“Exactly, the free lunch earned the bar more money in the end; it wasn’t free at all,” she replied, before pulling a phone out of her purse. She focused on the screen while she continued. “So, what do you want? Why’d you help me?”
Before I could respond, a distorted and muffled guitar lick sounded from her purse.
Emma’s hand scrambled back into the bag and pulled another phone out. She sneered at the phone and muted the ringtone before dropping it back into her purse. Her eyes darted to me before they moved back to the phone she still had out.
“It’s my stepfather,” she said.
“Two phones?” I asked.
She shrugged and tapped the phone’s camera app, then the pictures. The first photo displayed a middle-aged man on a boat holding a large fish in his arms. A closer look told me it was the man from the pub she’d been messing with.
“You swiped his phone?” I couldn’t help but smile. “I hadn’t noticed that.”
“Neither did he,” she replied, sliding past more photos, “but it doesn’t look like there’s anything to see here.”
She cocked her arm to toss the phone down the street. I snatched her wrist before she could. Her whole demeanor shifted. She snarled but only stared at me.
“He might have contactless payment turned on,” I said, plucking the phone from her fingers. “Anything under £45 doesn’t require a password. See, we should head to the shops, steal what you can from him. What did he do to you, anyway, to get you so riled up?”
Emma took back the phone and examined the screen I’d navigated to. A devilish smirk appeared on her face and she nodded. When she looked back up at me, her lips curled into a frown.
“You still haven’t told me what you want,” she said. “As for the ass, he looked down on my mom, me too.”
“So you spilled a drink on him, accused him of groping you and then stole his phone?” I chucked. “You really are quite the firecracker. I’ll have to stay on your good side.”
“If you want to get on my good side, you’ll tell me what the hell you want,” she replied, finger to my chest. “I’m not an idiot, you know. You’ve been avoiding the question.”
“I still think you are way too cynical for someone so young.” I kept avoiding the question. “What about charity?”
“What about it?” she shot back. “You get a tax break when you give to charity, there’s a benefit. Most people are not quiet about their donations either. They want the credit. Anyone who ever claimed to help someone ‘out of the kindness of their heart’ was a liar. Even if all they got in return was the satisfaction of helping someone, they are using that feeling to fill a void in themselves, make themselves feel better. So, Mr. Fitzroy, if that is your real name, why did you help me?”
Fitzroy wasn’t my real name, but I kept that to myself. I’d taken the conversation as far as I could, learned what I needed. It was time to open up negotiations… almost.
“Why don’t we use your friend’s phone to pick up some dinner? Discuss it over some Scottish delicacies?”
Emma glared at me, a frown on her face. She still didn’t trust me and I couldn’t blame her for that. I wouldn’t trust me if I were her. The prospect of stealing a few quid from the man at the pub probably sold the idea for her.
Twenty minutes later, we were sitting at a small table in a crowded chippy, not Bashir’s mum’s, waiting for our order to come up. The loud and drunk conversations around us plus the blaring television behind the counter made it a poor choice for a conversation but Emma wouldn’t let me delay it any longer and nobody was listening to us. The moment we sat down, she glared at me over her beer, eyebrows high, expecting answers. I offered only lies – they were much more believable than the truth most of the time.
“I’ll admit, I do want something from you,” I said, just loud enough for her to hear over the cacophony around us. “It’ll probably sound a little strange.”
“Nine times out of ten, when I guy has a ‘strange request,’ it turns out to be some run of the mill vanilla shit that not even the most devoted nun would find ‘strange,’” said Emma. Her head shook. “That tenth guy is the real freak. If you are about to ask me to step on a puppy in stilettos, you should save your breath.”
“Someone asked you to do that?”
“Ohh,” Emma cooed like I was a baby, “first time learning about crush fetishists? There are some real freaks out there. If I found shit like that on the ass’s phone, I’d have gotten a lot more than a free meal off him.”
The waitress neared and slid our trays onto the table, pausing the conversation. Emma hadn’t matched my profile of her. Everything I’d found on social media and online articles from the paper for the high school she’d graduated from a year ago painted a picture of a girl interested in drama — lead of the school play — and the arts. Moderately popular, she wasn’t the prom queen/head cheerleader but she wasn’t the weird girl who never spoke to anyone either.
The pictures she shared displayed a lot of wealth. Family vacations at least twice a year to far flung locales, an ornate tile mosaic in the background of several selfies taken in a bathroom, amongst other evidence. Her stepfather was Salvatore De Rossi. He ran the Seattle Outfit, one of the smaller Italian American Mafia families, but they lived well from what I’d seen.
I’d expected a spoiled, entitled girl who liked to get her drink on, given the longing look she’d sent the pub on the wedding walk. When she burst through the doors after the wedding, it should have clued me in that I might have been wrong. Her entire encounter with the ‘ass’ as she called him, had offered me a second chance to change tactics but I’d pushed through.
The girl in my profile, she believed in romance. If a guy as fit as me stepped up to protect her, she’d swoon. Then when I asked her for a special favor later, she’d agree right away, no need for the bribe money I’d readied.
The real Emma, the cynical, world-weary girl who sat across from me, munching on some chips while cagey eyes darted out the window at every passing person wouldn’t swoon for anything. She wouldn’t sign her name on the dotted line without something in return.
“My gran is in hospice and she’s not going to make it very long,” I said as she chewed on her chips, using the lie I’d practiced. “I visited her just before I came into the pub. She’s always on me about finding a girl, falling in love and settling down. I’m only 25, I don’t want to get married.”
