I hated to be broke.
I think growing up living hand-to-mouth in the good times, and with a gnawing belly in the bad, I’d busted my fucking ass as soon as I was old enough to make sure I always had a little something stashed away, to ensure that I would never be hungry again.
So being really close to being hungry, yeah, it wasn’t sitting right with me.
Like, I bought the fucking fish-flavored ramen because it was on sale for ten cents less than the chicken and beef kind of close to being hungry.
So the fact that I had to go to the damn grocery store and load up on fancy shit that I wasn’t going to be able to eat, yeah, that was just another shitty part of an otherwise crummy week.
At least, I figured, it couldn’t really get that much worse.
Until, of course, I was browsing the damn cheese section—not the normal cheese section where you find blocks of familiar things like cheddar or shredded mozzarella in bags, oh no, the fancy cheese section where shit was wrapped in twine and cost twenty bucks for a little circle of some shit I couldn’t even pronounce—when a familiar voice called my name.
Rather, he called the name I’d repeatedly told him not to fucking call me.
“Theodora.”
“Fucking fantastic,” I grumbled under my breath as I threw some brie into my cart.
I’d never had brie before, but in my humble opinion, it looked revolting. Sitting in a blob around some crackers, the consistency like mozzarella and cream cheese had a freaky, mutated baby.
“Freddie,” I said, knowing full well that his name was Frederick, and he expected to be called that. If you were going to get my name wrong, I was going to get yours wrong too.
Did it make sense to be petty over the small shit in life? To sound, well-adjusted people, maybe not. But to people like me, who could get alcohol poisoning if they shared a drink with each of their unhealthy coping mechanisms—like habitual pettiness—yeah, it was how we got through the day.
It probably irked Frederick that I refused to call him Mr. Lasso, let alone cut down his first name, so his tone was just borderline surly when he said, “Fancy seeing you here.”
Yeah, right.
Like he hadn’t tracked me down.
I’d been avoiding him for days.
And men like Frederick didn’t like when people didn’t do exactly what he wanted them to do. So he was willing to go to full-on stalker-mode to force me to talk to him.
He put a little too much faith in me that I wouldn’t yell in his face in public like I had the last time I’d seen him in private.
But for the moment, I was pissing him off enough by staring at him blankly.
“Gee, aren’t you running a little late?” he asked. “Isn’t that against the… arrangement?”
“Maybe if you taught the peacocks how to tell time, I could keep a tighter schedule,” I said, turning away from him to continue shopping since, as much as I hated to admit it, he was right.
I did have a schedule to keep.
And I did need to keep up my end of said arrangement.
“It’s childish, Theodora, to blame anyone else but yourself for your shortcomings.”
Oh, the urge to grab that fucking tomato sauce off the end cap and beat him to death with it was probably not healthy. But we could just go ahead and call that fantasy another coping mechanism.
It kept my hands on the cart as I moved past that aisle, anyway.
“Don’t you have something better to do than follow me around the grocery store?” I asked, tossing something from a shelf into my half-filled cart, then marking it off my list.
I’d never been much of a list person, personally. But I couldn’t afford to have a single misstep. Too much was riding on this.
“I am shopping as well. As you can see,” he said, waving toward his cart that had exactly two things in it. One of which he’d plucked off an end cap as he followed me.
Men like Frederick Lasso didn’t do their own grocery shopping.
He was there because I was there, and because he thought I was too decent a human being to cause a scene in such a public place.
He grossly overestimated how much I gave a single fuck about what a bunch of strangers thought of me.
Hell, it would give them a story to tell the other mom’s at the pick-up line for school, or to their half-interested spouses over under-seasoned chicken.
A little spice for their lives.
But I was trying harder than was characteristic of me to be good, to hold my tongue, so I didn’t give him any more ammunition against me.
“Fascinating,” I said, giving his cart a pointed look. “I didn’t realize you had toddlers,” I added.
Like anyone would fuck his bland ass.