by Hart, Allysa
“The reason I….? Oh.” My cheeks flushed as I looked down at the abandoned bag at my feet. I had been hastily shuffling towards the door in an attempt to escape before things got any weirder. And he was right, I had forgotten the real reason I had come over.
How does this keep happening to me?
I scooped the bag up, fluffing the tissue paper that was spilling from the top, and held it out to him. “I brought you these. Seemed like you might need them.”
He pushed the paper aside, and peeked into the bag, raising an eyebrow when he looked back at me. “Books?”
“Specifically, a dictionary and a thesaurus. You seem slightly confused as to what the meaning of the word prank is. I thought this might help.”
He chuckled. “Oh, little lover. I assure you that I have a very comprehensive understanding of the meaning of the word prank. I just don’t want to prank you. You seem to have enough reasons to hate me. Why give you more? I’m focusing my energy on the opposite.” He looked me up and down grinning salaciously as he seemed to undress me with his eyes. “I think it’s working.”
“It’s not working!” I informed him, far too loudly.
Me thinks thou doth protest too much, Bekah.
“Well, keep the books, anyhow.” He winked. “Oh and take this one too.” He walked over to his bookshelf where those stupid mice now lived in a completely decked out cage, and picked up a gift bag identical to the one I was holding.
Wearily, I took it from him, and shoved my hand inside, withdrawing a thick yellow book with black writing on the cover.
Pranks for Dummies.
I shoved it back in the bag, and shoved the bag against his chest.
“Hardy-Har-Har,” I retorted. “Thanks, but I don’t need this. I’ve only been warming up, you see. Getting a feel for what you can handle, so to speak. I assure you that I have something epic planned for next time.”
I have nothing planned, epic or otherwise.
“If you say so.” He smirked, and I wanted to wipe that silly smirk right off his face. With my fist.
“I do. I said I’d get rid of you, and I will.”
His jaw was twitching now, and I could tell he was trying not to laugh. It was, quite frankly, pissing me off.
“Laugh it up now, buster,” I scolded, wagging my finger at him, as I turned and marched toward the door. “Laugh it up while you still can. Because soon, you won’t be laughing at all. I’ll be the one laughing. I can promise you that.”
I cannot promise that. Not even a little bit, but I know better than to show my hand.
“I’m shaking in my boots,” he assured me, struggling to keep a straight face.
I said nothing more, turning to stare at him through the glass door as I stepped onto the sidewalk.
I watched as he shook his head, walked behind his desk, and bent at the waist.
What is he doing?
I put my face against the glass as I peered inside, trying to catch a hint of what he might do next.
He had something in his hand, as he came around the desk, but I couldn’t see what it was.
Something black. Whatever it was was soft, and malleable, and able to be crammed into his fist.
Shit! He’s coming straight toward me!
Crap!
I quickly turned tail and started to walk across the street toward my car, but I could hear his footsteps pounding the pavement as he jogged behind me.
“Bekah,” he called softly.
I ignored him.
“Bekah!” he called my name again.
We were in the middle of the road, and I was not stopping to see what he wanted.
I hoped he would just take the hint and go away, but I wasn’t that lucky.
I made it to the sidewalk, with him right behind me, and I stopped so that he wouldn’t follow me to my car.
We lived in the same building and I would feel obligated to give him a ride, which I did not want to do.
“Oh my god!” I exclaimed turning to him, with my hands on my hips. “ What do you want?”
“You forgot this.” He lifted his arm, and uncurled his fist, revealing the object I had been trying so hard to see just minutes before, dangling it from one finger.
It was a concoction of black lace and satin, and I was mortified as the realization dawned. I looked down at my chest, thankful I still had the perky breasts of a woman in her twenties, despite the fact that I would be thirty in a few months.
How had I walked out of there without my bra and not noticed?
That’s what he does to me.
I grabbed for the bra, and shoved it into the pocket of my hoodie, scanning the area as I did so, and praying nobody saw. It was the end of the work day and Main Street was just closing down for the day. Somebody was bound to have seen. Hopefully it was somebody with enough class and tact to keep it to themselves.
That’s all I can hope for at this point.
“Thanks,” I mumbled, looking down at our shoes, waiting for his to move and him to walk away.
Thankfully, he did, I watched as his shiny loafers turned in the direction of his shop and he walked across the street.
I leaned against the front door of my shop, attempting to act casual as a couple walked by holding hands.
Nothing to see here, folks.
They were so wrapped up in each other they didn’t give me a second glance.
Breathing a sigh of relief I began my walk to the back lot, toward my car.
I hadn’t made it more than three steps before I heard Kimmy calling my name.
Shit.
I was not in the mood for chit-chat. I just wanted to go home, crawl under the covers with a bottle of wine and drink until I forgot that I had thrown myself at that man, yet again.
“Bekah!” she called again, and I turned. The last time I had tried to avoid someone calling my name it had not ended well for me.
I plastered on a smile and turned around again. “What’s up?”
