They were both still giving each other mouth-to-mouth resuscitation as they headed out the door.
“It’s not their fault,” I reminded myself once they had left. “You’re not in a very pro-couple mood, remember? Asher and Dove could be a pair of graceful monogamous-for-life swans and you would still want to wring their necks. Or penguins! Everybody loves penguins! But right now those smug little mated-for-life fuckers in tuxedos can go fuck themselves.” So maybe I was feeling a little bitter.
I decided to distract myself by cleaning up. I was just starting to transform my studio back into my living room—and mentally calculating how long I could live on Whole Foods samples (a little trick my best friend Lacey had taught me) and coffee shop jam packets; surely it would be worth it if I could just put down the money on an actual studio space—when the doorbell rang. With a sinking heart, I went to check it, and my worst fears were confirmed.
Like the terrible icing on the worst ever cake, the person at the door was Stevie.
He was trying to peer through the peephole, the lens making his eyeball bulge, his nose seeming to swell. “Kate? I know you’re in there. I watched your ‘clients’”—he did the actual air quotes around the words, like this was still the nineties—“take off, so it’s just you and me. I’m taking back that magazine.”
I bet my landlord let him in, even after I told him not to. Damn. Mr. Briggs was an old sweetie, but he had all the memory retention of a piece of soggy Swiss cheese. He couldn’t seem to hold it in his head that Stevie and I were no longer together; though, in all fairness to him, the fact that he had absorbed that we had once been together was pretty impressive, given that he regularly forgot that WWII had been won seventy years ago.
“Look, you can drop this whole act,” Stevie said, lowering his voice as if he was about to tell me a secret. “You don’t have to pretend to be all intellectual anymore, okay? It was cute how you tried to do literary analysis on those ‘classics’—” he did the air quotes again—“to get my attention so I would date you, but it’s over and you need to let it go. Props to you for pretending to read them all the time, that was a real commitment, but since we’re not together anymore you can drop the whole fa?ade and go back to reading whatever fashion magazines you usually read.”
He kept on talking, but his words fuzzed out in my brain and I felt my incandescent rage grow suddenly ice-cold and hard and pointed. Stevie needed to shut the hell up, and he needed to do it right now.
Luckily, a Girl Scout is always prepared.
Or is that Boy Scouts?
Whatever, I was never in either of them. But what can I say: I’m always open to inspiration.
I pulled the string I had run over the edge of my door earlier, to a little contraption I had rigged up just after he called, and armed just after Dove and Asher left. And through the peephole I watched three gallons of expired aquamarine dye cascade over Stevie ‘Jackass’ Jacobs.
My deposit on the apartment was going to be completely gone to pay for new hallway carpet, but it was totally worth it to hear Stevie screaming like a toddler, as if it were actual acid and not blue-tinted water spilling all over him.
He shook himself, spluttering, blinking dye out of his eyes. “You bitch! You fucking crazy bitch! Over a goddamn book!”
“Magazine,” I corrected.
I turned away from the door with a little smile on my face, humming a happy tune.
That was it. I was keeping the thing, on principle.
TWO
Later that evening, fireworks burst overhead, eager laughter swirled around me, and an attentive waiter pressed a mojito with freshly crushed mint into my hand. Ah, this was the life.
“This is the life, right?” Lacey said to me with a grin. She looked resplendent in a knee-length dress of shimmery golden gauze, accentuated by moonstone clasps at the shoulders, and an ebony belt that brought out the deep brown of her eyes. “Would you believe Grant wanted to have this fundraiser in a stuffy old ballroom? On a beautiful clear night like tonight?”
“It’s a good thing he has you to talk him out of it,” I said with a playful dig at Grant’s tuxedoed ribs. “I would not have wanted to miss this.”
“I second the motion,” Grant said, raising his glass as if for a toast.
Tonight’s dance/banquet/concert/general purpose give-us-your-money event was to raise funds for Grant’s latest favorite charity, a group that bussed kids in homeless shelters to the library every day, and watched over them while their parents were out working or looking for jobs. This time last year, the only charity Grant Devlin had been interested in was the Society for the Relief of Young Bimbos, but Lacey had made him a changed man. These days he actually sought out opportunities to do good on his own without any prompting, and when he encountered a cause that didn’t have a fundraiser—or even one that did, but didn’t seem big enough or glamorous enough to raise the necessary awareness or funds—he made one.
“So, how much are we getting so far?” I asked Grant.
He pulled up some numbers on his phone. “Oh, about seven million,” he said off-handedly. “But I think we can get it up to nine million by the end of the night, maybe even eleven. Thanks for donating those items to the auction table, by the way.”
“Well, I just hope you guys aren’t counting on me for that last two million,” I joked, trying to cover up my blush. Anything close to a compliment about my work tended to do that, and being asked to donate an item for a high-end auction definitely counted as a compliment. “I mean, I’m good, but I’m not sewing blood diamonds onto the fringes or anything.”
“Every little bit helps,” Lacey put in. “And don’t underestimate yourself, Katie. I’m pretty sure I saw Mariska Hargitay giving them the eye at the auction table earlier.”