Stuck With a Rock Star

by Amelie Bloom

  Mr. Spectacles looked like a nice man who’d come out for a quiet, solitary dinner to relax after a hard days’ work. I could relate to that. The last thing that poor man needed was Kat stumbling over, fondling his biceps and asking him where he worked out. And that was the best-case scenario.

  I tried to steer Kat away from Mr. Spectacle’s table, but she wasn’t having it.

  “Please don’t bother him,” I begged as she careened forward, pulling me with her.

  “I’m not going to bother him,” she insisted. “I’m just going to say hi.”

  “You are going to bother him.”

  Kat came to a halt so quickly I almost lost my balance, too, although I was still very much in control of my motor functions.

  “You like him, don’t you?” said Kat. “You want him.”

  I didn’t not like him, but that was neither here nor there.

  “I don’t hit on strange men,” I said, “and you probably shouldn’t, either.”

  “Maybe you should try it?” said Kat much too loudly and pointing straight at the man in question. “I’ll let you have him.”

  “Stop talking about him like he’s a stray bill somebody dropped on the sidewalk,” I hissed.

  Mr. Spectacles, who’d opened his book and started reading while he waited for his food, snapped it shut and looked straight at us.

  I didn’t think he’d heard every word, well, at least not my words, but he’d clearly caught on that he was the center of attention.

  “Have it your way,” said Kat. “If you don’t want him, then don’t interfere—”

  “Will you go back to our table?” I begged Kat. “If I go over there and talk to that man, will you promise not to make a scene?”

  “I never make scenes.”

  “Do you promise?”

  “I promise, but only if you come back with his number. Otherwise, he’s fair game.”

  Kat wobbled her way back to the table, and I grudgingly moved in the direction of Mr. Spectacles, who was looking first at Kat and then back at me.

  “Sorry about that,” I said. “My friend had a little too much to drink.”

  Mr. Spectacles looked up at me with his deep brown eyes. He had a dimple on one cheek that showed even when he wasn’t smiling, which he certainly wasn’t now.

  “Listen,” I said, “please believe me when I say I have no intention of bothering you—”

  “Then don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t bother me.”

  Mr. Spectacles was a lot edgier than the situation warranted. He was the kind of man who didn’t have to go out of his way to get attention. Surely, by his age, he’d gotten used to deflecting unwanted moves onto his rather attractive turf.

  Not that I was trying to make a move onto Mr. Spectacles’ turf. Certainly not. I was just trying to keep Kat from making a fool of herself.

  I had a bad feeling that I was going to be the one who came out looking like a fool.

  “It’s just that my friend over there—”

  “The one who’s inebriated?”

  “She’s not inebriated.”

  She was.

  “Alright,” said Mr. Spectacles, “I’ll humor you. What about your perfectly sober friend?”

  “She wants me to get your number.”

  Mr. Spectacles looked at me as if I’d demanded he strip naked and dance on the table.

  “I mean, I don’t really even want your number,” I said. “You can fake number me.”

  I could feel that my face was very red. This was one of those nightmares you try to wake yourself up from. The only problem? I wasn’t asleep.

  “Fake number you?” Mr. Spectacles said as if he’d never before been presented with the concept.

  “Your wine, Miss,” a waiter said at my elbow.

  “Do you have a pen?” I asked the waiter.

  The waiter rooted around in his apron, pulled out a pen, and handed it to me.

  “Here,” I said, holding out the pen to Mr. Spectacles. “Write down a number, any number, and I’ll go away. Just write down something, and I promise you’ll never have to see or speak to me again.”

  Mr. Spectacles could not have looked any less receptive to my suggestion that he write down a fake number. He clearly did not understand that I was just asking for it to get Kat off my back and forestall an even more embarrassing scene.

  Mr. Spectacles looked at me with not-so-veiled contempt, and, for a few seconds, I thought he was going to call over a waiter and complain that another diner was harassing him. He must have changed his mind about trying to get me thrown out because he heaved a martyred sigh and asked if I had any paper.

  “I don’t have anything to write on,” I said.

  What he did next shocked me a little.

  He grabbed my hand, turned it over, and started to write a number on my palm.

  That impersonal contact should not have been a problem, but I felt a little zing go up my arm. Mr. Spectacles held my palm flat to the table with his right hand and wrote down a series of numbers with his left. I don’t think Mr. Spectacles felt any zinging. He released my hand as if he were dropping a decomposed rodent.

  “There,” he said. “Happy now?”

  Not really.

  “Thanks,” I told Mr. Spectacles. “Sorry to have bothered you.”

  “If you’re so sorry, then maybe you shouldn’t have bothered me,” he shot back.

  His eyelashes were long and feathery. His cheek was covered in a dusting of black stubble. I looked into his brown eyes and wished I had not.

  The man hated me.

  I felt a flush of anger rising from my toes all the way up to the tips of my ears. What I’d done wasn’t that bad, and I’d only done it to save him from Kat’s aggressive advances. He should be thanking me, not acting like I’d committed some major breach of social protocol.

