Spite Club

by Julie Kriss

  Alison. She was talking about Alison Shepard, another teller. She thought Josh was cheating with Alison, not Gina.

  Or he was cheating with Alison and Gina.

  There were two of them.

  Where the hell had I been on Valentine’s Day? I remembered. Sitting in my cubicle, doing my job as always. Oblivious to what was going on around me because I thought it completely innocent that my boyfriend had gone to pick up the cake.

  “Okay,” I said. I had that crazy, curiously numb feeling I’d had when I’d walked into Josh’s apartment and seen him with Gina. Like this was happening to someone else. “I guess I just wanted to know how it happened. Thanks for letting me know.”

  “If there’s anything I can do—”

  I hung up. I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t even hyperventilating. I felt like someone had shot me in the arm with Novocaine. Through the blankness, a thought bubbled up. Something I realized I wanted.

  I called Nick Mason.

  “Yeah?” he said. He sounded like maybe he’d been sleeping. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. Then again, he usually sounded like that. And I was in bed in my underwear, so I couldn’t throw stones.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “I know, redhead. You at work?”

  Why did I like it when he called me that? When he didn’t use my name? He knew my name—he’d said it plenty of times. But when he called me redhead, I got chills up my spine. “I’m not at work,” I told him. “They sent me home.”

  There was a pause, because even Nick knew that was bad. “What happened?”

  “Josh saw your text. He started an argument. I threw a mug of tea at him. So here I am.”

  “Fuck,” he said softly. “It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. Jesus, Evie, I’m sorry.”

  He was. That was the thing about Nick—deep down, buried below the asshole surface, was an almost-nice guy who took the time to teach me to box and who didn’t want me to get fired.

  But I didn’t want that nice guy right now.

  “It’s okay,” I said to him. “They gave me a few days off. I’m sort of maybe fired, but now I don’t have to work with Josh every day.”

  “What the hell did he say to you?” Now the growly voice was back, and I got another shiver.

  “He called me a slut,” I said.

  “He fucking called you what?”

  More shivers. “Yeah. I got slut-shamed, and I didn’t even get to have sex. Oh, and he’s cheating with a woman at work as well as Gina, so he completely fucked me over. I’m not having a really good day.”

  He took a second to acknowledge this. “You want to hit something?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “Not this time. I want something else.”

  “Yeah? And what is that?”

  I took a breath. “You said something about dirty sex when we first met.”

  There was a pause. Barely a heartbeat long, but it was there. “Did I?”

  “You did,” I said. I was picturing him in my mind right now. Lying in bed, mostly naked, like the photo. Oh hell, that photo. “You said that I’m nice, and that you’re too dirty for me, and that’s why we can’t fuck.”

  Another heartbeat of surprise at my foul language. But Nick, of all people, knew exactly where I was going. “Yeah,” he said. “I said that.”

  “I’ve decided I hate being nice,” I told him. “I want to do things your way. I’ve had the world’s shittiest day, and I think some dirty, dirty sex would make it better. And I think you’re the guy to provide it.”

  This was it. The moment when he could laugh at me. Make me feel stupid or ugly. Tell me I wasn’t sexy or attractive. Tell me to leave him alone.

  Instead, he said, “Right now?”

  My heart leapt in my chest. It freaking leapt. “Yes. Right now.”

  He made a rumbling, thinking sound, a little like hmmm but mixed with an exhale. “That might be a shitty idea, Evie.”

  “It isn’t a shitty idea,” I said, because it wasn’t. It really wasn’t. “It’s a good idea.”

  “You’re kind of vulnerable, or something. Emotional or some shit.”

  “I am not emotional!” The panic in my voice made that a lie, but I didn’t care. “I’m perfectly sane, and I need some dirty sex!”

  “See, that right there,” he said. “That’s emotional. We fuck right now, and we do it dirty, you’ll probably change your mind and regret it.”

  “You have got to be kidding me!” I slapped a frustrated hand down on the mattress beside me. “This is a booty call, Nick! A serious one! No strings attached!”

