Clearly, I was wrong.
“She’s my best friend, dumbass. You don’t think I notice shit?”
“We were never serious, Daphne.”
“You’ve slept with her, right?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Michelle left for California a week ago. Your time with her is over. You’ve practiced the gallop, now it’s time to trot.”
“What the fuck are you even talking about?”
“Figure it out. I got to go. Get your head out of your ass before the rest of your life passes you by. Sweet dreams,” she says and ends the call before I can reply.
I toss the phone on the coffee table and kick back, relaxing into the couch to watch the last quarter of the game. But every throw and run goes by in a blur.
I can’t stop thinking about what Daphne said.
I replay the last words Marissa and I spoke to each other and how I promised her I’d find happiness again. The closest thing I’ve come to that has been with Michelle, but every time I touched her, I was filled with so much guilt.
We were never meant to be more than a fling. I scratched her back, and she scratched my…well, you know. But her plan was always to move to California to take care of her mother who’s been battling early onset Alzheimer’s for years.
I’m not heartbroken over her leaving. I like Michelle, hell, I even love her. She’s been in my life since we were little kids, and it’s hard not to have feelings for the woman. But it’s not the deep love I have for Marissa.
I can’t seem to let go of the past. The memory of my wife and the love I have for her still burns in my heart as strongly as the day she took her last breath.
2
Angelo
“There goes the neighborhood.” Carlos, a regular at Hook & Hustle, slides onto the barstool. “Did you see the joint next door?” He pitches a thumb toward the window and shakes his head.
Carlos looks like he stepped right out of a halfway house before he wandered in. The man has money, but he refuses to wear fancy clothes, preferring to look like a regular schmuck than a man of means.
I grab a clean glass from under the bar top, already knowing his order without his having to say a word. “It’ll be fine.”
Every old-timer thinks the neighborhood’s going to shit because a new store or some swanky new restaurant is hanging their awning over the door. What they see as a demise of their old life, I think of as progress and the bettering of the community. It’s always doom and gloom with this bunch. When they’re not complaining about the neighborhood, they’re rehashing the olden days, which from what I remember, weren’t so fucking great.
Carlos stares at me with a straight face and his arms out wide. “I mean, who da fuck needs an entire store of cupcakes?”
“I miss the days when pimps and prostitutes were on every corner,” Wally, a complete drunk and asshole, tells us like it’s the most normal thing in the world. “Those were the good ole days. The only Cupcake I want is the one who gives me a five-dollar blow job and doesn’t complain.”
Wally’s about seventy years old and used to have a nice wife and was halfway normal. About ten years ago, she caught him banging the maid, and all hell broke loose. She took his ass for every dime they had and left him with nothing except the clothes on his back and the case of chlamydia the maid gave him as a parting gift.
“Dude,” I grimace, grossed out by the very thought of some toothless, drugged-up hooker going down on my cock for five bucks in the alley. “You’re fucked up, Wally.”
Carlos turns to face Wally, one eye looking at him and the other still on me. “You know Cupcake was a man, right, Wal?”
Usually, I barely notice Carlos’s lazy eye, but moments like this make it damn near impossible to ignore. I never know where to freaking look, and he’s never told me either. I think he likes to keep it a secret just to fuck with my head, and for that reason alone, I love him.
Wally’s head jerks back. “What?”
Carlos laughs and slaps the bar top, almost falling over. “I thought I had bad eyes, but come on, man. Cupcake had a five-o’clock shadow and absolutely no tits.”
Wally’s face turns a few shades of green, and he covers his mouth. “You’re lying,” he says from behind his hand.
“What was Cupcake’s real name, then?” Carlos raises an eyebrow above the eye that’s looking right at Wally.
