Still…I’ve often wondered…can you take the kid away from the white trash but not be able to take the white trash out of the kid? Only time will tell.
And if you’re still prejudging me, I already know how you would answer that.
Chapter Two
SO, IN EARLY January, I drove back to my apartment after spending a week with my family from Christmas through New Year’s. That time away from school had been more than enough, and I was ready to jump back into my routine. My beater car was chugging along like it always did, but a couple weeks into the semester, as happened every few months, my car refused to work properly—this time, it was dying at stop signs and making a grinding noise when I would turn after sitting at a stop sign or when I would start up from a dead stop. It sounded awful and moved as though pained. I knew things were not good and grimaced, but I called Carl, the guy who worked on my car, and told him what was going on.
Maybe I should give you a little history here. I met Carl when I was waiting tables—I think I’d only been on that job for a month. Anyway, he’d hit on me, but I had been fresh out of a relationship (this was pre-Robb). He was a cute guy, though, so I gave him my number. He wanted to meet me for a drink, but I wasn’t old enough for the bar scene at that time. I think that might have scared him off a little bit, but he called again a couple of weeks later and asked how old I was. I told him the truth, that I was close to twenty-one but not quite. So he invited me to a Sky Sox game in the Springs and we had a good time. He kissed me when he dropped me off at my apartment but nothing more. I called him a couple of weeks later, not willing to take the hint, and invited him out to lunch.
If you’re wondering what the hell this has to do with Kage, just bear with me. I’m getting there.
With Carl, after a few awkward friend-zone dates, I moved in for the kill. Maybe it was because he’d had a couple of beers, but he let me seduce him. Yes, even I find that notion funny, but we slept together. The next morning, he confessed that I was friend material, and I didn’t have the heart to ask why, deciding to let the relationship die a natural death.
Except…Carl was a mechanic and we were tentative friends…and my car was an unreliable piece of shit. The first time I was unable to scrape up money to fix it, he, being the great friend he was, let me repay him in another way to fix my car. I just had to pay for the parts. The cool thing was Carl worked with me. I knew he gave me a cut rate because he never had me take my car to the shop. He did it all in his own garage at home (which was itself pretty impressive). Yeah, I already see you looking at me funny again, but if it comes down to a decision of if you can eat for the next month…a little blow job in exchange for car repair is welcome payment. In my world, you do what you gotta do. And it didn’t hurt that he was a good looking guy.
He did tell me I could clean his house instead. He tried to talk me into going that route, but if you’d seen his house, you would have done what I did. Ten minutes of work versus a week? I’ll take the ten minutes. I had a lot of homework to do, and I usually worked a good thirty hours a week on top of that. I happily gave the best BJ of my life.
But I digress yet again. That particular February, classes had just started up for the spring semester a couple of weeks earlier. If I had just been going to school, transportation wouldn’t have been a problem. And don’t even ask me about the damn bus. The bus didn’t operate during later hours, so the times I was working? The bus didn’t matter, and let’s face it—I couldn’t afford a cab. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to bother a roommate to pick me up from work at two in the morning. Once, maybe, but not every time. I considered buying a bike, but during the winter, that would have been ridiculous. Hell, it would have been anyway, because my job was miles away from my apartment. It wasn’t feasible.
I had to have a car, or I’d have to quit my job and find something closer to home. That was all there was to it.
Well, finally, I took my car to Carl and, after checking everything out, he told me it was the transmission. There was no way he could work magic on it. It needed a new transmission or it was going to die an ugly death. As it was, every time I drove it, I knew that could be its last trip. He said he’d call around, get me some numbers, and get back to me.
One thing I knew from making my own calls was that it would cost a couple thousand to have someone else do it. I suppose I should have trusted Carl, but I felt like it was a good idea for me to make sure he wasn’t gouging me. When he called back, he told me he’d charge eight hundred.
