The sight just fed her frustration and unreasonable anxiety, and she went out into the street again.
Where two military-looking “health inspectors” were just climbing out of an unmarked car. “Mademoiselle Lenoir. We need to ask you to respect our request that you stay off the premises. You could compromise the investigation.”
Vi scowled at them. “It’s my restaurant!”
“Nevertheless.”
She narrowed her eyes at them. “Have you seen Chase this morning?”
“Who?”
She glared at them and stomped off. Getting arrested, she had learned, was a huge hassle.
But she didn’t really start to worry until one a.m., when no one had shown up at her door with boxing gloves or leather stitching materials or just a big shit-eating grin on his face.
Also he didn’t show up by two a.m.
And by three she knew he really wasn’t going to show up that night, and that it was incredibly demeaning that she didn’t even have his telephone number, and she was pissed at herself, and she managed to fall asleep.
More or less.
***
“Wow,” Célie said five days later. “Wow. I never would have pegged him for someone who would just disappear like that.”
“Well, you know how guys are.” Vi kicked the pavement. They were waiting in line to get into a favorite comedian’s show. Vi could only scout new restaurant locations and fight with bureaucrats so long during the day, and while Au-dessus remained closed, she’d decided to take advantage of the miracle of having evenings free. She’d far rather be going out with friends than waiting in her apartment wondering if Chase would finally show up again. “They say I love you, I want to marry you when they want hot sex, but then they scare themselves and run off. Or I scare them,” she said sullenly.
“You do scare most men, Vi,” Lina agreed. “But…he didn’t seem that easy to scare.”
Vi shrugged, trying not to think about it. This comedian had better by really funny.
“I think you’re choosing the wrong men,” Célie’s boyfriend Joss said. “Maybe you need to select the good guys. Or at least someone with guts.”
Vi glared at him. Tall, hot, strong, quiet Joss Castel had come back from five years in the Foreign Legion only a month ago, apparently having been in love with and faithful to Célie all that time. He was pure salt in the wounds of every other woman trying to handle the dating scene. “Maybe the good guys are all gone.”
Joss just looked at her with steady, faintly challenging, hazel eyes. “Since you attract essentially every man alive, just by walking by, I’m going to go ahead and insist it’s a selection issue.”
Vi scowled at him.
“Are you sure nothing is wrong?” Célie asked. “Did you call him?”
Vi’s stomach clenched around that worry, that had woken so small and innocent in her only five days before but had long since stretched its cute little tentacles out in her belly, planted them, and started to feed. It was a monster worry now.
She infinitely preferred to believe that she’d been dumped by an emotional coward than to focus on that worry.
If she concentrated really hard on all her past history with men and not Chase himself, that dumped-by-a-coward scenario almost seemed likely.
“I don’t have his number,” she said.
Célie’s lips rounded.
Vi flushed. Yes. That made her seem like nothing but a booty call.
“Does he have yours?” Lina asked. With her glossy, loose curls and pretty face, Lina looked as sweet and delicate as her desserts, and she’d learned from childhood to have a sure, tough inner core, therefore. Perception, balance, and sense, to Vi’s energy and flamboyance. They worked well together at Au-dessus.
“I threw my phone into the river.” Vi had ended up getting a disposable phone so she could argue with health inspectors and harass them every hour for results, but she was trying to put off having a new smartphone until the ugliest chatter about her had died down on Twitter.
Chase didn’t have the disposable phone’s number, though. She’d bought it after he disappeared. She’d called that embassy number yesterday, but they’d acted as if they’d never even heard of a Chase Smith.
She slanted a glance at Lina. “Your cousin hasn’t been doing anything weird, has he? Receiving strange guests from Belgium?”