AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I had a choice to make: up or down. Evan and his driver were surely gone by now, and encountering this drunken crowd at street level on a Friday night wouldn’t be any better than in the stairwell. So I hurried on up, pain be damned. I had to make it to my floor before they did.
Reaching my floor, I rushed into the hallway and gently closed the door to the stairs before hurrying to my door. Breathing heavily, I unlocked and then closed the door behind me. I turned the deadbolt and listened. I didn’t hear anyone in the hallway.
For a second, I considered bracing a chair against the door the way they did in the movies. But that was stupid. Nobody knew I had a million-dollar check in here, so the break-in potential was no higher than normal. Even so, I looked over to the corner, confirming that I still had the old baseball bat Billy Boxer had given me.
I’d wanted a security bar for the door, but Billy said the bat was better because the real threat was from a killer posing as the cable guy, whom I would let in the door anyway because I was gullible.
I wasn’t gullible enough to stay with Billy for long, but I had kept the bat.
Pacing nervously around my apartment, I stopped by the window. Evan’s car was still parked outside with the lights on.
Crap. I’d forgotten to text him.
My phone had settled at the very bottom of my handbag, but I plucked it out. My heart was still racing when it finally lit up.
ME: Safely home
It was true enough. His response was immediate.
UNKNOWN: Thank you.
Since playing the part of fake girlfriend meant I’d have to be in touch with him, I hit the icon for his message and added Evan as a contact.Fake girlfriend—that had an odd ring to it. It almost sounded dirty.
My hands were still shaky when I pulled the checks out of my purse and stuffed them into an empty envelope. Then I noticed it—the front check, the big one, wasn’t a company check. It was a personal check from Evan.
The almost-CPA in me wondered how the accounting department at his company would journal the entry for a nine-hundred-and-eighty-thousand-dollar expense report for a charity gift on behalf of the company. It wasn’t a topic we’d covered in school.
Shrugging to myself, I sealed the envelope, folded it, and hid my prize in the pages of my latest romance novel. Adding a few older books on top, it was as safe as I could make it for tonight.
After taking a glass out of the cupboard, I lifted up hard on the fridge handle as I pulled the door open. Anything less, and it would refuse to budge. One of these days, the stupid door would fall off. The broken hinge squeaked annoyingly, as it always did.
“A feature to keep people from stealing your food,”the super, Zhukov, had said when he’d shown me the apartment to rent. Why not admit the landlord was too cheap fix anything?
I surveyed the various options for my parched throat. A partial bottle of unsweetened cranberry juice sat in front, left over from my health-food craze three months ago. After two weeks I was back to normal food. My God, that stuff tasted like crap.
But having lived through a period when my family could barely afford to feed ourselves, I never let food go to waste. I kept the bottle front and center to remind myself to take a sip of the awful shit once in a while. I had it down to half full. I was sure it hadn’t grown mold because it tasted so bad even the fungus couldn’t tolerate it.
I slid my purple-juice enemy to the side and pulled the box behind it to the front of the shelf. Pressing the button on the spigot. I watched my glass fill. One quarter, one half, three quarters—I didn’t stop until it was full.
To keep my head clear, I’d passed on the chance to sample one the expensive bottles on the wine list at dinner. But now I could indulge in some alcohol to wash down the Advil for my ankle, not to mention calm my nerves. What came out of my box was probably only remotely related to what DiMaggio’s wine list offered, but it had alcohol in it. It was so cheap the label only saidwhite wine. But tonight it was the small print on the box I cared about. It promised thirteen percent alcohol.
I swallowed the pills, settled into the couch, and replayed the evening in my head as I drank. Tonight had been confusing as hell, a roller coaster of emotions from the fear I’d experienced entering the restaurant, to the elation of a two-million-dollar gift, to a different kind of fear in the stairwell of my building.
It took me the first half of the glass to come to grips with the concept that I had beaten the Shark of Wall Street and had a million dollars of his money to prove it. Plus he’d paid for dinner. Not a bad night.
He’d wanted something only I could provide, and I’d made him pay through the nose to get my help—two fucking million dollars. That was the right spin on it. I wasn’t selling myself; he was buying my help.
After one more swallow, I lifted myself up and after a moment returned to the couch with my little silver goal journal and a red pen to mark the occasion.
This was the second iteration of my goals, written down so I couldn’t cheat by changing them or forgetting them. My first goal journal had gone missing in the frenzy of boxing up our possessions to vacate the houses after the bankruptcy.
Opening the book, I uncapped the pen and ran a nice solid red line through number eight.
8: Bring in a million dollars of revenue for Three Sisters Fund.
Then I crossed it out again, and once more. Each strike through the line made me feel better than the one before. This had been a goal I wasn’t sure I’d ever complete. I’d thought it might become my white whale.
Today I’d achieved double the goal in one evening, and all I had to do was put up with Evan McAllister for a while. That would be a lot easier than number nine would be. Because that one didn’t allow me to use rich people’s money. I’d have to accomplish it with my own earnings.
