But that didn’t matter now.
What mattered was that she was here.
And that last night was the first New Year’s I had ever spent with a woman.
And it felt right.
I had felt my gut instinct enough in my life to know it when it showed up. Like it did every time I looked at Aven.
This was new, sure, but it was going somewhere.
Aven – 3 days
Kennedy had closed down the salon for the two days following New Year’s Eve, knowing that practically every female in the area was fighting off a massive hangover and making trips to the gym to make good on their resolutions and that a trip to the salon was low on their list.
I had enlisted Gunner to watch Mackey for me, something he did with a text that declared Don’t cry to me when it goes south, doll. A compassionate soul he was not, but I understood him well enough to know it was his way of trying to protect me. Even if it made him kind of sound like an ass.
We spent those days in Quin’s apartment in the city.
We talked and had sex and shared meals – I got my Sbarro the next late morning, crossing paths with women in last night’s makeup, and men with sunglasses on even inside.
“Holy hangover, Batman,” I had mumbled, feeling Quin’s hand squeeze my hip where it had been situated since we walked out of his apartment.
I noticed that as the days went on; he was always touching me. Like he was afraid that if he didn’t hold on, I might slip away.
But I sure wasn’t complaining.
We had exchanged presents, making me realize he had been thinking of me around Christmas just like I had been thinking of him. He had gotten me a genuine Russian musical jewelry box.
He had opened my gift – a bit of a gag one because I hadn’t known him well enough at the time to get him anything truly personal – he had thrown his head back and laughed, childlike, almost painfully attractive.
I had gotten him a plaque with an inscription on it that had made the guy at the personalization place look genuinely shocked.
To the world’s best opium smuggler.
He had hung it up in his hallway like it was the best gift he had ever gotten.
On the third day, we climbed into his car at the crack of dawn, both of us having work to get to, a life to resume.
“Girl, that is a glow,” Benny declared as soon as I walked into work that morning, pointing a comb at me. “Don’t you even try to deny it. Kenny,” he called, enlisting our boss in his musings, “come look at Aven. She’s got that I got fucked right good by some delicious man meat until I couldn’t walk right for a day glow to her, doesn’t she? Please tell me it was that yummy thing with the suit and the nice car. Tell me he’s your man.”
There was no stopping the obnoxious smile that I could see reflected in the mirror behind him. Blissfully happy. I had never seen the look on my face before.
“He’s my man.”
Quin – 5 days
“Oh my God. You can’t be serious,” Aven scoffed as I led her inside my place for the first time, having spent the night before at her place because Gunner said he was done dog sitting so we could ‘fuck like jackrabbits all week.’ I wondered then if maybe there was more to it than simply Gunner being Gunner, if maybe he had thought something had been building between the two of them, if he was pissed that I had gotten the girl.
I would have felt bad for the fuck, but I was too happy enjoying Aven to give it much thought.
“Seriously,” she said, shaking her head at me. “This is insane. No one person should be allowed to have two nice places like this.”
I hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I had needed to fight and claw my way to the top, barely getting any sleep all through my twenties and half of my thirties, trying to build something, trying to get out from under the nearly unbreakable ceiling that seemed to be the lower middle-class upbringing.
So when I had first sat down to sign the paperwork on the apartment in the city and then walked into it for the first time with the keys in my hand, I felt it.
Awe.
But, to be perfectly honest, since then, I had yet to feel that same sensation. When I bought the building and had it renovated, when I stayed in luxury hotels, when I bought my house. It just became my new norm.
It was nice and humbling to be able to view my life through the lens of someone who was still in the place in life that I had once been.