Had that…had that really just happened?
Ignoring the people brushing past me and the guys “accidentally” touching my ass, I hurried to make a note in my phone. Five pm Livery tomorrow.
Holy shit.
Well, I guess he hadn’t forgotten about me; he’d just kept me waiting long enough to make me think he’d forgotten about me. It felt like such an elementary school trick, and yet…it fucking worked. I found myself more excited to be with Satan than not.
I started imagining what the evening would go like. Satan was going to be gruff and aloof at first, sure. But maybe I could get him to open up. He’d make…
Well, was this a date, or was this an interview? Was it for off-the-record stuff, or was it just as two people that clearly had an attraction to each other?
I was very excited for this opportunity, but I clearly hadn’t given it enough thought as to what it was. I’d told him that if he gave me what I wanted, I’d give him what he wanted, implying if he gave me interviews and treated me nice, I’d give him a night out and something more, but…
Well, the interview I had didn’t exactly work in my favor. It wasn’t the most honest interview I’d ever had, nor the longest.
Maybe I needed to extend the olive branch some. Let Satan get what he wanted a little bit, and then push for me to have more of what I wanted if he wanted seconds.
Why am I thinking of this the way Leigh would?
Oh, shit, Leigh!
I put my phone back in and made my way back into the thumping music, the sweaty and drunk people, and the mass of bodies that made any sort of mobility a damn near impossibility. But by this point, Leigh was almost certainly gone. I spent a good two or three minutes just pushing through, looking for higher ground so I could scan the room, but trying to pick out one girl like Leigh in a crowd like this was virtually impossible.
And then I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“Hey, you!”
I turned. It was the guy that had tried to hit on me before, the one I kept a safe distance from.
“Hey, where’s Leigh? My friend?”
“Oh, her? She and Derrick left already.”
Well, not her first rodeo.
“Want to go grab a drink?”
I looked at this guy and contrasted him and Satan. Satan would, if I was being honest, probably get what he wanted. This guy…
I knew I was doing women everywhere no favors by choosing the cliché asshole over the nice guy, but goodness, this guy just seemed so boring.
“I gotta go, sorry,” I said, brushing past him and ignoring everything else that he said.
I didn’t know. I felt kind of bad. But a nightclub was not the place for a nice guy, and hopefully he realized that, whoever the hell he was. Not like I was ever going to see him again.
I hailed an Uber and rode it home. Finally free from the sensory overload, I collapsed into the backseat, exhausted. But even though I craved sleep and a chance to decompress, I knew that on the other side of this evening was a chance to hang out with Satan in a more public yet intimate setting than his clubhouse.
It had a lot of professional opportunities. “Professional” was the word that I kept repeating to myself, even muttering it out loud at one point.
Because if I acknowledged it being personal, well, my mind went in the kind of direction that Leigh would have encouraged, and I didn’t yet know if that was a good or bad thing.
But it sure felt good to at least imagine.
Satan
“What the fuck have I gotten myself into?”
I said those words to myself as I stood before myself in the bathroom of my house. I had a spacious home on the outskirts of Phoenix, far away from the clubhouse. I’d bought it with my then-wife probably a decade or so ago; I’d promised her that when we bought, we would make sure that we kept our club life and home life separate.