Ouch. I was used to scraping up a few hundred here or there for car repair, but eight hundred? Impossible. Even during my best weeks at work, there was no way, and I lived paycheck to paycheck. And, in spite of having roommates, I still had my portion of rent and utilities to pay. I could come up with the usual two to three hundred, but eight hundred? No way. Yeah, eight hundred was way better than a couple thousand, but it was just as unreachable for me.
I was starting to feel desperate, boxed into a corner. I had started looking for other jobs close to home and there was nothing. Maybe in the spring or summer, but—as it was—even the temp holiday jobs had dried up. There were no jobs, so it would have been stupid to get rid of the one I had, because it was my only income. My future would be a bicycle, trying to find the safest route between home and work, and finding plenty of warm clothing for the trip. I tried to look at the bright side, telling myself that I’d be getting extra exercise.
Oh, and the eight hundred? That was only for the part—a used one at that. He said it would be great if I could pay him a few hundred for labor, because transmission work, he said, was “a bitch.” When I broke down in tears, he told me a good housecleaning would take care of it.
Still…that left me with the balance, and I was no closer to having a plan of how to get the money together than I’d been before. There was no way I could get a loan—I already had a boatload of student loans stacking up, ready for me to begin repayment once I was out of school for good. Plus, I’d be really pissed if I got a loan for the car and it wound up dying for good shortly thereafter.
So the future of my vehicle—not just my transportation but my independence as well—weighed on my mind one evening when I was working. My car was still getting me around, but I knew it wouldn’t last forever, and it was all I could think about. Not long into my shift, a group of four rowdy, obnoxious, catty females came into the bar. They were demanding and rude, and the more they drank, the worse they got.
A lot of times, I could tune out my problems and focus on work, but that night wasn’t one of them. Having those women give me grief while I was feeling stressed just made those feelings worse, and I was doubly upset with myself for not being able to tune out my own problems and the bitchy women. I knew my subconscious could work on my problem better than my wakeful mind could, but my conscious brain was having none of it. It was too huge a problem to push into the background.
As the night wore on, these four mean and nasty women continued barking orders at me. I realized they weren’t much older than I was—maybe mid-twenties—but they all appeared to be married and unhappy and hell bent on making the rest of the world as miserable as they were. They weren’t overtly nasty at first, but as their bodies absorbed more alcohol, their rudeness surfaced. They’d taken to hollering at me, “Hey, you! Drink girl! Get yer ass over here!”
They demanded another round of shots when I arrived…and they weren’t nice about it. When I returned with a tray of tequila shots, lime wedges included, they were laughing and howling at the top of their lungs. I started setting the shots down in front of each person. One of the women pointed at me and said, “She could do it.”
I was used to rowdy and even impolite customers, but these women were going for a record…and I’d reached the end of my rope. I’d had enough of their catty remarks and, out of all of their nastiness that evening, this was one comment I knew for certain was directed at me. So I held the tray close to my body and said, “Do what?”
The
y all started snickering again and one of them eyed me up and down as if considering me to play one of her friends at the table. I could feel anger welling up in my belly, but I knew I had to try to remain calm. She shrugged and said, “Maybe.”
“Do what?” I asked again, this time with more force. I was close to kicking the four of them out of the bar, especially when they were determined to make their conversation so personal. I didn’t care for the fact that they were making me the butt of their jokes.
The snottiest one—a bleach blonde with short sculpted hair and perfect makeup—assessed me again and said, “I think I have a proposition for you.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. So I just raised my eyebrows and stared at her, letting her know that I obviously had better things to do.
“Yes, I think you’re pretty enough.” I let out a breath and started to turn to go. They were fucking with me, and I didn’t need to have my feelings hurt by four mean women. But she said, “No, wait.” She stood up and grabbed my hand. “Hear me out.”
She lowered her voice so I had to strain to hear her over the sounds of AxeWound playing on the jukebox by the pool tables. “I think my husband’s cheating on me.” I nodded but still failed to see why she cared to tell me. Hell, if she were half the bitch to him that she had been to me that night, I could understand why. “Anyway, I want to prove it, because he keeps denying it, so I’m going to hire someone to seduce him. You’re a pretty girl—you could do it.”
