by Aiden Bates
Unfortunately, there was still no answer. Looked like I’d be buying an extra first class seat for my aging, disgruntled corgi, then.
Where the fuck are you, Damon? I found myself thinking over and over again as my dress shoes beat a rhythm out onto the sidewalk back to my place. Answer, dammit! Why won’t you answer me?
Finally, I quit checking. Winning the Morningtons over would be stressful enough without worrying about what my not-even-a-boyfriend-yet might say about my absence. I’d call him in the cab to the airport if I was lucky. If not…
Well, I’d deal with that in Los Angeles, I guessed. Typical fucking Hayward, really. Didn’t even work for the asshole and he was still finding ways to muck up my life.
14
Damon
I turned my key in the lock of my apartment door and shouldered through it, feeling particularly victimized by Murphy’s Law. If it can go wrong, it will felt like the story of my entire life.
How was I supposed to have known that the redheaded Alpha getting handsy with me at the Ballroom last week was on my own university’s scholarship board? How could I have planned for my—not boyfriend, maybe, but romantic interest’s—insane decision to split the man’s eyebrow open with his fist?
You’re going to lose your scholarship. The thought came to me like—well, like a punch to the face. The redhead—Jim, Duncan had called him—couldn’t boot me from my scholarship just because he didn’t like me, but he could boot me thanks to the scholarship’s morality clause. It wasn’t my fault that stripping was the only way I could afford New York City rent when school already took up so much of my time, but the board wouldn’t see it that way. Not with Jim, the redheaded stepchild, leading the charge.
I tossed my coat onto the rack and managed to drop my phone in the process. It landed on the floor with a resounding CRACK!—Murphy’s Law strikes again. This time, it was in the form of a spiderweb of broken glass across the phone’s screen. When I bent down to pick it up, I found that I couldn’t even scroll across it to unlock the damn thing. My thumb became another victim of good old Murphy as soon as I tried—the pad of it ran across the glass at a bad angle, leaving me hissing as blood welled up and smeared across the shattered screen.
Zero for three. This wasn’t my day.
I was still looking down at it, bemoaning my general situation, as I came into the living room. As soon as I rounded the corner, though, a fiendish shriek cut through the air.
“Hi-ya!” Anders cried out, baseball bat clutched fiercely in his fists.
He swung it, stopping only when he was about half an inch from cracking it against my nose.
“Okay, what the fuck?” I said—half to Anders, half to the universe in general. Asshole redhead, broken phone, bleeding thumb, and now my roommate was trying to kill me. I might’ve gotten lucky the night before, but as of this morning, luck was not on my side in the least.
“Oh, thank god!” Anders moaned, lowering the bat as his shoulders relaxed in relief. “I thought you were him.”
“Him who?” I eyed his weapon of choice as it clunked to the floor. “Is that my baseball bat?”
“It is, and I appreciate the fact that your paranoid ass keeps it by your bedside.” Anders vaulted the couch and slumped onto it, eyes bloodshot and hair awry.
“Are you on a bender?” was my third question. And, since Anders was apparently only answering every other one: “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Anders sighed. “Just didn’t sleep at all last night.” He glared over my shoulder at the door. “Seems that my stalker has reared his ugly head again.”
“He came here?” I blinked, surprised. “How does he know where you live?”
“Because he’s a stalker, Damon. Duh.” Anders buried his face in his hands. “He was at the door all night, banging on it and commanding me to come out. I finally called the police, but by the time they showed up, he was gone.”
“Benefits of living in the Bronx, I guess.”
“Yeah. No shit.” He rubbed his eyes, then looked up at me. “You’re bleeding, you know.”
I glanced down at my thumb, which was dripping red onto our secondhand rug. “Shit—sorry. Broke my phone. Cut myself hoping that it was still usable.”
“Band-Aids in the cabinet over the sink.” Anders nodded at the bathroom door and I plodded in, shifting aside his birth control and just-in-case pregnancy tests until I found what I was looking for.