At this rate I would never make it to my car.
“Did I just see Eros out here?”
I shrugged, trying to pull off nonchalant.
Pretty sure I’m failing.
“Well, he does work across the street.”
Her eyes narrowed and she crossed her arms over her chest.
“Yes, he does. And it seems to me like you’ve been going over there a lot. In fact, I could have sworn that I just saw him handing you a bra.”
She stared pointedly at my chest, and I forced myself to meet her gaze head on.
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” I swore.
“Really? So he didn’t just hand you a bra? That’s funny, ‘cause you don’t appear to be wearing one.”
I groaned, and crossed my arms over my chest. My only hope now was to attempt to change the subject and pray that it worked.
“You know, Kimmy, I’m glad you stopped me. I was planning to come into the shop in the morning. There’s a book I need. Have you closed out the till yet?”
She looked annoyed at my change of topic, but she still allowed it to happen.
“Nope. Not yet. You’re just in time.”
“It will just take a minute,” I assure her, already walking toward her shop that was two doors down from mine.
She followed behind me, and I made a beeline for the back of the shop where the DIY and self help books were.
The yellow dummy books took up a whole small bookshelf by themselves, and I quickly located the one I was looking for, and clutched it to my chest as I marched to the cash register.
Kimmy was behind the counter, doing last minute checks and balances, and I slammed it on the glass countertop in front of her.
She picked it up, and scanned it, and bagged it, and ran my card, and only then did she comment.
“Pranks for Dummies? Such an obscure and peculiar subject matter, especially seeing as how April Fools Day is still months away, and yet, this is the second one of these I’ve sold today. Want to guess who bou
ght the other copy?”
Kimmy tucked her pink hair behind her ear, and looked at me over the black plastic eyeglasses she wore for show only.
“Someone else bought this book today?” I asked innocently. “Isn’t that peculiar? An interesting coincidence, but I don’t know anything about that.”
“Mmmhmm,” Kimmy murmured shaking her head as she smirked at me. “For fucks sake, Bekah, what are you planning to do? Prank him out of business? What about your sale?”
Grabbing the bag off the counter, I turned away from her and marched to the door with a snap in my step. “I’m gonna do both.”
And I’m not going to fuck him again.
Chapter 10
Rebekah
This book sucks. That was the conclusion I had come to after three glasses of wine and two hours of searching it’s depths for the perfect prank to put Eros out of business and get rid of him once and for all.
All of the pranks listed in the book were amatuer status at best. They even had a section for prank calls, and the “is your refrigerator running joke” was in there.
Fuck My life.
The book could have been written by sixth graders.
It contained nothing clever enough to bring down the business of a competitor, and most of the best pranks that weren’t sixth grade level either required lots of money I didn’t have or lots of time spent around the person you were pranking.
That wasn’t a risk I was willing to take.
Sighing, I closed the book and downed the rest of my glass of wine.
There was a trashy reality show playing on tv. The kind where one partner might be cheating so they set them up to catch them in the act.
Spoiler alert: They are always cheating.
The show itself is horribly depressing, especially to someone in my profession, but there’s a small part of me who loves this kind of thing.
Misery loves company, right?
Sometimes at the end of a depressing day, this show made me feel a little less alone, and empowered in my misery. It made being a single matchmaker a little less sad when I saw the horrible stories of love gone wrong.
Leaning back on my couch, I dug in my purse for the bag of peanut m&m's I knew I had stashed there.
I ripped it open with my teeth, poured a half dozen or so into my mouth, straight from the bag and settled back to enjoy the misery of people who were not me.
This woman, for instance, a school teacher and dance instructor from New York was especially pathetic.
She had to have been blind to question whether or not her man was cheating. The signs were all there.
The texts from other women, the long hours supposedly spent at work, mysterious expenditures that went unexplained.
A text on his phone from a “friend” that literally said, “I love it when you eat me. I can’t wait to return the favor.”
And his crazy wife still believed his lies and lame excuses. She continued holding out hope.
I called bullshit.
Cheater, cheater, pussy eater.
The producers and staff on this show were just as flabbergasted as I was by this woman’s faith in her husband’s innocence. So of course, they set a trap, and surprise, surprise, the cheater fell right into it.
They sat in a surveillance van outside the hotel where the decoy ws. The cheating husband was not wearing his ring. He got the decoy’s number and asked her out to dinner. It wasn’t not until they were sitting at the hotel restaurant and he mentioned having a room upstairs that his poor wife stopped defending him.
Then she just lost it. She completely fell apart. She was sobbing, she was cursing, she was on the phone with her attorney, all before the cameras stopped rolling.
But that was where it got interesting. Usually at this point in the show, the woman jumps out of the surveillance van, storms the restaurant and creates a huge scene. Smacks her husband, throws her ring at him, cusses him out and generally loses it. The kind of breakdown reality tv producers live for.
