He nodded. “Wait inside, okay?”
“Will do.” I smiled gratefully, then handed him all the money in my purse. “Thanks again. Seriously, thank you.”
He turned up a hand at the cash and slid back inside the car. “Naw, girl, you’re good. Just stay away from all them unsavory characters. You feel me?” He drove off with a wink and left me standing in the parking lot feeling rather deflated.
“Yeah, I feel you.”
With a tired sigh, I hung my head and trudged into Taco Bell to call a taxi.
Thirty minutes and four tacos later, I was back in my dingy apartment cuddled up next to Deevus and waiting for Amanda to get home. I didn’t have to wait very long. My departure must have caused a little bit of a commotion, and when she couldn’t find me at the party, she came straight back.
“Rebecca?” she called as soon as she yanked open the door.
She must have been truly worried. Rebecca only made an appearance
when she was really angry, really concerned, or really drunk.
“I’m in here,” I called quickly, watching as Deevus bolted for the door.
Amanda appeared a second later, disheveled and flushed. “What the hell happened?”
I prepared for the grand wind-up to launch into my story—the one I’d been rehearsing since the second taco. But before I knew what was happening, my eyes welled up in sudden tears. “I had the most amazing...and most terrible time.”
Just like that, I collapsed in a fit of child-weeping. Amanda’s jaw fell open as she watched, then rushed to comfort me on the floor.
“We’re...we’re crying about this?” she asked incredulously. My hand flailed toward a bottle on the table, and she ducked in time to save herself a black eye. “Oh—yep—we’re going for the tequila. Okay.” She tried to smooth down my hair but found herself as stymied by the pounds of hairspray as I had. In the end, she just patted my back sympathetically. “You want to tell me what happened?”
“That guy, M-Marcus,” I was blubbering, barely able to get the words out, “he took me to the middle of the floor, and uh, we started d-dancing!”
“Oh,” she soothed, steadying the bottle before it could slop down my dress. “I know you hate dancing.”
“I loved it!” I cried viciously.
Her eyes dilated slightly in the dim light as she tried to follow along. “I...okay. Well, honey, that doesn’t sound so bad.”
“He’s the rich guy from the coffee shop.”
“The one you’ve been talking about? The one with the most beautiful eyes in the entire world?”
“Yeah. It was him.”
“That was Marcus Taylor!”
“The one and only. Trust me. Nobody was more shocked than me.”
“And you danced with him? What’s it like dancing with a billionaire?”
“I didn’t think of him as that way. I mean, dollar signs weren’t flashing over his head or anything. His money was the last thing on my mind. You know I’m not like that.”
“I would’ve loved to dance with that guy! I never even got a chance to meet him because I had to find you!”
“I’m so sorry about that. Marcus is a great dancer. Me, not so much.”
I went on to tell her about those rich snobs, and how I said I was Marcus’s girlfriend, and how it all played out. She listened patiently and didn’t judge me.
“Can I ask you one more thing?” she said.
“Sure. Anything.”