“Sweetie,” he called out, like everything was hunky dory between them. “You look so pretty.”
False, motherfucker. She looked fucking gorgeous.
“What are you doing here?” Lily asked in the most acerbic tone I’d heard in my life.
“Came to see my best girl,” he replied trying to be smooth but failing spectacularly. That was proven by the snorts everyone sitting around the bar let out at the same time.
“She here?” Lily asked, looking around her curiously.
It was that response that made him stumble, and for a brief moment, hostility and irritation flashed across his face before he replaced it with his previous fakeness.
Interesting!
“I’m looking right at her!”
Fucking barf! Lily must have been thinking the same thing as me as she met my eyes and swallowed audibly.
“Ugh, I just puked in my mouth,” she muttered, loud enough for everyone to hear.
“Me too,” Annie agreed, making herself busy behind the bar in front of us.
“Me three,” I nodded, taking a mouthful of my beer to try to wash the nasty taste away.
“Amen.”
“Agree.”
“Gross.”
“Need a bucket when you got a second!” Were all of the answers that came from the guys sitting around us, making the douche’s face twist in anger.
“Look,” he snapped, leaning on the bar and trying to get around me into Lily’s face. “I said I was sorry, didn’t I? You were always busy, and I hadn’t seen you, so when I got drunk, I thought she was you…”
“My father had just had a heart attack, you piece of shit,” Lily seethed, throwing down the dish towel she’d been using under the bar. “I’d been with him at the hospital for twenty-seven hours, and I know it was that long because I’d been on a date with you when I got the call. So you’ll have to fucking excuse me if my attention was diverted for twenty-seven hours,” she hissed, leaning over the bar. “And thank you for trying to find someone to stick your tiny little penis into that looked like me – even though she did not.”
“Who was it, doll?” Jonesy, the guy who worked at Dahlia’s garage asked from his seat.
“Carly Thresher,” she muttered, not taking her eyes off the douche who blanched at the name. “Didn’t think I got that good a look, did ya?” she asked, a smile teasing the sides of her mouth. “Also didn’t think that I knew you weren’t drunk, and that it wasn’t the first time with Carly, was it, sweetie?”
“Nasty,” Jonesy mumbled, going back to his beer and shuddering.
Yup, it was nasty. The rumor that she sent out notifications informing men about her most recent STI instead of Christmas, Valentines, Easter, Independence Day, Labor Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Birthday and any other type of greetings cards might be slightly exaggerated, but I was willing to bet it was only by one holiday.
I’d taken about all I could take of it all, so I stood up, unfolding to my full height of six-feet-three inches, roughly five inches taller than Chris. That was when he gulped, remembering well who I was.
“I think you’ve said enough,” I informed him, sounding light hearted and easygoing when all I wanted to do was kick him up the ass. What stopped me from doing that was that my foot would get stuck and I liked the boots I was wearing, plus it was his ass. Ew!
Trying to buy himself some height by straightening and raising up onto his toes slightly – Jesus take the wheel – he sneered as he looked me over.
“Like I’m gonna listen to you!”
“I would if I was you,” Annie informed him, rooting around under the bar for something.
“Boy, you’re standing on your fucking tip-toes,” Jonesy snorted around the bottle that he was holding up to his mouth. “Ain’t no one gonna take you seriously doing that. Not even Albert!” he gestured over his shoulder with his thumb in the direction of the eighty-nine year old, who was passed out drunk with his head on his table.
It turned out either Albert wasn’t as drunk as he seemed or he was a cognitive drunk, because he raised his thumb slightly and gave the thumbs-up back to Jonesy who missed it because he’d turned back around, but the rest of us didn’t.
Without even fixing what had just been pointed out, Chris glared over at Jonesy and spat, “Shut it, fuckwad!” Making us all laugh even harder. “Whatever,” he sneered, and then turned back to Lily who was finding it all hilarious. “I’ll see you at mine when you get off.”
The smile dropped from her face and she was just taking a breath in to blast him when I took a step closer to him and leaned down into his space. “Don’t you mean after you get off?” The anger that filled his face would have been funny if it hadn’t been for his entire existence pissing me off at that second. “You know I have enough issues with you already, you little pissant,” I growled. “And now you’re just adding onto them. Trust me when I say, you did not want to add to the existing problem that I had, and you sure as shit don’t want to add to the one I have now.”