But not this woman. This bitch was savage as fuck. She dried her tears, cleaned out their joint bank account with a phone call, and straight up told the producers no when they asked if she wanted to go in there and confront him.
This had never happened on this show before, and was all in. I leaned forward, gaping at the tv, and waiting to see what happened next.
I was on the edge of my seat as she grabbed a piece of paper and a pen from the table, hits down a sentence or two, and pushed it across the table.
Cut to commercial.
I finished off the rest of the m&m’s while I waited, and absentmindedly thumbed through the stupid book again, pausing when an ad on the second to last page caught my eye.
It was for a product that touted itself as chaos in a box, and promised to deliver an epic prank that would go down in history and be remembered for years to come.
That sounds promising.
I tore out the page and stuffed it in my purse for later, just as the show came back on with seven minutes left in its time slot.
The camera cut to the woman, standing outside a large downtown skyscraper, the kind that houses affluent businesses and offices on every floor.
She looked like a million bucks with her hair perfectly coiffed, a fresh manicure and a sexy red dress that looked more suited to a fancy romantic dinner and some dancing after than it did to hitting an office downtown in the middle of the day with a camera crew.
She looked into the camera and smiled, tossed her hair over one shoulder and marched into the building with the camera crew hot on her heels.
The elevator ride up was tension filled. They really upped the drama for the viewers at home.
It’s working.
I stared at the tv as she stomped down a long hall filled with cubicles and office doors. Finally, she stopped. There was a nameplate on the door, but they blurred it out. She flung open the door, and a man stood. His pants were unbuckled, and dropped to his feet.
I gasped, knowing it was her husband. He was standing behind a large walnut desk, and I just knew that there was a woman now hiding underneath.
His wife knew it too.
She stormed over there, calmer than shit, and leaned down, pulling the woman into view. By her hair.
The other woman was your typical va-va-voom brunette, with a tiny waist and huge breasts busting out of the top of a blue dress that wasn’t at all workplace appropriate.
Her husband tried to intervene but she slapped him, and shoved the woman out of the way.
Then, and only then did she cry, letting the tears fall freely as she went to town on the poor bastard’s face.
I couldn’t believe they were still filming, but then again, I could. This was reality tv gold right here.
She cursed and screamed, and hit him, smacking his face, punching his chest, and calling him every name under the sun.
Inwardly, I cheered for her, but this went on for so long, I started to feel sorry for the guy, and wonder if the whole thing was staged.
Just when I was about to turn it off, she stopped, stepped back, took off her ring, and threw it in his face, before turning and high-tailing it out of the room.
The brunette was in the corner, smirking, looking like the cat that ate the canary. She thought she was about to have her cake and eat it too.
Oh, honey.
Predictably, the husband rushed after his wife, still fixing his pants with one hand, as he chased after her screaming her name, hollering apologies, and proclaiming that the brunette means nothing to him.
They could have ended the show there, but they didn’t. Instead, they followed him down the hallway, but they weren’t focused on him. They were the only ones not focused on him. Everybody in a cubicle was standing to watch the drama as it played out. Every office door that was closed on the way up, was now open, with men and women in expensive suits standing in the doorways, like a pack of vultures circling its prey.
That’s when I realized that the husband had much
bigger problems than just his wife leaving him. Professionally, his career was shot. I wasn’t sure what he did for a living, but it didn’t look like the type of place that relished the idea of becoming a video clip of reality tv moments for years to come.
And that’s when I got the idea.
Eros, your poor bastard.
You should have never tried to give me that stupid book.
Eros
When I got to work the next day, I saw that Bekah had decided to fight arrows with hearts.
That is, she wasn’t taking the usurping of her customers sitting down, and she was no longer trying to fight me with pet mice and shit bombs.
There was now a huge bouquet of pink and white balloons attached to a sign board outside her shop and a large hot pink banner proclaiming “Find Your Happily Ever After for Valentines Day!”
Valentine’s Day was three weeks away, and you could definitely tell that people were anxious for it. I was busier than ever, with clients coming from two towns away every day, hoping to find their one true love. My consultation calendar was booked up until Valentine's Day.
No lonely person within a hundred miles was leaving anything to chance this year.
I turned my key in the lock, but I didn’t go in. I pivoted and looked again at Happily Ever After with its bright banner and cheerful balloons and smiled.
Good for her.
I hoped it brought her some business. Contrary to Bekah’s belief, I wasn’t trying to steal her customers or destroy her business.
I just was really good at what I did, and I couldn’t leave.
At this point, I could stand to have a few less customers, and a lot more time to woo my little lover.
I had even tried to send some of my clients to Happily Ever After, but it was my reputation that had brought them here, and I was the one they wanted.
I saw a couple of people stop when they saw her sign, Hope leapt in my heart, and just as quickly deflated, when they looked across the street, pointed, smiled, and started walking in my direction.
Crap.
Sighing, I flipped the sign, and opened the blinds. I was ready for another day of making love matches for other people while the one I loved still hated my guts.