“No problem.” I looked at her left hand, allowing my eyes to slide there just briefly.
“How are you doing?” she asked, and I saw her glance at my ring finger, too. The tan line hadn’t had time to fade yet, and I took the coward’s route and put both my hands under my desk. That was how I’d been handling this whole situation, with my head down and creeping along like a misty ghost in a scary movie. I’d been hiding from Dax by ignoring his texts and voicemails. I’d been avoiding certain roads that I knew he’d have to drive on to get to work, and I’d deleted the social media apps from my phone. I’d done all that but I was still having trouble dealing…no, I had to stop crying.
I squeezed my bare fingers together and cleared my throat before I answered her question. “I’m fine,” I said. “Before next Tuesday, please sit down with Munir and get him up to speed so that he’s ready for the zoning commission.”
“And so that Octavia doesn’t have a cow about everything, right?” she asked, smiling.
I only shrugged. Rashelle liked to gossip but I wasn’t going to get involved. When I’d first started here, rumors had blown up about me with lots of people (including her) whispering that I had been involved with our boss. I had been embarrassed and self-conscious about coming to work every day because of that—but obviously, it hadn’t been true since Dax and I were together then. We’d been engaged but I hadn’t had the ring yet…I bit the inside of my cheek again.
When I didn’t accept her invitation to badmouth Octavia, Rashelle told me that she would go talk to Munir right now, and she left my office. It was almost time for the staff to leave for the day anyway, but I planned to stay a lot longer myself. I had plenty to do and lately, I had hated going to my apartment. It felt so strange without Dax. After all, I had moved to Detroit for him, so it was strange for me to be in this entire city. I bit my cheek and repeated that he wasn’t worth it, and I worked for a couple more hours before I also left to hit the building’s gym.
Things had gotten ridiculously complicated after the night at Château Moderne, because Dax and I had been together for long time and there were so many connections between our lives. All of those needed to be severed or untangled. I was a lawyer so I was used to tedious details, but it was a different experiencewhen it was so personal. There were the vehicles, for example. He had been driving what I’d called the good car, the one that didn’t have any mechanical problems and was actually mine. He took that one because he was out in the city late at night and had needed something reliable. It had left the bad car, which was in his name, for my use.
That issue had been the first thing I’d dealt with, after the bouncer guy and I had made our deal on the sidewalk outside of the nightclub. “Come on,” I’d told him. “Let’s get this over with.” First, he’d said that he needed to see the color of my money. I didn’t actually have that much on me but he’d been ok with seeing the color of my bank account when I showed him the balance on my phone. He’d informed me that he didn’t do any payment apps, he worked cash only, and then he’d told his boss at the Château Moderne that he was taking off early…which was apparently ok. Anyway, we had gone to get my car, the one that Dax had driven to the club that night. He’d left it halfway on the sidewalk and next to a fire hydrant.
“Where did you park? You can follow me home,” I’d told the bouncer.
“No, I’ll go with you,” he had said, and had gotten into the passenger side. “Who the hell rides in here, tiny children?” He’d put the seat as far back as it would go, mangling the clothes that Dax kept hanging on the bar across the rear seats and crushing whatever else he’d stored on the floor. There was a lot of stuff down there.
If I hadn’t already been so upset, I would have told the bouncer to get right back out and go to his own vehicle. But I wasn’tthinking straight. “Fine, you can come with me,” I’d muttered, and we had gotten on our way.
I had to do that now, too. The gym had emptied while I’d been working out until I was the last person here, and all the employees were watching me. I’d had jobs like theirs where I had to wait to close up, and I didn’t like doing this to them…but I also really didn’t want to go home. “Thank you,” I told the woman at the desk when I finally left, and she ran behind me to lock the door.
And then I really did have to return to the place I’d shared with Dax. He’d been so upset when we’d moved in there, but I’d said that it was the best that we could afford and I had held firm in the face of his strenuous objections. It had been a terrible fight, actually, but I was the only one contributing to the rent since he was growing his business. I hadn’t been willing to give in, not on that.