I could feel the frown tighten my face. “What do you mean seduce him?”
“I mean put the moves on him and see how he reacts. Find out if you give him an inch, does he take a mile?”
The brunette across from her, the one with the pug nose, said, “Yeah, you know he will.”
I found her plan disgusting, but I didn’t need to piss off any customers…even though these ladies deserved it more than anyone else in my bar had in a long time. “No, thanks. I think I’ll pass.”
I turned on my heel and started walking away. But then I heard the wife say, “I have five hundred bucks that says you’ll consider changing your mind.”
I froze. Had I heard that right? Five hundred dollars? I didn’t turn around at first, but my mind wrapped around that money as though the bills were within my grasp. It wouldn’t be enough to repair my car, but it would come close. If I had five hundred, I could maybe scrape the rest together, especially if I worked an extra shift and only ate ramen noodles for the month. I’d done that before, so I knew I could do it again.
Oh, no. What was I thinking? Was I actually considering it? No, no, no. No way was I going to seduce some guy into cheating on his wife for five hundred dollars. No freaking way. I felt dirty having thought it.
So I started turning around again and said, “Sorry. No can do.”
I hesitated, though, when I saw her whip out her wallet and pull out five one-hundred dollar bills. She slammed them on the table as though she were betting on a sure blackjack hand. It was tempting…
But no.
I shook my head. “Thanks but no thanks.” I almost put a smug look on my face like a mask, but for some reason, I didn’t. Later on I would be grateful that I hadn’t added what I’d considered: My integrity’s not for sale.
Because, it turns out, it was.
Chapter Three
I STOOD, ALMOST frozen, considering the offer that had just been presented to me. I could seduce a man, see if he had the desire to cheat on his wife, and collect five hundred dollars. There were but two catches. One was that I didn’t trust these women, and they certainly hadn’t given me reason to. The second was that I’d be doing something essentially evil. I would be destroying the trust between two people who had entered a sacred bond. I could see no good coming out of it—either I’d catch the guy being a snake and his wife would hate him or he’d find out what I was trying to do and he’d hate his wife. Whatever the case, what this woman was asking me to do shined a light on the supreme lack of trust in her marriage.
Then again, maybe I was being overdramatic. The bottom line was that this woman had offered me easy cash—probably the easiest and fastest money I would ever make in my life. The thought made me feel almost like a whore, but I pushed it to the back of my mind. She hadn’t mentioned actual sex.
Dirty or not, evil or not, I was intrigued. Maybe my car could be saved.
About that time, as the scales were tipping in the woman’s favor, the pug nose woman reached in her purse and slammed down another hundred. “Gotta support my girlfriend.”
The long-haired blonde next to her did the same, followed by the last friend, an almost-mousy girl compared to the other three. Icy Blonde looked at me again. “That’s eight hundred dollars. Still no thanks?”
Holy shit. Okay…so now they’d made it impossible to refuse. That would just about repair my car and solve so damn many problems. I sighed and stepped closer. Yep, turned out my integrity had a price, and it was eight hundred smackeroos. I swallowed what little pride I had left and got closer to the table so I could lower my voice some. “So what’s involved?”
Pug Nose pulled a chair closer. “Sit down.”
I was busy and the bartender wouldn’t appreciate it, but I could spare a couple of minutes. I sat. Icy Blonde assessed me with her eyes again, a cold stare that made me feel about three inches tall, but I somehow passed muster. She said, “You try to seduce my husband. I want you to imagine him as the only man on the planet for you. Offer sex…and…” She arched her eyebrows, and the cool white shadow on her brow bone shimmered in the low light. “And…take him up on the offer if he does.”
Pug Nose: “Oh, he will.”
“Pics or it didn’t happen.”
The long-haired blonde started giggling. I tried not to roll my eyes. I had an ugly truth to swallow. She was telling me I had to follow through with an offer of sex. That did make me a whore. Maybe that made me a more expensive, better educated one than she’d find downtown, but there was no denying what that exchange of money would make me. If I were going to follow through with this evil plan, there were some details I needed to clarify. I didn’t intend to rape the man. So I asked, “And what if he refuses?”
