I wiped my perspiration from my forehead and leaned against the brick wall furthest from the moldy green bin. Placing one foot firmly against the bricks, I dug into the pocket of my pants and pulled out my phone, looking for the one person that I both wished I’d never have to contact, but somehow hoped I would.
Chapter 10
Mallory
“He’s calling me,” I said to no one in particular. Claudia was at one of her classes and Jinny was probably out auditioning for some train wreck reality show about getting married too young. I swear, I really wasn’t bitter, I just really thought they were rushing things!
I stared at my phone, and without thinking, pressed the Ignore button. Within seconds my phone began to ring again.
“Argh! Maybe if I just ignore it he’ll stop calling.” I flipped the switch, silencing the phone. Unfortunately, I still had it on vibrate.
Bzzz. Bzzz. Bzzz.
Over and over again, the calls came, the space between calls almost non-existent. About the tenth time my phone went off, I finally answered with a growl, “What do you want from me?”
“I knew you were screening my calls!” he barked back.
I shut my eyes and sighed. Beside me, stacks of unfinished sheet music sat, waiting for notes to be added. I’d been at it all night, but somehow giving my all for a teacher who didn’t give a shit about me was a creativity cock block.
“I take it you didn’t win?” I muttered, rubbing against my forehead. I really did not have any time for Asher’s superstitious weirdness. I already had too much on my plate as it was.
“A promise is a promise,” he replied firmly. From behind him I heard the definite caw of a seagull followed by him shouting, “Oh, shit!”
“What’s going on? Where are you?”
“I’m in an alley,” he replied in a ‘woe is me’ sort of tone. “And this fucking seagull just crapped all over my arm!”
“An alley,” I repeated incredulously, stifling a laugh from the funny image in my head I’d conjured up. “Why are you in an alley?”
“Because I just lost my fucking battle and I’m too embarrassed to go back inside. It’s no use. I officially do not know how to dance anymore.”
I frowned, thinking of the man I hooked up with just a week prior. From the moment I first met him, he just seemed so…confident. It was partly the reason that attracted me to him in the first place. He carried himself in that certain way that almost commanded attention, and once I heard his charming humor, I was officially a goner. Of course it had helped watching him gyrate those hips that night at Club Mal. After watching him dance for a few seconds, I all but ripped my panties off right there in the club. That man definitely was a far cry from the vulnerable one I was now speaking to…
…and how could such a good dancer suddenly forget how to move?
“You really feel broken, don't you?” I asked softly.
He let out a strained laugh. “Funny, what tipped you off?
Hearing the sadness in his tone was like a punch straight to my gut.
Growing up, one of my favorite games to play was nursing things back to health.
Oh, look! Barbie has a broken arm!
Is that bird’s wing broken?
I was officially the Florence Nightingale of Glennon Court. Of course that old love drifted away once I tickled the ivories for the first time, but then again maybe it wasn’t entirely gone.
I glanced over my shoulder, peering past the little counter that separated the kitchen from our tiny living room, until my gaze landed on the Fridge of Shame. Even from my place on the couch there was no mistaking the wild haired girl in that Polaroid who was obviously basking in the afterglow of doing something so forbidden.
“Despite what a hot mess you looked like, you could tell you were happy. It’s because you put yourself out there,” Claudia had told me, practically writing an anthem to sing my praises.
Put yourself out there.
I shut my eyes and took a deep breath, knowing I’d probably regret the words that were about to come out of my mouth.
“How do we fix this jinx? What can I do?” When I was met with nothing but silence, I called out, “Asher, are you there?”
After another beat he finally spoke, saying only two simple words. “Thank you.”
Chapter 11
Asher
The whole purpose of meeting with Mallory again was to work together to find a way to break the curse—not to turn me on so I wanted nothing more than to jump in the sack with her again!
I practically groaned in frustration when I opened the door to find her wearing tiny crocheted shorts, which were paired with one of those loose tank tops that had the deep arm holes showing off the bra underneath.
My nostrils flared as I shook my head in disappointment, though my dick was practically doing somersaults. Keeping my eyes on her face, I grunted. “Come in.”
“Wow, it’s nice to see you too.” She stepped around me, eyeing the apartment in curiosity. “Nice place. It’s a far cry from that hotel room you took me to.”
I couldn’t help but cringe. “Um, yeah. That was actually a last minute idea.”
“So it’s not some pad you normally rent out to take your hookups to?”
I frowned, wondering why she sounded mad all of a sudden. “You know, the beauty of a one-night stand is to avoid awkward conversations like this. We hooked up; we had fun, why can’t we just leave it at that?”
“And we could have left it like that if you hadn’t gone looking for me, insisting that I meet up with you again.” She lifted her chin adamantly, knowing she had me there.
“Fine. You win again.” I dropped my head and shut the door behind her just as she began reaching into her purse for a pink tube of pepper spray. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! What are you doing?”
She shrugged nonchalantly. “I still don’t know you. I have to take some precautions.”
At the risk of bringing up our hook up again, I spat out, “You didn’t seem too worried when you were riding me to orgasm town.”
