“Two thousand dollars,” Xavi blurted out.
I stopped walking and turned fully back to him.
Now he had my attention.
Xavi
I couldn’t believe I was doing this. I was probably insane. I’d been flippant with Janice earlier, but no – this was proof that there absolutely was something wrong with my head.
Rowe stared at me, the stupidly large figure I had shouted out hanging in the air between us.
“What?” he asked.
I bit my lip. This was so fucking stupid. I’d sunk to a totally new low of being a loser. It wasn’t even on the chart. They would have to invent a new chart to calculate how much of a fucking loser I was.
“I need a favor,” I said. “And I’ll pay you two thousand dollars if you do it for me.”
Rowe frowned at me. “Is this some kind of scam?”
I shook my head. I could understand why he would assume that. Fuck-up Xavi Mendez would be exactly the kind of person you’d expect to be caught up in a pyramid scheme – or starting one. “No,” I told him. “I just need you to come with me somewhere for the weekend.”
Rowe narrowed his eyes at me. “Absolutely no way,” he said. “I’ve seen horror movies, and I need both of my kidneys.”
“Alright, fuck you, then,” I snapped, a defense mechanism that I couldn’t stop. “I’ll find someone better to go with me. I was just asking you because you looked like you needed some pity, anyway.”
“Great talk,” Rowe said, turning his back to me.
Shit.
“No, wait!” I said, rushing after him and whirling around him, standing in front of him to block his way. “Alright, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. I’m just – I really need your help this weekend.”
Rowe still didn’t look impressed. “I’m going to need a lot more explanation than that.”
He was right. It sounded shady. Like I was offering to pay him for a dirty weekend. The irony was, it was the exact opposite I was asking for.
I took a deep breath.
I hated being vulnerable like this, but I needed this badly. If I didn’t bare my soul right now in front of Rowe, I was going to have to do it in front of my friends – people who I actually cared about.
Getting embarrassed in front of a colleague was a lot different from doing it in front of them.
“I have this group of friends,” I started. “We’ve been hanging out since college. Some of us, since high school. Two of them are getting married this weekend, and they gave me a plus one, and… if I don’t bring someone…”
Rowe shook his head. “If you don’t bring someone, they’ll have a seat spare?” he said, clearly not understanding the stakes here.
“No, it’s not that,” I said. I sighed. Might as well come out with all of it. “I have a… kind of a reputation. They all think I’m incapable of holding down a relationship.”
A look came over Rowe’s face for a moment – a look that saidwell, duh– before he smoothed it out. Great. So I had that reputation here at work, too. It wasn’t my fault the last three senior managers had taken a shine to me.
Come to think of it, that was probably why Janice hated me so much. Every time she tried to get rid of me, I just slept with someone and made it go away. If it wasn’t Rowe saving me, which he’d been doing more and more of since he started working here.
“Okay,” Rowe said. “I think I’m getting it. You want to pretend that you’re capable of having a relationship by bringing a date to the wedding.”
“Right,” I said. I hesitated. “I want you to come to the wedding with me as my boyfriend.”
There was a beat of awkward silence.
“Uh, my fake boyfriend,” I amended myself. “Obviously. I’m not expecting you to actually date me.” Because who would consider a thing like that, even for two thousand dollars? I would need a couple extra zeroes on the end of the figure, and I wasn’t talking about behind the decimal point.
