“Alex! Alex!” Candice yelled in her dream.
She put another log on the fire and tried to fan the flame higher. She wanted the first boat to see what was going on. She couldn’t see anyone on the boat. Was it unmanned or too dark to make out the crew? Candice couldn’t tell.
She looked away for a moment and heard a grating sound as wood clashed against wood.
“Housekeeping!” a voice said. “Housekeeping!”
Candice woke from her slumber and looked up. A young woman was pushing a cart of cleaning supplies. She rolled over and looked at her phone. It was 12:15 p.m. She’d overslept. Check out was at noon.
“One moment,” Candice said.
The housekeeper stepped out of the room.
Candice slipped out of the bed and found her dress on the back of one of the chairs. It was neatly draped. Next to her was her underwear. She slid her clothes on and then took her shoes that rested by the door. She walked out of the room and went downstairs.
“I’m checking out,” she said to the lobby. She handed over the key and the clerk nodded.
The day was bright and it took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the brightness. A light air blew through the streets. The height of the buildings and the brightness of the sun created hard shadows. The city was bifurcated into places of light and dark. Candice walked through them. She walked a few blocks from the hotel towards Jack London Square.
The area was busy with a day fair. A horde of organic food stalls had been set up. Candice walked through them. She knew she was overly dressed and the darkness of the dress helped warm her skin under the summer sun. She picked up a strawberry and tasted it. The juices were rich, better than the ones at the Ferry Building. She bought some and then looked at her phone.
There was a text from Alex and from Tiffany.
“I just landed in L.A. I miss you already,” Alex had written.
“Let’s get coffee or lunch,” Tiffany had written.
Candice got an Uber and headed home. When she arrived back at her house she changed her clothes into shorts and a T-shirt and then sat on her stoop eating the strawberries. She put the green tops to the side and watched the street as she ate.
A white man jogged by. He wore barefoot style shoes that separated his toes and Nike shorts. A white visor protected his eyes from the afternoon soon and he’d tucked his sport athletic shirt into the back of his shorts. Candice shook her head looking at him.
A woman walked her dog. She was thin and wore tortoise-shell glasses. Her arms were covered in tattoos and she wore a beaten Motley Crue T-shirt with cut-off blue jeans. Her dog was a large German Shepherd. The dog pulled at the leash and yanked the woman around. The dog’s coat was dark, although his face was tan. A few white whiskers around his nose gave him an aged appearance.
Candice watched the woman and the dog walk down the street until they disappeared. A moment later she heard two dogs barking angrily. There was a woman’s high-pitched screams and then there was silence. Candice thought about walking around the corner to see what had happened but thought it wasn’t worth her time.
Candice looked down at her phone. The message to Tiffany would be easy.
Let’s meet in an hour. Can you pick me up? she texted her friend.
Yeah. Just got done with my run. I’ll see you in an hour, Tiffany responded.
The message to Alex would be harder. Candice wasn’t sure what she should say or what she should do. She liked him. She worried though that Mitch might come back. Her dream that morning hadn’t filled her with hope.
I’m glad you had a safe flight. Let me see what my work schedule is like, she wrote after a few minutes of anguish.
She wasn’t sure how he would respond. Would he think that she was being cold and rude? He was older, so he probably didn’t think much of it. He didn’t seem the type to get overly worked up over things like this.
Candice was still on the porch mulling things over when Tiffany pulled up. Tiffany drove a small Honda Civic CR-X. The car was red and black and roared loudly. When Tiffany parked, the stereo speakers were blasting out Calvin Harris’s “How Deep Is Your Love.”
“Remember Coachella?” Tiffany said.
“There was such a big crowd for Calvin,” Candice answered.
“There was also that hologram of Tupac,” Tiffany said. She walked up to Candice’s door and sat next to her friend. She was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt as well. Hers was pulled back tightly. The basket of strawberries still sat next to Candice and Tiffany pushed her finger around the discarded remains. She looked sad when she couldn’t find a strawberry. She pouted for a moment.
“That was so crazy,” Candice said. She looked out into the street and then down at Tiffany’s car. “I don’t understand why you have a car. You live in the city. Isn’t it impossible to find parking?”
“The car is small, and I just started paying for a spot at a lot nearby.”
“That’s expensive though.”
“Everything is expensive now. I like the car. I drove it today for the run.”
“Where did you go?”
“We went to the Presidio and ran around there.”
“We?”
“I went running with a group of people. We are all preparing for the SF marathon together. I found everyone through a Facebook group.”
“Oh cool. What’s everyone like?”
“It’s mainly people our age. There are more than a few tech people,” Tiffany said.
“Aren’t we tech people?”
“I’m not sure we count as tech because we’ve been living here for a few years.”
“We work in the industry though.”
“Yeah. Well, it pays the bills.”
“Sometimes it does,” Candice said. “It doesn’t solve everything though.”
“What happened,” Tiffany said. She put her arm around Candice’s shoulder and pulled her friend closer for a hug.
“Nothing. I think I am being dramatic. I had a bad dream this morning.”
