I even liked it sometimes.
Mostly when they were quiet enough that I could read.
Which was pretty much only the middle of the day when they were at classes and the middle of the night when they were asleep.
I pulled on the jeans and top, stepping into my loafers. Sara made an annoyed sound when she looked me over. I had my backpack slung over one arm and my beat-up, ancient penny loafers on my feet.
“Yes, yes, no, hell no,” she said, pointing to the top, the jeans, my shoes, and the backpack. “Thankfully, we wear the same size shoes,” she muttered, tossing a pair of ankle boots with two-inch heels at me. “What?”
“I don’t do heels.”
“Those are not heels,” she insisted. I cocked an eyebrow at her. “They are barely heels,” she conceded.
“Fine.”
I tugged on the boots and shoved my keys and student ID into the teeny tiny little bag she gave me. It had a wrist strap that was kind of convenient until you wanted to actually use your hand for something. I cracked a smile, imagining someone trying to tell a story or give directions and smacking themselves in the face with it.
I carefully pulled my emergency twenty out of my wallet and folded it into the bag. If I only had one drink, I could save half of it. That was a reasonable thing to do. I was in college, after all.
A quick application of lipgloss and we were on our way, arm in arm as we headed into the city that lay beyond campus.
Chapter 3
Antonio
I slid onto the stool at the end of the bar, needing to be around people and alone at the same time. Usually, I would get a booth and call a friend, Vincent most of the time. Either that or I’d get bottle service and wait for a woman to catch my eye. But today, I needed something else.
I needed to be around people but not with them. I needed to get drunk. I needed to blot out the phone call I’d just received.
“She’s sticking with him. She’s trying to sell everything to pay off his debt.”
Even after Michael had explained to her that it wouldn’t be enough, that other, scarier guys were coming next, that if she didn’t separate herself from her piece of shit, soon to be on the run or dead husband, she and her kids might get hurt or worse.
The woman did not seem to care. Even after he’d lost most of their money. Even after he’d cheated and lied.
Apparently, she loved him anyway.
I’d done the only thing I could under the circumstances. Saved the sonofabitch. But no one could ever know.
“Get them all out of there. Send them away. Get everything you can and get them out.”
Michael had agreed. Timothy and his broken fingers were lucky as fuck. He was likely in the backseat of a secondhand car, provided by Mikey, headed to a cheap rental house in the middle of nowhere, Central time zone, as far from legal and illegal gambling as we could get him. In the end, Mikey would leave them with a fridge full of food, an envelope of cash, and the deed to their house signed over to his name. It was a thankless gig, but he did it without complaint.
It was not without irony that he called himself the Mafia Relocation Services.
Otherwise, what choice did we have? Knock off the piece of shit and leave his wife and kids to fall prey to the other families? He had debt all over the West Coast. As much as he deserved it, neither big brother nor my cousin wanted to leave a trail of bodies every time someone got in over their head.
We would get most of our money back. Timothy would repent and probably do it again, online poker this time, most likely. But it was a lot harder to spend money you didn’t have online.
Either way, it was no longer my problem.
Still, it was fucking depressing. Why would a woman be such a doormat for a guy with a weak chin and a receding hairline? Didn’t she give a shit about her kids?
If that was love, I didn’t ever want to feel anything like it.
So I nursed my drink in silence, the bartender knowing enough to refill my glass without small talk as the happy hour crowd started to thin out and the pickup crowd started to fill in.
The serious drinkers and those looking for sex. The bread and butter of a bar might be the after work crowd, but in a place like this, it was the after eight crowd that dropped the most cash.
That’s when it happened. That’s when God played a colossal joke on my cranky ass. The cruelest possible joke he could play. I had literally just said I didn’t want love, so he sent me a thunderbolt.