  “Is it that unacceptable for a woman to ask for a man’s phone number?” I shot back. “Men have been asking for women’s numbers since the invention of the telephone.”

  Mr. Spectacles looked suddenly tired.

  “I may have over-reacted,” he said. “It’s just that you remind me of someone I’d rather forget.”

  “How so?”

  “She was a party girl.”

  I’m not a party girl. Never have, never will be; that’s more Kat’s department.

  “What makes you think I’m a party girl?”

  “You’re half drunk.”

  “I’ve had one glass of wine,” I said, gesturing to the lonely second glass sitting on the edge of the table where the waiter had placed it when I’d asked to borrow his pen.

  As I gestured at the glass, I hit the stem, and it toppled.

  Mr. Spectacles tried to right the glass before it spilled but succeeded only in directing the flow of wine down the front of his shirt. He jumped to his feet, and I grabbed a cloth napkin off the table and started dabbing futilely at his chest.

  Mr. Spectacles shrank back from my efforts to sop up the wine on his shirt front, and his metal chair went over, clattering on the stone floor of the terrace.

  The hum of voices around us hushed, and I realized that every eye in the place was looking at us.

  “I’ll be going,” said Mr. Spectacles. “I find I’ve lost my appetite.”

  “When your food arrives,” I said, “I’ll ask the waiter to put your meal on my bill.”

  “No need,” said Mr. Spectacles. “I’ll pay my own bill on the way out.”

  He was holding his hands extended in front of him palms out like he thought I was going to physically assault him. Mr. Spectacles retreated across the terrace and didn’t turn his back on me until he’d reached the French doors that led to the interior of the restaurant.

  “What in the world just happened?” Libby said when I got back to our table.

  “Did you get his number?” Kat asked as if that was all that mattered.

  “I want to die of humiliation,” I said, holding o
ut my hand so Kat could see the number written on my palm.

  “You got cutie’s number!” said Kat. “You should definitely call him tomorrow.”

  “I’d rather die,” I said. “Besides, I’m absolutely certain it’s fake.”

  “No man would fake-number you,” said Kat. “That only happens to me. Now, am I allowed to use the restroom?”

  After we ate, Libby and I bundled Kat into Libby’s car, and Libby drove us both home—or, in my case, my brother Rob and his wife Camille’s home.

  My basement apartment still had six inches of standing water on the floor. My landlord and his insurance company seemed unable to come to an agreement on who was responsible for mitigating the damage. In the meantime, I was homeless.

  When Libby pulled up in front of Rob and Camille’s house, the windows were dark.

  “Are you staying here on your own?” Libby asked.

  “Rob and Camille will be in Spain for another week, but it’s just tonight that the house is empty,” I told her. “It’s the nanny’s evening off, so the kids are with Camille’s parents tonight.”

  “Manny!” said Kat loudly from the backseat.

  “Manny?” Libby asked.

  “Male nanny,” I said. “He’s been with them for the past several years. To hear Rob and Camille tell it, he’s practically perfect in every way.”

  “What’s his name?” Libby asked.

  “Timo.”

  “Is Timo hot?” Kat demanded from the back seat.

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I’ve never met him.”

  “I bet he’s hot,” Kat insisted.

  “Whether he’s hot or not is entirely irrelevant,” I said and got out of the car before Kat made me promise to send her pictures of Rob and Camille’s manny so she could rate his hotness.

  Kat has a good heart, but she can be a bit shallow sometimes. Her fixation on physical beauty doesn’t generally attract the best class of man, either.

  Libby is all about soul, with no regard for the physical, and Kat is just the opposite. If they could combine their tastes somehow and average each other out, they’d both be much better off.

  Unfortunately, that’s not how things work when it comes to love.

  “How come you’ve never met the manny?” Libby asked as she helped me extract my luggage from the trunk.

  “Rob and Camille always give Timo the holidays off, and he takes his vacation when they do.”

  To be honest, I wasn’t looking forward to fitting myself into Rob and Camille’s household, mainly since it’d be just me, the kids, and the manny.

  I used the key code that Camille had texted me to let myself into the house through the garage. Timo would give me a spare key when he returned in the morning.

  I dragged my luggage through the garage but left everything but my handbag sitting by the door to the laundry room. I was just too tired to haul it all upstairs to Rob and Camille’s master suite where I’d be sleeping until either my apartment was habitable, or my brother and his wife came home.

  I’d assumed I’d stay in the guest suite until I was reminded that the guest suite was where Timo lived.

  The house had five bedrooms, but since Rob used one as his home office and the kids already bunked in together two to a room, there was no place for me—unless I wanted to sleep on the couch—other than the master suite.

  I was exhausted, and my head hurt.

  I fumbled around for the light switch for the stairs ascending to the second story and only succeeded in turning on a bank of lights over the fireplace in the living room.

  I gave up on turning the lights on. There was enough moonlight streaming in from the uncurtained windows overlooking the bay to get me up the stairs.

  I’d just made it to the top of the stairs and turned down the darkened hallway to the right when I collided with a naked man.

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