She glared at me furiously. “Do you have to be so crass?”
“Sorry,” I mumbled. “I'm just making a point that you didn’t seem to have a problem with me then.”
“That was when I assumed you were just some vacationer looking for fun. It looks like you have a place here after all. Why should I put my full trust in you, knowing that you lied to begin with?”
“Hey, I never lied,” I shot back in irritation. “You assumed I was a vacationer. That’s your fault, not mine.”
“You said you weren’t from town,” she argued, carefully moving her index finger onto the top button of the can.
“I’m not.”
She lifted an eyebrow doubtfully.
“This is my friend Gerald’s place. I stay with him in between projects. I usually live out of my suitcase, depending on where I’m filming next. I didn’t lie to you.” I sighed with relief when I noticed her hand lowering back into her purse. “If there’s anybody who should be scared of someone, it should be me.”
“You?” She gasped. “Why?”
“Threatening me with mace and cursing me. You’re a regular jezebel, you know that?”
“You know what I think? I think you’re just making this shit up.”
“And why would I do that?” I demanded.
“Ever hear of a self-fulfilling prophecy?”
I shook my head.
She explained, “You believe in something so much that you sort of coax it to happen. I think you’re so sure of this…this…jinx, that you’re actually causing your own losses.”
I tapped my chin in thought and soon shook my head. “Nope. It’s definitely not that.”
She rolled her eyes. “You know, I should really be offended that you think of me as some bad luck charm.”
“But?”
She shrugged. “I have to admit it’s a good distraction from everything else going on in my life.”
Curiosity got the best of
me. “And what might that be?”
WooWooWooWoo!
We both jumped at the sound of my ringtone, which mimicked the sound of a submarine going into war. Her chest heaved rapidly, and due to her thin top, I swear I could almost make out the outline of her beating heart. “That’s your ringtone?” she asked incredulously.
“What did you expect? Some pop song or something?
“Something other than naval warfare.”
I shrugged and glanced at the caller ID, scowling when I saw it was Roxie calling. “Ugh.”
“Someone you’re not a fan of, I presume,” Mallory’s high-pitched voice clucked.
“And this is how I know you’re a jinx.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s my ex, Roxie. We haven’t talked in months and now she suddenly calls me when you’re here?” I scowled, not really knowing why I flipped my phone over to show her Roxie’s mug on the screen. Did she really need proof my ex was calling? To save face I added, “So to answer your first question, no, the hotel is not a place I bring hookups to. I’d been in a long-term relationship for like ever. You’re actually the first person I slept with since Roxie and I broke up.”
It could have been my imagination, but it looked as if Mallory’s eyes brightened. “Whatever. I don’t care about any of that. Shall we get down to business?”
I nodded and motioned for her to follow me to my room, which may or may not have been my worst idea yet. I definitely did not want to sleep with her again, worried that it would be the final nail in my b-boying coffin, but all my research was neatly separated in piles on my bedroom floor. Either way, being locked up with an attractive woman and a bed would be my biggest test.
Mallory entered the bedroom, glancing around at Gerald’s ostentatious posters of marijuana leaves and ocean waves. She walked up to my window and flicked at one of those plastic flowers that danced in the sunlight. “Your friend’s room?”
“Guest room,” I corrected. “It’s kind of like a smorgasbord of all his random shit in here.”
“I can see that. It definitely doesn’t seem like you.”
I plopped down onto a space on the floor, furthest from the bed. “Oh? And what do you think ‘seems like me’?”
She lowered herself onto the carpet, luckily choosing to sit a few feet away from me. “I don’t know…for someone who works in show business, you seem a bit more laidback than all this,” she answered, gesturing toward a fluorescent poster of a cat.
“Yeah, pretty much,” I agreed, yanking out a legal pad I had haphazardly scribbled all over.
“What’s that?” Mallory leaned toward me, her sweet scent, which smelled like a mix of lavender and fresh rain, nearly knocked me over. I cleared my throat, leaning back further away from temptation. Maybe we should have just met at a bookstore or something.
If Mallory noticed my odd behavior, she didn’t mention it. So to distract her from my rigidness, I explained, “I took the liberty of looking up everything I could find about our situation.”
“About jinxes you mean,” she muttered.
I nodded. “From what I gather, it could have been caused by everything from a misplaced wish—”
“You do know we’re not in some Disney television movie, right?” She cut me off with a snicker.
I rolled my eyes and continued, “Or just a ball of negativity in the form of active energy, residual energy, or even a curse.”
She shuddered in response, causing the tops of her breast to jiggle. I quickly glanced away, focusing on my chicken scratch to distract me. “So now that I know what it could be, we need to figure out how we can fix it.”
Her mouth dropped open. She looked around at the piles of books and papers, picking up a few to wave around. “So after all this, you still don’t know an antidote?”
“Who’s walking the fine line of science fiction now?” I teased.
“You do know I have a life outside of this, right? I go to school and I have a pretty big performance coming up.” At the sound of the word performance, my ears automatically perked up. “This looks like it’s going to take a while, and when I agreed to help you, I sort of thought…”
“What? That it’d be a one day thing?”
