The Billionaire Game(5)
I did it all for the looks on the faces on my clients when they gazed at themselves in the mirror wearing one of my creations and realized that they were powerful, gorgeous, sexy goddesses; that they deserved to have self-confidence, to have fun, to have good things.
“You know what, Kate?” Dove breathed. “I think I will take a peignoir too.”
“I’ll just add that to the order, then,” I said with a smile.
Mission accomplished, NASA. The eagle has landed, and it is looking fly as hell.
#
Events conspired to sour my mood a little after that, and by ‘events,’ I mostly mean ‘Asher Young.’
Dove had barely redressed and come out from behind the changing curtain when he glommed back onto her like a leech—not that she seemed to mind—and began pelting her with questions: well, what color had she chosen? Was it low-cut? How easily would it hold together if someone were to, say, try to rip it off? He tickled her and she giggled like a hyena every time she refused to give an answer; I bit my tongue and resisted the urge to tell him that I suspected that he was the kind of guy who read the last page of a mystery story first and then told everyone the ending, and therefore had a special place waiting for him in hell.
They were both still giving each other mouth-to-mouth resuscitation as they headed out the door.
“It’s not their fault,” I reminded myself once they had left. “You’re not in a very pro-couple mood, remember? Asher and Dove could be a pair of graceful monogamous-for-life swans and you would still want to wring their necks. Or penguins! Everybody loves penguins! But right now those smug little mated-for-life f*ckers in tuxedos can go f*ck themselves.” So maybe I was feeling a little bitter.
I decided to distract myself by cleaning up. I was just starting to transform my studio back into my living room—and mentally calculating how long I could live on Whole Foods samples (a little trick my best friend Lacey had taught me) and coffee shop jam packets; surely it would be worth it if I could just put down the money on an actual studio space—when the doorbell rang. With a sinking heart, I went to check it, and my worst fears were confirmed.
Like the terrible icing on the worst ever cake, the person at the door was Stevie.
He was trying to peer through the peephole, the lens making his eyeball bulge, his nose seeming to swell. “Kate? I know you’re in there. I watched your ‘clients’”—he did the actual air quotes around the words, like this was still the nineties—“take off, so it’s just you and me. I’m taking back that magazine.”
I bet my landlord let him in, even after I told him not to. Damn. Mr. Briggs was an old sweetie, but he had all the memory retention of a piece of soggy Swiss cheese. He couldn’t seem to hold it in his head that Stevie and I were no longer together; though, in all fairness to him, the fact that he had absorbed that we had once been together was pretty impressive, given that he regularly forgot that WWII had been won seventy years ago.
“Look, you can drop this whole act,” Stevie said, lowering his voice as if he was about to tell me a secret. “You don’t have to pretend to be all intellectual anymore, okay? It was cute how you tried to do literary analysis on those ‘classics’—” he did the air quotes again—“to get my attention so I would date you, but it’s over and you need to let it go. Props to you for pretending to read them all the time, that was a real commitment, but since we’re not together anymore you can drop the whole fa?ade and go back to reading whatever fashion magazines you usually read.”
He kept on talking, but his words fuzzed out in my brain and I felt my incandescent rage grow suddenly ice-cold and hard and pointed. Stevie needed to shut the hell up, and he needed to do it right now.
Luckily, a Girl Scout is always prepared.
Or is that Boy Scouts?
Whatever, I was never in either of them. But what can I say: I’m always open to inspiration.
I pulled the string I had run over the edge of my door earlier, to a little contraption I had rigged up just after he called, and armed just after Dove and Asher left. And through the peephole I watched three gallons of expired aquamarine dye cascade over Stevie ‘Jackass’ Jacobs.
My deposit on the apartment was going to be completely gone to pay for new hallway carpet, but it was totally worth it to hear Stevie screaming like a toddler, as if it were actual acid and not blue-tinted water spilling all over him.
He shook himself, spluttering, blinking dye out of his eyes. “You bitch! You f*cking crazy bitch! Over a goddamn book!”
“Magazine,” I corrected.
I turned away from the door with a little smile on my face, humming a happy tune.
That was it. I was keeping the thing, on principle.
TWO
Later that evening, fireworks burst overhead, eager laughter swirled around me, and an attentive waiter pressed a mojito with freshly crushed mint into my hand. Ah, this was the life.
“This is the life, right?” Lacey said to me with a grin. She looked resplendent in a knee-length dress of shimmery golden gauze, accentuated by moonstone clasps at the shoulders, and an ebony belt that brought out the deep brown of her eyes. “Would you believe Grant wanted to have this fundraiser in a stuffy old ballroom? On a beautiful clear night like tonight?”
“It’s a good thing he has you to talk him out of it,” I said with a playful dig at Grant’s tuxedoed ribs. “I would not have wanted to miss this.”