“Scooby-Doo?” I held the box up to him as I came back out. “Really?”
Anders shrugged. “I like the Mystery Machine ones. They’re groovy. Can we please stop judging my Band-Aid choices and discuss the fact that this creep actually showed up at our apartment last night?”
“Sorry,” I said lamely, wrapping up my thumb beneath the Band-Aid’s gauze. “I should have been here. Can’t believe you went through that alone.”
“Actually—yeah, I’d rather talk about that. Where were you last night?”
If the morning hadn’t been such a shitshow so far, I might have smiled. “Date with Nathan, remember? I, uh. I stayed the night.”
“Well, at least one of us had a good night.” Normally, Anders would have been popping champagne over the fact that I was finally dating and banging again after my last ex absconded with my house cat—but he was shaken still, and I didn’t exactly feel like celebrating either.
“Shitty morning, though,” I said, slumping into the couch myself. “Remember my creep at the club last week?”
That, at least, earned me one of Anders’ grins. “How could I forget? Your darling Nathan cracked his skull open. Very heroic of him.”
“Yeah, well, turns out the poor slob Nathan beat up for me is on my scholarship board.”
Anders’ mouth fell open into a soft little O. “No. No fucking way.”
“Hate to say it, but…yeah.”
“You think he’s going to come after you for it?”
The look in Jim’s eyes as he’d caught sight of me bubbled up in my memory, spiteful and full of venom. “Actually, I know he is. I can feel it.”
“Well, fuck.”
“That sums it all up pretty well, yeah.”
“Welp. This calls for a beer.”
I watched him rise from the couch and thought about following him, but my heart just wasn’t into it. Beer wasn’t going to solve my problems—not this time. In fact, I didn’t think anything was going to solve this. Some things were just too far gone to save.
“Actually, I’m going to pass.” I glanced down at my phone again, seeing messages on my notifications bar that I had no way to check. “Can you text Foster? Let him know we’ll be missing rehearsal?”
“Already done,” Anders assured me, cracking open a bottle on the kitchen counter. “I was hoping you’d come down to the police station with me. Help me file a proper report with the day crew, since the nighttime guys were so unhelpful.”
“Yeah, of course. Just…” I glanced down at my clothes. “Gimme a sec to change? I’m still in the stuff I wore last night.”
“Walks of shame are such a bitch.” Anders raised his beer to me as I rose from the couch. “Here’s to better luck tomorrow, I guess.”
“Yeah,” I said glumly. “Cheers.”
My room was a mess when I stepped inside it. Part-time stripper, full-time student—it was a recipe for disaster in the truest sense of the word. Textbooks and notes were scattered across my bed, costumes and dirty gym clothes across my floor. Suddenly, I was glad that Nathan and I had been spending our time at his place instead of mine. His apartment was so pristine and untouched-looking compared to the warzone of my room. If he’d wanted to fuck me in my bed, he would’ve had to shove two years of late-night study sessions off of the mattress first.
I picked up my anatomy textbook before I looked for a change of clothes, gazing wistfully at the highlighted sections on its pages. I’d worked so hard to keep my head above water on this degree over the last two years. Sleepless nights, early mornings,
finals week stress—I’d done it all.
It didn’t feel fair that one asshole and a bad turn of happenstance was about to pull the rug out from under me on it. Getting my degree hadn’t just been the promise of a better life for me—it would’ve meant having enough money that I could send some back home for once. A life for myself beyond the winding and grinding at the Ballroom, which I’d always known I’d only be able to keep up until my thirties at best. A life for my parents and sisters beyond the occupational desert of the little West Virginia town I’d grown up in. Something better. Something more.
And now, just as I finally felt like my love life was coming together, the rest of my life was falling apart.
Nathan. I grabbed for my phone, feeling the urge to text him, only to remember that I wouldn’t be texting anyone at all until I got my screen fixed. I couldn’t even grab his number out of my contact list, thanks to my screen’s shattered state.
