“There you go,” Dax had told me. “You got what you wanted and now you’ll shut up, right? Camille, don’t get pissed again! I don’t have time to deal with your shit.” He’d left to meet a friend and I’d carefully given myself a manicure so that I could take pictures to show everyone.
“Nice ring,” the bouncer said now, but he wasn’t really looking. “What’s your name?”
“Camille Carpenter,” I told him.
“Ok, sure.” He flicked open his phone.
“That’s really my name. Camille Ursula Carpenter.” I started to dig for my license before realizing that he didn’t care. He hummed under his breath as he tapped and scrolled.
“No, I don’t see you on here,” he told me.
“Dax didn’t know I was coming…” I stood on my tiptoes and by doing so, I got a glimpse of his screen before he closed it. “Waita minute! You were looking at a weather app, not a guest list for the VIP,” I accused him.
“Sweetheart, I’m not letting you in there,” he told me.
“Don’t call me sweetheart!” I didn’t feel like anybody’s sweetheart, and especially not the man who wasn’t letting me confront my fiancé about the diamond simulants I might have been wearing on my finger. “I have to talk to Dax. It’s an emergency.” It absolutely was. Because, if that jeweler had been right and these were spurious or strass or pieces of phony crap—however you wanted to call it, if my fiancé had lied to me about my engagement ring, then I was going to have to do something drastic.
This wasn’t just about diamonds. I hadn’t wanted something so big and fancy, so over-the-top sparkly and ostentatious. Even if it wasn’t my style, though, it was a symbol and it represented something, and maybe there was an explanation for what the jeweler had told me. That was what I needed to know, and I needed to know it right now. Right now! “It’s an emergency!” I repeated, and I had forgotten to keep my accent out of the words. It was easy to hear it with the volume I’d used.
“Yeah, ok. Text him, then.”
No, because if I did, Dax would get mad and refuse to come talk. He didn’t like it when I showed up places as a surprise.
“Please,” I said. “Please?”
The man didn’t answer and he didn’t move himself out of my path. He didn’t care about my problem, which was obvious since he continued humming and then he started quietly singing somewords, too. We stood there with the music pumping for the empty dance floor and it was so stupid that I wanted to scream. Maybe I hadn’t been angry before, but now I was. Now I really was, at this guy.
“Listen to me,” I started to tell him, but he turned his gaze away from me and frowned.
“Ah, Jesus Christ on a cracker.”
Dax was just walking through a door in the side of the VIP area that had been disguised as part of the black, leather-covered wall. A woman also emerged behind him. She delicately dabbed her mouth with her fingertips and then turned her head and spat on the floor.
My fiancé was zipping up his fly.
“What?” I asked. “What?”
Even with the music, I was loud enough that Dax heard me. He looked up and I couldn’t see his eyes due to the sunglasses he wore, but I did see the snarl that transformed his mouth. There was enough light for me to read his lips as he said, “What the fuck are you doing here?”
The bouncer stepped in front of me again. “Camille Carpenter, let’s get going.” He started herding me with his body, moving me away from the VIP. “Go, go,” he urged. He bumped me with his chest and I stumbled.
“What is he doing?” I tried to see around this person who was separating me from my fiancé. That was right, he was my fiancé! “What was Dax doing with another woman?”
“Camille!”
The man stopped herding when we both heard my name. The volume of the music seemed to drop, so the DJ might have spotted that something interesting was happening at the VIP. “What the fuck are you doing here?” Dax repeated as he stomped over to me.
“I saw you closing your zipper,” I answered.
The bouncer stepped away as my fiancé grabbed my arms. “Camille, nothing is happening.”
“Why were you with that woman? What were you doing?”
“Nothing,” he told me. “She’s a bartender here. We were talking about inventory—”
“She wasn’t wearing a uniform.” I had noticed, because her dress was even shorter and tighter than what I had on. “Why were you zipping your pants?”
“I just went to the john,” he told me.