  “And I very much fucking appreciate it,” he said. “But you’re all twisted up and turned around. And dirty sex with me is very fucking filthy. That’s a bad combination. It isn’t going to work.”

  Why? Why was he being nice now, of all times? I was so done with nice. “You’re serious, aren’t you?” I said. “You’re turning me down.”

  He made a pained noise in his throat. “Yeah,” he said. “I have to.”

  “Well, thanks for nothing!” I shouted at him, hurt now as well as angry. Had he ever turned Gina down? Who was I kidding? Of course he hadn’t. “Take your chivalry and shove it!” I hung up the phone and threw it on the floor.

  I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes. This was my life right now. I couldn’t even get the world’s dirtiest guy to fuck me, and I’d been in bed with him just this morning. What was wrong with me?

  If what you’re doing isn’t working, change it.

  The words floated into my mind. Clear and simple. Had I heard them somewhere? Some self-help article? I had no idea, but there they were.

  If what you’re doing isn’t working, change it.

  Powerful and scary at the same time. Words that took courage.

  My life wasn’t working. My career, my love life, my sex life. None of it was working right now. What did I have to lose?

  If what you’re doing isn’t working, change it.

  It was time to admit that being nice wasn’t working for me. At all.

  Maybe it was time to change it.

  Twelve

  Nick

  “It’s official,” Andrew said. “He can’t get out of this one. I think Lightning Man is fucked.”

  “He’s not fucked,” I said, taking another swig of beer. “He’ll get out of this, just like he gets out of everything else.”

  “No way.” He leaned forward, his computer stylus pen in hand, and fixed something tiny on the screen that I couldn’t see. “Temptus has made the entire planet of Pluto into a nuke and is hurling it at Earth. How the hell is Lightning Man supposed to get out of that?”

  I didn’t know, actually. It was Saturday night, and we were sitting in Andrew’s living room, each of us with a beer in hand. I was on a chair with my feet up, a notebook on my lap as I jotted down sketches and ideas. Andrew was at the computer, his Illustrator program open, actually creating Lightning Man onscreen.

  I may have been a party animal, I was a homebody one night a week: Saturday. My friends—acquaintances—didn’t understand it, but I didn’t give a shit. This was our ritual, Andrew and me. Saturday nights, we’d hang out in his living room, drink beer, and make comics.

  I didn’t even remember how it had started. Sometime after his accident, I’d taken to coming up with outrageous comic stories by his bedside, and sometime after that Andrew had started drawing the stories I invented. During the long, thick fog of his recovery, after our parents had bailed on both of us, the comics were a way for us to keep each other company without actually having to talk. Because when we talked, we always danced around the real issues—or talked about them, which was way fucking worse. We were talked out. Making up the exploits of Lightning Man was better.

  Now we’d graduated to making Lightning Man on a computer instead of a pad and paper. That was Andrew’s talent, not mine. He could take up a stylus pen and do a computer drawing that knocked your socks off, while I could barely draw a stick figure.
So I stuck to the storytelling part.

  We didn’t publish Lightning Man, not online or anywhere else. No one had ever seen Lightning Man except for Andrew and me. That was what kept him interesting—the fact that he was ours, and ours alone.

  “Okay, genius,” Andrew said now, quickly setting up the next panel. “Pluto, which is now a nuke, is hurtling toward Earth. What’s next?”

  I was already doodling a solution. This was how I plotted Lightning Man—I came up with an unsolvable problem, then pulled a solution out of thin air. Since no one was reading it, it didn’t matter whether the plot was believable. “Well, here is Temptus’s problem,” I said, referring to our supervillain, who had horns and was always trailed by wisps of smoke in Andrew’s drawings. “The distance from Pluto to Earth is so big, his nuke is going to take”—I looked it up on my phone—“twenty-three years to get here. So he has to send the nuke through a hole in the space-time continuum to get it here faster.”

  “Uh huh,” Andrew said, already sketching Temptus in his sketchbook, his way of trying out ideas. Temptus was scribbling equations on a white board.