“Oh… well, what about yesterday? Didn’t you meet up with Alex?”
“Yeah,” Candice said. She looked out into the distance.
“And?”
“And it was great. We had drinks at Dogwood. We talked a little. We had sex.”
“That sounds good,” Tiffany said. “Why are you looking so glum?”
“I don’t know. I guess I am still feeling a little weird about the pregnancy thing.”
“Why?”
“I can’t explain it. I don’t feel bad about it, but do you think I should have told Mitch before I did something?”
“Would it have changed your decision if you had told him?” Tiffany asked. She pulled her friend in close again.
“No,” Candice said. She squeezed her friend’s hand and then let it go.
“Then what does it matter? Did I ever tell you about the time I got knocked up?”
“No. What happened?” Candice asked.
“I was in high school. His name was Hemmerich. He was a German exchange student. He loved Hermann Hesse and talking about himself. I would often get confused about who he was talking about. He kept saying, ‘When Hermann wrote this book…’ and I just thought he was talking about himself in the third person,” Tiffany said.
Candice laughed.
“I was young and dumb. I thought I would be with him forever. Forever being more than two months, that’s how long I was with the boy before him. Before he left, we had unprotected sex. He came in me in about two seconds. I didn’t feel his penis I just felt the gush of his cum,” Tiffany said with a laugh. “I thought that maybe if I was pregnant he would have to stay. I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking.”
“What happened?”
“Well, I missed my period. I was keeping careful track. I hadn’t heard from him. No letters, no phone calls, nothing. I was talking to one of my friends and she said that Hemmerich had slept with another girl before he’d left too. I thought I was going steady with him too
,” Tiffany said rolling her eyes.
“So you got an abortion?”
“Yeah I did the same as you. I walked straight up to my mom that afternoon and told her that she had to bring me to the clinic. That I’d gotten pregnant from Adolf Hitler’s grandson and that I didn’t want the baby.”
“What did your mom say?”
“My mom was a progressive, or said she was. She told me that it was my body and my choice, although I could see judgement in her eyes.”
“What about your dad?” Candice asked.
“He didn’t say anything. He’s always been stoic. We all sat at the dinner table and my mother told him everything that had happened. They knew about Hemmerich. He’d come over to the house a few times. My father hadn’t really spoken to him, hadn’t said anything bad either. When my mother told him that I would be getting an abortion he said, ‘Children are expensive, you’ve made a sound economic decision, Tiffany.’ Incidentally he said something similar when I told him about my college choice.”
“Did you feel bad about it? How do you feel about it now?”
“No. To be honest I don’t really think about it much. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to have been a teenage mom, but then I think about how awful it would have been. I wasn’t ready for a child then,” Tiffany said. She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t think anyone is really ready for these things though. You have to go with your gut to some extent. I think that having Mitch’s kid would have been a terrible, terrible mistake.”
“I agree. I guess the pregnancy just made me think about what I would do if I did find someone that I actually liked.”
“Someone like Alex?” Tiffany elbowed her friend in the ribs.
“Quit it.”
“Oh, you like him. You like him so much. You want to get married and pick out your wedding dress,” Tiffany continued. Her face skewed to the side. “Now, bitch, if I’m not your maid of honor, I’ll kill you.”
“I don’t know. I think you’d be pretty terrible about helping with wedding planning.”
“Let’s face it, Candice, no one stays married anymore. People get divorced, so why sink so much money into it? Really you should have a small wedding and a great honeymoon. That way at least when you get divorced, you’ll have had a good time in Thailand or somewhere.”
“You always look at the bright side of life don’t you?” Candice said.
“I try.”
“Anyways, how was the run today?” Candice said.
“I’m dead. I can’t believe I actually ran twelve miles. It was absolute shit. The good thing now is that I can eat whatever I want.”
“Yeah, I’m hungry. Let’s go get food,” Candice told her friend. She stood up and picked up the finished basket of strawberries and brought them inside. She threw them away and walked back out. Tiffany was standing by her car.
“Let’s go for a ride,” Tiffany said. She smacked the top of the car. “Get in my hot rod and we’ll go get some burgers and milkshakes.”
Candice smiled. She opened the car door and slid into the passenger seat.
Tiffany looked over at her and put her foot on the gas pedal. The car engine revved and the two pealed out. The tires streaked and the two jetted away from Candice’s West Oakland apartment.
Chapter 8
The sun came into Candice’s apartment at six thirty in the morning. The rays had found their way through the buildings to hit Candice’s sleepy eyes. Tiffany and Candice had had a late lunch the day before and then Candice had returned home. She’d done her laundry, cleaned her apartment, and begun watching another movie on Netflix.
Keeping with her 80s nostalgia streak, Candice had turned on Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. She had realized that it was by John Hughes, who she took a disliking to after re-watching Sixteen Candles. She’d liked the Ferrari in the film though. The blood-red car was owned by Ferris’ friend, Cameron’s father. Ferris and Cameron go joyriding in the car, end up in a parade, and Ferris has to frantically return home after ditching school for the day.