“Hey, Anders?” I came out of the room in a fresh change of clothes with one final hope. “Any idea what I did with that little slip of paper that had Nathan’s number on it?”
“Don’t you have it in your—” Anders stopped as he remembered my phone’s current state. “Don’t worry. Let’s have a look for it and you can text him from mine. Maybe he’ll be able to help with your scholarship thing. He travels in all kinds of fancy circles, I bet. Little piece of paper can’t have gone far, right?”
We turned the apartment upside down searching for Nathan’s number, but not to any results. I found a roll of quarters beneath the couch and Anders’ favorite thong on top of the fridge—but as far as little slips of paper went, we came up short.
“Head by his place after he’s off work,” Anders suggested. “He’s probably freaking out, thinking that now that you’ve fucked him, he’s never going to see you again.”
I laughed. “I don’t think Nathan is really the type to hang around his phone waiting for some love-struck Omega to call.”
Anders raised an eyebrow. “Love-struck, huh?”
I groaned. “I’ll tell you on the way to the station. For now, let’s go file your report.”
I cast a final glance inside my apartment before I shut the door, locking it up tight. Somehow, now even the place where Anders and I lived felt like it was working against us. Now that Anders’ stalker had found its location and one of the kitchen cabinets had apparently eaten Nathan’s number, I felt about as good about it as I did about the rest of my day.
Which was to say, not good at all.
15
Nathan
“Bruff!” Lady yipped as the flight touched down at LAX.
I slipped her a doggie treat from my pocket and turned my phone off airplane mode. “Behave, Lady.”
“…Bruff,” she replied, tentatively sniffing the treat before digging in.
As my phone regained signal, a dozen emails and messages from work poured in, one after another.
Nothing from Damon, though.
It was a bad start to a trip I didn’t even want to be on.
A cab from their airport took us to the company apartment I’d be staying in for the week. I’d touched base with the Morningtons’ assistant before my flight had taken off and gotten a go-ahead for dinner with the couple later that night. But by the time I’d gotten my suit unfurled and ironed, my phone buzzed with more bad news.
The Morningtons regret to inform you that they have been forced to cancel dinner to attend to a personal matter, the message read. Would you be willing to move the meeting to Wednesday night?
Wednesday fucking night. I’d hoped I’d be able to take care of things promptly and be back to New York within twenty-four hours. Instead, I’d be here for the entire damn week with nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs. I’d done Disney World with my parents the summer when I was seven and they were trying to stave off the likelihood of a divorce; Hollywood had never interested me much, and getting around the city was too much of a hassle to really bother with venturing out of my neighborhood otherwise.
You’d want to do it if Damon was here. The thought came to me out of nowhere, and I found myself glancing glumly at my phone once again. An email from Sterling reminding me once again not to fuck up my meeting, a message from my housekeeper to let me know she wouldn’t be around the apartment until I got back, but nothing from Damon.
For not the first time since I’d boarded my plane out here, I found myself wondering what the hell I’d done wrong.
I knew how it sounded, the mysterious business trip across the country that just happened to crop up the morning after we’d fucked. I was me, after all. A younger version of myself might’ve spun that exact same yarn if I found myself dealing with a one-night stand that had convinced himself that we could ever be something more than that. But I thought I’d made it clear to Damon—we were something more, dammit! In all my efforts to woo him, I’d actually managed to catch feelings for that graceful idiot and his perfect blue eyes.
It had never happened before, and now, thanks to Malcolm fucking Hayward’s meddling in my accounts, it might’ve already been gone. Out the door and out of my life.
“This sucks,” I informed Lady, who had already chosen an armchair to nap in for the duration of her stay.
She only blinked at me sleepily before resting her head on her paws and closing her eyes. Not even a little reassuring bruff! from so-called man’s best friend was offered to soothe my frustration. Or, hell. My nerves.
I ordered in for dinner. Pizza—not as good as the kind Damon and I had eaten on our first night. But I supposed it wouldn’t be—Californians didn’t seem capable of grasping what constituted as an appropriate pizza topping. Meat, cheese, vegetables—fine. But when every pizza on the menu had avocados on it—or worse, fucking shrimp—well, that was just asking for my wrath.
