TESNI’S STORY
PART TWO
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‘Any chance you can stay at one of your guys’ places? I have company.’
I was already in the building when I read the text with the winking emoji planted at the end of it.
Surrounded by the cold echo of the concrete stairwell, stairs went up on my right to the flats, and stairs went down on my left to the overgrown communal garden.
I slumped against the sticky entrance door and just stared at the phone screen.
The last message I wanted to light up my phone screen.
I’d just come from a delivery run.
My pockets were a few ounces lighter. My purse, a bit heavier. I’d unloaded a few bags of coke, weed, speed, and molly.
Just two deliveries. One regular, and the other was a stag night. Those bachelor parties—even on Tuesday nights—could get way out of hand.
That was good for me.
But I stopped off on the way home to pick up some takeaway—and I had my mind set on a bath, some music playing, maybe a joint, some satay noodles, and a vegan caramel mousse that I was dreaming about all damn day.
I went so far out of my way for the mousse that it added another twenty minutes to my trip home—and for what?
For this? To be stuck in the hall of the flats, leaning against the door with a lot of suspicious stains, two plastic bags pulling down on my fingers, a backpack slung over my shoulder, and a disappointing text glaring up at me?
It was too fucking late for that nonsense.
The time above the text had my face souring. It was almost three in the fucking morning.
And Bee sent it eighteen minutes ago.
So I was supposed to turn around, call through my roster of guys, let my noodles get cold, and spend the night somewhere else.
That was so fucking annoying.
But I knew the deal.
It was now Bee’s flat to use for the night.
Sort of an arrangement of ours.
Sometimes, she would bring some sucker back, drug them, steal what she could from them, then kick them out before the sun rose.
But I usually had some notice.
I hadn’t known that tonight, when I left to do my deliveries and she left to go see an old friend, that she would be bringing anyone back to the flat.
Guess she found a sucker too good to pass up.
Still, an annoyed huff echoed through the stairwell before I pushed from the door.
Instead of going up the steps, I took the staircase on the left—the cold, concrete steps that led down past the bin room, the lift to the underground storage cages, and out into the garden.
‘Garden’ was a bit of a stretch.