Candice liked the lead actor, Matthew Broderick’s charm and young good looks. He seemed to nail the role of being young, fun, and carefree. “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it,” Broderick’s character said towards the end of the movie.
The movie had made Candice smile and made her forget about the pregnancy, Mitch, and Alex.
Candice had morning breath when she woke up and brushed her teeth right away. Afterwards she had a glass of orange juice. The juice and toothpaste tasted disgusting together and she spat out the concoction into the sink. She drank some water to rinse out her mouth and dressed for work.
The BART was packed when she got to it. She was early but not that early, and a throng of people packed the train cars. The system had been built in the 70s, and not much had been done to renovate it. It still had ugly seats, and the carpeted floors were stained with God knows what.
Candice had to wait for three separate trains to pass before she was able to squeeze on one. She could smell two different men around her and wondered why she even bothered going to work. When she arrived at the Embarcadero station everyone burst out of the car like a dam had broken. A burst of fresh air came in, and Candice gulped in the air. When she got street-side, there was a gray mist over the landscape. The San Francisco fog hadn’t rolled off, and everything was more subdued.
The walk to the office took just a few moments and Candice was pleasantly surprised that someone had brought bagels in. She still had the sour taste of orange and toothpaste in her mouth and eating a bagel got rid of the awful flavor.
Once she’d toasted her bagel and covered it in cream cheese, Candice sat down at her desk. She began to look over her work from Friday. She’d forgotten what she’d done. The weekend, especially her meeting with Alex, had made her forget what she had going on at work. She didn’t like to bring her work home with her, but she would often think about things that were due even during her off hours.
She brought up the copy for the alarm clock company’s website. “Sleep fast, sleep better, sleep all-nighter,” she’d written.
“That is fucking terrible,” Candice said aloud. She looked around the office and noticed that no one had come in yet, except whoever had mysteriously brought the bagels. It was nine o’clock. She shrugged off her profanity and tried to think of more clever titles for alarm clocks.
An hour passed and she had nothing. She’d looked at the thesaurus for all the different words for sleeping, alarm, clocks, and waking up. She’d then spent two hours reading a variety of sleep studies. The articles made her sleepy, and so at eleven o’clock she left the office to get some air.
She walked towards the Ferry Building. The morning mist had burned off, and as usual a horde of tourists, joggers, and business people were walking up and down the Embarcadero. She looked at the building. It’d been built in the late 1800s by an American architect who’d also designed the clock that faced outward. The front of the building was an arched arcade, which made it seem like an old Spanish building. The building had been restored and renovated in the early 2000s when the marketplace where Candice and Tiffany had gotten sandwiches had been constructed. Candice had never been on the second and third floors but knew that they were used for the Port Commission.
Candice walked a ways up the Embarcadero and ended up outside of Pier 39. The pier’s K dock became a haven for sea lions in the late 1980s. The area was an ideal spot for the water dogs, as they were protected from outside predators. The amount of sea lions varied from season to season but there were usually at least a few whenever Candice walked by the pier.
The sea lions barked at her and the other people passing by. Some of them sunbathed on the small dock that floated in the water while others dove into the bay. Candice watched them for a while wondering what life underwater would be like. It would be a life free of trouble that was for sure.
Candice felt her phone ring. She picked it u
p and looked at it. It was Tiffany.
“Hey, what’s up,” Candice said.
“You’re not at the office?”
“No, I stepped out. I needed some air and some space. A bit stuck on the alarm clock project. I thought a walk might be good.”
“Things are not good at the office anyways,” Tiffany said. “Especially for you.”
“Why? What’s up,” Candice replied. She furrowed her eyebrows.
“There’s been complaints about you. Someone is basically spamming the company email address with complaints. They are addressing your writing. A handful came in this morning. Then as the day has moved on, more and more have come in and they’ve gotten more violent and crazed.”
“Mitch.”
“That’s what I was thinking too,” Tiffany said.
“Well is Tim doing anything?” Candice said.
“You know how bosses are. They aren’t sure how they want to handle this. At first the person, it is like 100% sure in my book that it is Mitch, said they were from a few companies. He wrote in that he was from Apple, then Yelp, then Spotify, etc.”
“I haven’t worked on those campaigns. We didn’t even work with them.”
“I know, but Tim is wringing his hands with worry about if it’s true.”
“What the fuck? Why isn’t he protecting me? Should I contact Human Resources?”
“I already did that for you,” Tiffany said.
“Thanks. Did they say anything?”
“Well, they said that Tim needs to cover you. That this obviously looks like employee harassment. Tim said it probably isn’t a big deal and that he wants to reach out to his friends at Yelp, Apple, etc. to confirm things.”
“Should I look at the emails?”
“The first ones are pretty benign, but a lot of them get pretty fucking bad, to be honest, Candice,” Tiffany said. “Where are you now? Can I come meet you somewhere?”
“Sure. I’m over by Pier 39. You can hear the sea lions in the background.”
Stroked by my Dad's Best FriendA Billionaire Secret Baby Romance Page 24
