrow went up, “to guest blog for you?”

  “If I did that, I’d have to tell them who the other half of The Ex Factor is so y’all could communicate. Are you okay with that?”

  Not many people—five, to be exact—knew he was the Ex-Man of The Ex Factor. He didn’t need the publicity for Rainstorm, as the Venn diagram of “People Who Read Callie’s Blog” and “People Who Play Zombie Apocalypse Games” didn’t have a large intersection, and it might actually work against him among the gaming community if it got out. And Callie had agreed to the secret—mainly because most people would look askance at dating advice from someone they assumed was socially awkward, Star Trek obsessed and living in his parents’ basement because he designed games. The secrecy of his identity had been played up on the blog so long that the Ex-Man was its own local celebrity. Callie had no desire to leak that info now, but a guest blogger for her would require someone else to know.

  Damn it.

  It would be so much easier to turn her down by email, which was most likely why Callie had come in person to ask this favor. “Let me think about it. I’ve got too much going on right now.”

  Callie started to say something else, but he stopped her. “Seriously. Not now.”

  Callie’s head cocked to the side. “What’s wrong?”

  He knew exactly what she was asking—he knew her far too well not to—but he’d rather play ignorant and not go diving into his psyche at the moment. “I just told you—glitches. And they’ve got to be fixed before the news spreads and affects the launch.”

  “I know that’s what you said, but things have messed up before, and there’s never been a bit of code you couldn’t wrangle into submission. There’s something else going on with you.” She sighed. “First, you blow all of us off on Fat Tuesday without any explanation—”

  He rolled his eyes. “Since when do I owe you an explanation for my whereabouts?”

  Callie made a face at him, but ignored the comment otherwise. “Eric says you’ve been grumpy for days now. What’s the problem? Can I help?”

  The offer was sincere, that much he knew for certain. And while he appreciated it, he had no intention of bringing any more people into this little melodrama. “Unless you have software experience that I’m unaware of—and if so, you can start taking care of your own website—I don’t think you’ll be much help. So...”

  Callie got that worried look on her face. “It’s not your mom, is it? Is she off her meds again?”

  She was one of the few people on earth who would have guts enough to ask straight out like that. And the only reason she could get away with it was that she’d been there—both physically as a witness and as emotional support for him at some of the worst times. Jesus, the last thing he needed was his mother going manic right now on top of everything else. He paid a neighbor to make sure his mother took her meds, but it had been awhile since he’d checked in...

  He didn’t like having a memory leak in the programming to deal with, but it beat the hell out of the kind of chaos his mother could create. “No, Mom’s fine.”

  She opened her mouth to say something else, but he cut her off with a look. Callie closed her mouth quickly. She had a certain amount of leeway—enough to ask but not enough to push the topic, and she knew it.

  A second later, her eyebrows pulled together and she cocked her head. She pushed off the couch and came to perch on the edge of his desk. “What’s that? It’s pretty, but I don’t think it’s quite your style.”

  He looked where she was pointing, but it was totally unnecessary. Only one thing on his desk matched that description. The cause of my bad mood. “A watch.”

  “That I can see.” She picked it up to examine it and let out a low whistle. “I know this brand. Is it real? Because if it is, it’s not cheap.”

  He knew that, too. He’d had to look up the brand online, only to be more confused by the information. Jamie had seemed so normal, but she’d been wearing a thousand-dollar watch—or a really great knockoff—in the French Quarter on Fat Tuesday.

  She smiled as though she was onto something. “It’s also a ladies’ watch. A gift, I presume?”

  Damn it. Now Callie was intrigued.

  The smile faded as she looked closer. “Uh-oh. Do you know the clasp is broken?”

  He tried to be casual, pretending to be looking at his screen. “Yep. That’s how I ended up with it.”

  “So you just found it on the street?” He shrugged. Callie leaned across the desk and poked him until he turned his attention to back to her. Then she just stared at him, eyes narrowed, and waited. He knew that look, and damn it, that was the problem with remaining friends with your ex-girlfriend. She knew too much, knew him too well, for him to get away with prevarications or vagueness. When he didn’t say anything, she poked him again. “Spill.”

  Lie and drag this out or just tell the truth and get it over with? Decisions. Figuring the quickest way to get Callie off his desk would be to just tell her, he decided to tell. But not all of it. “It belongs to Jamie,” he said casually.

  “Jamie.” She nodded. “And Jamie is...?”

  “A woman I met last Tuesday in the Quarter. I missed that party because I was with her. I ended up with her watch accidentally when the clasp broke.”

  Callie, in love with love as always, grinned. “All day Tuesday? And you’d just met?” At his nod, she made a breathy aw noise before hooking a chair with her foot and pulling it close to the desk. The she leaned forward on her elbows, all excited. “Okay, I want to hear all about her.”

  Damn it. That was supposed to satisfy her, not encourage her. “Not much to tell.”

  “You spent all day with her, blowing off your friends in the process. There’s tons to tell. I
assume she’s pretty.”

  “Of course.”

  “And...” Callie waited for him to answer, then heaved out a sigh. “Guess we’ll do this the hard way. So...what does she do?” she asked in a singsong voice.

  “I don’t know.”

  Callie blinked in surprise. Recovering from that, she tried again. “Where’s she from?”

  “I’m not sure. One of the Carolinas.”

  “So she was just in town for Mardi Gras?”

  “Maybe. I think she said she was staying with friends, but I’m not sure. And before you ask me where, I don’t know that either. Or even how long she was in town.”

  He could tell Callie was getting frustrated with his answers. “And her last name is...”

  “Don’t know.”

  “What the hell?” Callie sat back and crossed her arms over her chest. “Are you just trying to be difficult?”

  “Really not.” His computer chimed, and he turned his attention back to it. “Now, if you’ll—”

  “What do you know about her?”

  He gave up his last bit of hope she’d just let it go and swiveled to face her. Any other time, this would be funny—baiting Callie was always fun—except he was busy and far more frustrated over this than Callie could possibly imagine.

  “Let’s see. She’s about twenty-six, twenty-seven. Brunette, gorgeous, great legs.” Callie rolled her eyes at that. “Smart, funny...a little conservative, maybe? Bourbon Street was a bit shocking for her.”

  “Specifics, Colin.”

  He thought. They’d talked about everything—and yet nothing, he realized. Instead, he rattled off what he did know. “She doesn’t drink anything fruity or fancy. Her elbows are double-jointed. She knows all the words to both ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and ‘Ice Ice Baby.’ And she knows a lot about baseball.”

  Callie’s eyebrows had gone higher with each inane detail, and when he finished, her mouth twisted. “That’s what you know about this girl?” she asked, sarcasm dripping off each word. “She likes Led Zeppelin and baseball.”