Icy’s brow furrowed. “I’ll know. Because I’ll be watching.” Okay, so that seemed a little…creepy, but it was her money. “So I’ll know if you do a half-assed job.”
I shrugged and frowned. I could do a decent job…and I’d just pray he didn’t take me up on the offer. It felt almost like entrapment. Icy picked up the cash and counted out four bills. “Half now and half when you’re done.”
Wow. What? I could walk with half the cash now? Seeing the bills…it was too tempting. I would take the money to Carl the very next day. It might have been a move of reluctance, but I swept the cash off the table just the same.
Now that I was committed, I needed the dirty details. “So…when do I do this?”
Icy started digging in her purse. She pulled out a pink phone and began swiping at the screen. Then she handed it to me. “That’s Kage.”
Okay…so this was gonna be harder than I’d hoped, and it wasn’t because the guy was a dog or a dork and, therefore, difficult to cozy up to. Oh, no. The guy was hotter than hell…sex in a snug pair of blue jeans. Holy shit. Just slightly longish dark brown hair, gorgeous green eyes framed with long eyelashes, and the cutest cleft in his chin. Well, no…it wasn’t going to be hard flirting with him. He was definitely my type. But it was going to be hard deceiving him.
Then again…if he was a big dirty cheater, then I was doing this woman a favor…even if she didn’t necessarily deserve it.
“You said his name is Kage?”
“Yeah, with a K.”
I nodded but stared at the phone a little longer. I realized that was a bad idea. I didn’t need my new boss jealous, angry, or more hateful with me than she’d already been that evening, so I peeled my eyes away from the phone and looked up at her. “So how do I do this?”
I heard the bartende
r yelling at me over the music. “Jess! Would you mind?”
I turned around and gave him a glare. Lazy ass. He wasn’t the usual cool guy I worked with. I didn’t care for this guy at all, and I was interrupting his hockey game or whatever the hell it was he was staring at on the big screen. He could deliver a drink or two across the room. It wouldn’t kill him. Still…I didn’t need to be in trouble, so I stood. “Be there in a minute!”
Icy said, “Kage and his friends go out for pool every Thursday night at a bar just down the road. Give me your phone number and I can text you the details.”
Today was Tuesday. Holy shit. “You want me to do it this week?”
“The sooner the better.”
So, while we exchanged numbers, I imagined Kage’s beautiful green eyes in my mind and knew this was going to be the easiest eight hundred dollars I’d ever made in my entire life.
I’d just have to try not to feel too guilty.
The next day, I was on the phone with Carl, telling him my good fortune. “I’ll have the eight hundred to you by the end of the week. I have four hundred of it now.”
“What? You’re shitting me, Jessica.”
“Nope. Can you still get your hands on that transmission?”
“Yeah, probably. But I gotta know—how’d you manage?”
No way was I going to tell Carl I was about to sell my soul while trying to corrupt another’s. “Let’s just say the universe shined down on me…for a change.”
“This I gotta hear.”
“No way. I just wanted to let you know my car will live to see another day.” He started laughing and hung up. Yeah, sure, funny for him. I still had the monumental task of cleaning his filthy abode to look forward to. But I delivered the four hundred to him later that day to make sure I didn’t spend it on anything else in the heat of the moment.
More than anything, I needed my car up and running. Transportation by far was easily my most important expense. As far as housing and food went, I could always start living on campus again if I had to. School itself wasn’t a concern, because I’d have a few student loans to pay off later, but my family’s income as such (or lack thereof) made me eligible for a lot more financial aid than many students I knew. And the whole idea was that college would educate me enough that I’d qualify for better-paying jobs. At least, that was what I believed, so those future expenses I didn’t concern myself with. Sure, I had to buy supplies and, once in a while, my financial aid wasn’t enough to cover textbooks, but my job covered everything else I needed.
Be Careful What You Wish For Page 2