  “When Temptus opens the space-time continuum,” I said, “Lightning Man will jump into the rift, reversing the effects with his presence.”

  “That puts Lightning Man adrift in space and time,” Andrew pointed out.

  “Not if Thunder Boy is back at headquarters with a program that will pull Lightning Man out of the continuum, as long as he is pulled out before the rift closes. Which is ten seconds.”

  Andrew nodded as if this was an actual possibility. “Tricky,” he said. “But Thunder Boy is a genius. What’s going on with the redhead?”

  For a second, I thought he was still talking about the comic. “What redhead?” I asked.

  My brother turned from the screen and rolled his eyes at me. “The hot girl you took out for a sandwich, dumbass. That redhead.”

  Fuck. Evie. “Nothing is happening,” I said, and I felt the pain of those words, right in my balls. Nothing is happening.

  “Nothing?”

  “It’s possible I fucked it up.”

  Andrew looked surprised, though he shouldn’t have. “It’s possible? Fucked it up how?”

  Just talking about this brought a tension headache to my temples. I had never done anything more difficult in my life than turn Evie down yesterday. But I couldn’t think of what else I could have done.

  No, that was a lie. I could think of it. And I did. A lot. But I still didn’t think I was wrong.

  Andrew was waiting for an answer, and I told Andrew everything, so I said, “I fucked it up by not having sex with her.”

  “What?” Andrew said. “I thought you weren’t sleeping with her.”

  “I’m not. Thanks for the reminder of my blue balls, though. She asked, and I said no.”

  “Uh huh,” Andrew said, disbelieving. “So the redhead asked you for sex.”

  “Yes.” I think some dirty, dirty sex would make it better. And I think you’re the guy to provide it. Damn, I would be hearing those words on my deathbed. When I would still be regretting saying no.

  “And you turned her down,” he continued.

  “I had to,” I explained. “She was only asking because she was emotional. She’d just been almost fired from her job, and she’d had a big fight with her douchebag ex. He wasn’t only cheating with Gina, but someone else, too. She was in a crazy mood. She was up and down and sideways all at once.”

  Andrew scratched an eyebrow thoughtfully. “What did she do when you said no?”

  “She got mad, and hurt,” I said. Fuck, I hadn’t meant to hurt her. That part stung. “She told me to take my chivalry and shove it.”

  “She told you that, and you still said no?” my brother said.

  “It was bad,” I admitted. “It was very fucking bad. Maybe I didn’t handle it right. I have no idea. But having sex right then would have been worse.” I didn’t say the worst part: Sex, right then, would have ended us. That was the part I didn’t say. Because it sounded ridiculous, not wanting to end something that didn’t exist in the first place.

  Andrew shook his head. “How you have so many women, and know so little about them, amazes me.”

  “Because I never talk to them, buttwipe,” I said.

  “So, talk to this one,” he said. “Call her.”

  “And say what?”

  He counted on his fingers. “I’m sorry, I hope you’re okay, I think you’re hot even though I totally fucking hurt your feelings. There’s a starter script. Go from there.”

  “She’ll get the wrong idea,” I said.

  “Like what? That you actually like her?”

  I glared at him. Because yeah, that was what I meant. I didn’t want her to know I liked her.

  I didn’t like her. It was just a revenge thing.

  Except I sort of did. This was Evie. What was not to fucking like?

  Jesus, I was a fucking mess.

  “Fine,” I said, like I was doing Andrew a favor. “I don’t know why I take your advice about women, when you know even less about them than I do.” I pulled out my phone and stood up. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “Sure,” Andrew said. “Take your time.”

  The fact that he was so agreeable probably meant that he had some secret way of listening in, but I couldn’t be bothered with that right now. I stepped out onto his front porch and dialed Evie’s number.

  She answered, and there was a blare of sound, as if she was somewhere loud. “Nick!” she shouted over the noise. “Hi!”

  She sounded panicked and relieved at the same time, which I didn’t expect. “Evie?” I said. “Where are you?”