She nodded.
“Well, I sort of hope it will be! You’re talking about your life? What about mine?” I exclaimed hysterically. “If I suck this bad in competition, can you imagine how I’d be at work? I’d lose every job I have booked and probably wouldn’t be able to book anymore in the future!”
“All right, all right.” She shook her head and grunted. “I guess I’ll help…you owe me, though.”
I owed her? For what? Ruining my life as far I knew it?
I tried to keep my cool. “You said you needed a distraction, didn’t you?”
“Again I say, for a day!”
The bedroom door suddenly creaked open, causing Mallory to yelp. She jumped to her feet, automatically grabbing for her purse, undoubtedly preparing herself to douse someone in pepper spray.
I rolled my eyes. “Relax, it’s just my roommate.”
Gerald peeked in, his eyes widening when he spotted Mallory practically trembling in the corner of my room. “Oh, uh…sorry for scaring you. I just heard yelling and I thought…”
“Thought what?” I snapped, eyeing my piles of research in dismay. We were all just wasting valuable time.
He coughed uncomfortably. “I ran into Roxie at the swap meet. She asked me how you were doing and I may have told her you were back in town.”
I shut my eyes, allowing my head to fall back. “I was wondering why she called me.”
“Sorry, dude.” Gerald flashed Mallory a grin. “So you’re the infamous jinx, huh?”
“Gerald,” I called out warningly.
Mallory pushed herself from the wall, straightening and smiled politely. “No, it’s okay. Apparently it’s my new nickname.”
“You b-girl?”
She shook her head and bit into that plump bottom lip of hers.
Ugh, she really was going to make this hard on me.
“Too bad. It would have been a good name for you. B-girl Jinx. You’d scare the shit out of all your competitors.” Gerald laughed.
“Don’t you have somewhere else to be?” I interrupted with a snap of my fingers.
“Rude much?” Mallory murmured under her breath, causing me to scowl.
“We have some work to do,” I added, more so to remind Mallory than to tell Gerald off.
Gerald looked over at me in surprise after he scanned the room. “Wow, so you’re still pretty serious about this whole thing. I thought you’d be over it by now.”
“That’s what I thought too,” Mallory muttered. The two shared a conspiratorial look, which left me feeling more irritated.
“Just leave us for a bit, okay? I got to get this done before I battle again.”
“You’re competing in the King’s Round, right?” There was something in his voice that made me feel as if he didn’t want me to compete. Ever since I lost for the second time, it was no secret ‘Hollywood’ had somehow cast a bad shadow over Grom Attack. I was actually surprised they hadn’t come right out and kicked me off the crew yet.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I want to figure this out first…hence, please leave. Now.”
Gerald nodded thoughtfully, tapping against the door jam. “Okay, well, have it then.”
I waited until he was completely gone before turning back toward Mallory. “Let’s get to work, yeah?”
Chapter 12
Mallory
Rays of dark orange beamed through the slots of Asher’s blinds. Outside the sun danced on the horizon, filling the sky with colors of lavender and fuchsia. A yawn threatened to bubble in my throat, but I fought it back, knowing that it would only be the final kick needed before I passed out and fell asleep.
“You ready to turn in for the night?” I asked hopefully, watching Asher run his hands through his thick mess of dark hair almost frantic
ally.
He straightened himself, rolling his neck from side to side until it gave out a loud crack. I winced, but let out a sigh of relief when he nodded his head. “Yeah, I think I’m done.”
“Thank God.”
“But before you leave, let’s go over everything we have so far.”
I bit back a groan and grabbed my notes, still in utter disbelief at how far his zaniness had come. Clearing my throat, I read over my list. “Um, it looks like you can purify negativity by using things like sage—”
“Like the spice?” He cringed. “I’m a cilantro person, myself.”
I coughed, masking my laugh. “Um, no. It’s like this spiritual smoking ritual thing. The sage leaves are rolled together and burned.”
“Okay, like that makes any more sense than eating it.” He snickered.
I rolled my eyes. “Hey, you’re the one who wanted me to help, remember?”
“Fine. Sorry.”
I nodded my head in satisfaction. “Then there’s Palo Santo.”
“Like a saint?”
“No.” I pursed my lips, narrowing my eyes. Asher was completely ridiculous. For someone way into this stuff, it felt as if I was talking to a preschooler. “Then there are crystals, talismans, and some odd incantations that I’d rather not try myself.”
He nodded his head, coaxing me along. “Okay, okay, what else?”
In the most serious voice I could muster, I replied, “Sacrificing a chicken doused with the blood of a virgin on the night of the third blue moon.”
He blinked, unmoving. Everything around us seemed to go silent, even the ticking sound of a nearby clock seemed to cease completely. After a few more seconds, I decided I could no longer take the awkwardness. Breaking out into hysterical giggles, I managed to spit out, “I’m kidding, dude.”
His momentary sigh of relief was immediately replaced with a look of exasperation. “Really? You have the balls to joke around at a time like this?”
Breaking Hearts (B-boy #3) Page 6
