“Yes.”
“Does it have a bed?”
I grinned. “Several.”
The woman didn’t even bother checking the glass doors this time as she grabbed my wrist and dragged me toward the curb.
“I would call us a car, but with my wallet being stolen and all,” I muttered along the way. “Do you have a card?”
The woman peeled open her purse with a sly grin. “Several.”
A sleek black town car pulled up to the curb only a few minutes later. I opened the back door for her and as she ducked inside, I looked over my shoulder back toward the alley. I could just make out the American, still there, still watching. I grinned in victory and wiggled my fingers in goodbye at her before getting inside the car myself.
I’d be seeing her very soon.
I was sure of that.
The door clicked shut and I turned to find the woman with her legs spread open, lace thong hanging from her extended pinkie.
“I thought we could get a head start,” she said, swirling it round and round.
I licked my lips and grinned as I crawled toward her. Hey, I deserved a little reward. Teachers work very hard, you know.
Delaney
The door of the black town car slamming shut was like the snap of a hypnotist’s fingers, breaking the trance, plunging me back into the real world with the abruptness of a bucket of ice water splashed in my face. I stumbled back, shaking my head as I steadied myself with an open palm against the brick wall of the alley, still hot from baking all day in the summer sun. Or maybe it was my skin that was hot. I pressed my shirt wider open and fanned myself.
I hated to admit that watching that had turned me on a little. The way he touched her… the way he moved away and she stepped closer… the way he whispered in her ear… Even worse, I hated to admit that it made me a little jealous. He’d used some of those moves on me. To see them used on another woman made me irrationally angry.
I stood there in the alley and waited for the car to pull back around. I expected he was telling the woman that he couldn’t hook up with her after all, that he forgot something at The White Room, that he felt suddenly ill, maybe bad clams or something. I stood there and I kept expecting the next car to be his, for him to pull up, for him to step out, for him to come back to me. I stood there and the woman’s man came out, got enraged, waited for a time, and left. Still I waited.
Because whether I wanted to admit it or not—and I didn’t, by the way—I wanted him to come back.
“Fuck,” I cursed when it became more than obvious that he had gone home with her.
But I managed a smile nonetheless, because I still had his jacket and I still had his wallet and I was going home with goddamn both of them.
“What a sucker,” I muttered to myself as I headed toward the sidewalk to walk home and cracked open his wallet. “What a fucking suck—”
I hurried forward to the streetlamp to see if better lighting revealed something missing. I wedged my fingers into all the card slots, wrenched apart the cash section, shook the zippered coin pouch at the back till my arms hurt.
It was empty.
The wallet was fucking empty save for a single folded-up business card that fell to my feet. I was about to kick it into the gutter in frustration when I noticed something handwritten on the back. With an irritated sigh, I knelt down.
The business card was a heavy, expensive looking cream card stock with an address printed in gold cursive. On the back in sloppy, hastily written letters were the words “Come find me.”
With my eyes clenched shut, I squeezed the business card in my fist and let out a long string of curses. You have no idea how much I could have put on an Amex Black before he discovered I was using it.
“‘Come find me’,” I laughed. “In your fucking dreams.”
I was done with him, whoever he even was. I didn’t need some guy teaching me anything anyway. Pushing myself to my feet, I started toward my apartment. I consoled myself by turning over the jacket this way and that, trying to figure out how much I could get for it at a second-hand shop.
It was nearly one in the morning when I finally arrived outside my apartment. All I wanted to do was flop onto my bed and pass out. Tomorrow I would worry about finding a new job, about the bills stacking up, about the empty fridge, about—
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I moaned, yanking a taped notice from my apartment door.
My eyes darted about the page, one word shouting a bright, angry red: eviction, eviction, eviction.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
My heart was beating so fast, my fingers trembling so terribly that it took me at least three times to process all the information. My landlord had filed paperwork with the courts. The authorities had come that afternoon while I was at work. My things had been moved into storage; an address was provided. I was locked out.
It didn’t stop me from trying to jam my key into the hole. When that failed, I tried desperately yanking at the doorknob as if it might magically open against my will. It did not. I kicked the door, flopping into a defeated mess on the welcome mat, which was apparently too ratty and gross to even bother sending off with the rest of my crap.
“God-fucking-dammit!” I shouted into the night, clutching at my hair with shaky fingers.
“Shut the hell up!” my next-door neighbour shouted back.
“No, you shut the hell up, dickwad!”
I flipped his front door the middle finger before burying my chin between my knees. All I had with me was a useless key to an apartment that was no longer mine, my purse with a couple of cards already maxed out, and a stranger’s jacket and business card.
If my parents could have seen me right then and there, I’m sure they would have had more than a few words for me. “Delaney, we told you this was a bad idea, running off to a foreign country,” my dad would say. “We told you just to get a nice, quiet job in Texas. Like us,” my mom would add. “What have we always told you?” they’d say together. “Know your place in the world.”
This is what you get if you aim for anything higher than living paycheque to lousy paycheque. Even if they wouldn’t admit it aloud, that’s what they’d think if they saw me sitting here penniless, homeless, jobless.
Futureless.
I tried to steady my breathing enough to think straight. I had to find somewhere to sleep tonight. Bridget was still at work and had hours left of her shift. I didn’t think that my ex-boss, Harold, would really appreciate me hanging around The White Room waiting for her to finish. My only other options were Candace or Aubrey.
So with my jacket slung over my arm and my purse on my shoulder, I walked the thirty minutes it took to get to The Jar.
The Jar was a cool hole-in-the-wall type college bar despite being housed in a grand old Victorian-style building; the place was owned by Noah O’Sullivan, Aubrey’s fiancée. It was the kind of joint where they’d forgotten to take down the Christmas lights for the past seven years and poured till the glasses ran over, meaning the floors were always sticky. It was the kind of joint where nobody would judge you for dancing on the bar and the bathrooms were littered with graffiti and band stickers. All in all, it was my kind of joint.
My feet were starting to ache in the heels the waitresses at The White Room were forced to wear, as if a perky ass meant someone would order the most expensive cut of steak. I was tired and just wanted to sulk on a couch, bemoaning my lot in life into a bottomless glass of whiskey. I sighed in relief when I turned the corner and saw the sign announcing The Whiskey in The Jar. Apparently, it’d been named after a song by a famous Irish band called The Dubliners.