  “I can’t hear you,” she said. “Hold on.” I waited a second, but the noise didn’t go down. It sounded like the pulse of loud dance music. “Shit, I still can’t hear you,” she said. “Let me—” The line went dead.

  So much for playing it casual.

  I couldn’t let it go. So I texted her instead. Where are you?

  Cintano’s, she replied, naming a trendy downtown bar. Known mostly for hookups, if you were a trendy kind of person. Which Evie wasn’t. She was a lot of things, but trendy wasn’t one of them.

  Still, I had to ask the question. What are you doing there?

  Her answer took a second. You told me to find someone to fuck me, she wrote. And you won’t do it. So here I am.

  I stared at the words with disbelieving eyes. Then I closed my eyes and tilted my head back.

  Fuck. Fuck.

  Why was I so stupid sometimes?

  It was none of my goddamn business. She was right, I’d said no. Evie was free and single, and could go to Cintano’s on Saturday night if she wanted. Pick up who she wanted. Fuck who she wanted.

  Not my business at all.

  Except Cintano’s was a meat market. She didn’t belong in a meat market, meeting those kinds of guys. Letting them buy her drinks and come on to her. Letting them touch her and take her home.

  I didn’t care. Nope. We’d been of some use to each other, gotten drunk for one fun night, and that was all. We weren’t dating or fucking. We weren’t anything, even though she’d tried.

  She was at Cintano’s on Saturday night.

  The beast inside me roared to life again. Evie with her pretty red hair, her soft skin, her nice round ass, at Cintano’s. Right now.

  I should not fucking care about this.

  The phone buzzed in my hand again. It was Evie.

  Confession, she wrote. It isn’t going very well.

  Oh, fucking hell. That sealed it. I’ll be right there, I texted back. Don’t move.

  “Hey!” Andrew said as I came back inside and put on my leather jacket. He held up his hands. “What about bros before redheads?”

  “Next time,” I told him.

  “Fine. But while you’re gone, I’m going to draw Lightning Boy and Judy Gravity getting it on. And it’s going to be filthy.”

  “Do not draw that,” I shout
ed over my shoulder, and I banged the door shut behind me.

  Thirteen

  Evie

  Confession. It isn’t going very well.

  I had never been to Cintano’s before. But if a girl is going to try and get herself laid, she may as well go to the top place in town for it. On Saturday night.

  This was the new me—or, should I say, newer than the last new me. I was going to be bold and sexy. Adventurous. But I was also going to be confident and in control. I wasn’t going to be the sad-sack cheating victim Josh had made me out to be, or the pathetic hard-up girl who begged Nick Mason to have sex with her. I also wasn’t going to be the boring bank teller with “marriage material” on an invisible sign over her head. None of the guys at this bar knew me, so I was going to be someone new, and sexy, and fun, just for one night.

  Fuck Nick Mason and his stupid scruples. Just fuck them.

  There were plenty of men in Millwood. Nick Mason wasn’t the only one. I would go pick another one. Easy.

  While my roommate Heather blared Howard Jones in her room, I picked out a wrap dress from my closet: basic black, knee length to cover my ass, with a deep V neck. I added a silver necklace and a pair of heels. On a wave of inspiration, I picked up the jean jacket Nick had lent me and tried it on. The look was dressy and classy, overlaid with the sharp denim, and I liked it.

  I was adjusting the jacket when I noticed something in the breast pocket. I pulled it out and found a business card. Andrew Mason, programmer. Specializing in PHP. There was a phone number and an email. Huh. Who was Andrew Mason? A brother or a cousin? The jacket was a too small to fit Nick, but it was definitely a guy’s jacket, big enough to give cover to my ample boobs, though I had to roll the cuffs.

  Whatever. Nick was a mystery in a lot of ways, but he wasn’t one I was going to ponder tonight. I put the card back in the jacket pocket, blow-dried my hair, put on some makeup, and headed out.

  I only had a mild panic attack when I got out of the Uber in front of the bar. And a second one—again, mild—as the bouncer waved me through. Oh, God, I was in Cintano’s. To pick up. Right. Let’s do this.