I laid in bed for a while, picking the shellfish out of the toppings and tossing them to Lady so she could snack on them while I contemplated a scathing Yelp review. Younger Nathan would have done it, too. But this Nathan—the Nathan that stared forlornly at his phone waiting for an Omega that he’d only met a few weeks ago to give him a call—this Nathan’s heart just wasn’t into it.
I turned to social media instead, searching Damon’s name on Instagram. If I couldn’t talk to him, scrolling through his photos would have to do. He didn’t have many posted—for a professional dancer, he obviously didn’t give two shits about his social media presence—but from what I gathered, he spent a lot of time at work and a lot of time at the gym. His last post was from months ago, a picture of the ugliest, most disagreeable orange cat I’d ever seen. Beneath the photo of its squashed face and unruly fur, he’d posted a simple caption: a frowny face.
Nathan of the past wouldn’t have thought anything of it. But then again, Nathan of the past didn’t scroll through the Instagram feeds of the Omegas he slept with, wishing that they were in bed beside him instead of all the way back in New York.
With nothing else to do with my time, I dug a little deeper. Six months ago, I learned, Damon had begun a relationship with some meathead-looking Alpha named Andrew. There were a few pictures here and there of the two of them together with the ugly cat—her name, to my amusement, was Cleo Catra, and ugly as she was, she held herself with just as much regality as her namesake—but they dropped off abruptly, and Damon’s Instagram posts had shortly followed.
Weird. First he’d lost his ugly boyfriend, then he’d lost his ugly cat. Damon Bishop, as fate would have it, had the world’s shittiest luck.
I told myself I wouldn’t dig deeper. I resisted the urge for what felt like hours and probably added up to all of twenty minutes. But when I reached the end of Damon’s feed—a picture of himself from a few years ago with Cleo Catra on the day he’d first adopted her, and another of him with his dads and five pretty, blue-eyed younger sisters—I found myself unable to stop snooping.
I missed him, I rationalized. He wasn’t returning my texts and it felt like something was wrong. If I thou
ght that would make me feel any better as I clicked onto his ex’s profile, well, I was wrong. But what I saw on Andrew’s feed once it loaded surprised me so much, the guilt melted away like butter in a pan.
There was Cleo Catra, alive and well. The last picture of her was posted just a few hours earlier, in fact.
That motherfucker had stolen Damon’s cat.
It pissed me off more than it should have. Maybe because I was an animal lover myself, I guessed. If someone took off with Lady, I’d have gone full Liam Neeson on their asses. Kevlar, throwing knives, mad karate skills. The works.
When I saw the location tag on Andrew’s profile, my grip tightened around my phone with rogue ambition. The idiot had his address listed in his profile information. Apparently, he was trying to operate a start-up to sell weed-infused cat-shaped lollipops outside of his apartment just a short ten-minute drive from where I was now. Cleo Catra, I learned, was the face of said start-up.
The prick tagged Damon in every post of her. Like he was taunting him with her new life as the official mascot for High On Pussy Pops. God—even this guy’s company name was horrible.
I had half a mind to get a cab to his address just then. Break into his stupid shop. Steal Damon’s ugly cat right back.
But that would be crazy, of course. That would be something that an insane man would do. Damon wasn’t even talking to me presently, for some unknown reason. I didn’t exactly like the idea of him being pissed at me, then discovering from his shitty ex that I’d broken into private property for an impromptu cat burglary.
“Bad idea, Garnet,” I mumbled to myself, closing out of the app. “And stop talking to yourself while you’re at it—you even sound like a crazy person.”
I knew what I should’ve done. Turned my phone off, grabbed a shower, taken Lady for a jog, another shower for good measure, then sleep. Followed by another day of the same: shower, jog, shower, jog, sleep some more, wake up, repeat. I could get through a week like that. It’d be infuriating, but I could’ve done it.