But he’d been right that it wasn’t a very nice place. The neighborhood wasn’t the safest, which my coworkers had informed me when they’d heard the address and which I could also see with my own eyes every time I was there. There was always something happening on the street, like police cars and ambulances driving up and down it, some kind of fight, or somebody yelling and causing problems. In fact, I saw a scary guy right now, a huge figure lurking in the shadows of my building. I parked but then, as I watched him, I wasn’t sure what to do. Was it better to make a run for the entrance or to stay here, where someone else might come and bother me? I didn’tseem to have the city smarts that my coworkers did and at times like this, I missed them.
The man seemed to notice me in my car because his head lifted and stayed turned in my direction. I got ready to start the engine with the new key I’d had made, the only one that now worked for this vehicle. The bouncer guy had told me that I’d better do it, because he thought that Dax would try to repossess it. He had called that “felony larceny.”
“It’s not a bad ride,” the bouncer had told me on the night of my breakup, as we’d ridden through the city. He’d run his mitt of a hand over my dashboard. “But you keep a lot of crap in it.”
“It’s Dax’s stuff,” I’d explained. He had liked to be ready to make wardrobe changes for the night and the thought of him looking so cute in one of his outfits…
“You’re crying over that guy, that jackoff cocktail straw,” the bouncer had said. He had sounded both disgusted and kind of resigned, and he’d been right. I had cried over Dax that night and I had kept doing it in the days since. I had cried as I’d taken him off the cell phone plan, changed the locks on the apartment (in violation of my lease), moved my money out of our shared bank account, and cleaned up a thousand other problems. Yes, we’d blended much of our lives, but we were going to get married so that had made sense. That was what you did when you loved and trusted someone!
I didn’t trust the guy who was waiting next to my building, though. His face was shadowed and he wore all black, and he still seemed to be staring at me…and then he started to crossover. As he did, I caught a glimpse of his face and I recognized him—I should have before, because there weren’t a lot of people that size just walking around. But realizing that I knew him didn’t make me feel much better. This was the bouncer from Château Moderne, the big guy I’d brought here on the night when I’d returned my ring. I’d thrown it, to be more accurate.
Now he stopped a few feet from my car. “Camille Carpenter?” he called through the window.
“Yes?” As I answered, I tried to remember his name. Had he told me what it was that night? As we’d traveled across the city, we had talked some. I’d explained what I wanted him to do, which was not having sex with me. I had wanted him to be a guard and a mover.
“I get it. I’m supposed to stand at the door and make sure that your twiggy boyfriend doesn’t come in while you pack his shit, because you think that you might cave and forgive him,” he had clarified.
“What?” I’d been totally sure I hadn’t said anything about “caving,” but he’d continued.
“So I’ll keep him out so that you don’t flip your shit and want to put that disco ball ring back on, and you’ll get his gear bagged up. Then you want me to help you bring it back to the club,” he had said, and at least the last part was correct. I’d wanted Dax’s stuff out and I wanted it done fast, before he tried to come home. I had nodded and the bouncer had asked, “Why are we driving so damn slow?”
The speed limit on that road had been thirty miles per hour, no matter how fast other drivers chose to go, and I hadn’t bothered to argue with the person who’d just voiced the stupid theory that I had needed protection from Dax so that I wouldn’t “cave” and take him back. I had wanted the bouncer guy to block the door because I didn’t want my former fiancé to intrude as I gathered his belongings. If Dax had come home at that moment, he would have gotten in my way. He might also have started arguing and being sweet, and then maybe he could have convinced me…it had been safer for my emotions to have a guard at my door.
But it didn’t feel safe to have him here right now, standing in the street next to my car.
“Camille Carpenter?” he repeated.
“Yes?” I answered. I had given up on trying to remember his name.
“It’s me,” he said, which didn’t help with that problem. “I have to talk to you.”
“Go ahead.” Sure, maybe I wasn’t as street-smart as my colleagues at Whitaker Enterprises, the ones who had grown up here in the big city versus me in my small town. At least I had enough self-preservation to know that I shouldn’t have opened the door at this moment.
