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“I know,” he said. “It’s not you I’m mad at. It’s the situation. It’s me.”
“You?” He didn’t continue. Lola looked at her hands in her lap. She assumed he was mad at himself for even considering the offer, but she was afraid to ask. “Just please tell me what you’ve been thinking this last week. You’ve been so hot and cold. I can’t figure out what you want, so you have to tell me, and you have to be honest.”
Johnny ran a hand over his face and blew out a breath. “You want honesty?”
“Yes.”
“I keep thinking about that life,” he said. “I want something of my own. We can’t live paycheck to paycheck forever, but I don’t know how to get out of it. I can’t ever seem to catch up.”
Lola took his hand again and squeezed it. “I’m relieved that you’re also worried. Sometimes I feel like I have to be the one to fix it.”
“I want to fix it, Lola, but I don’t know how.”
Suddenly she wanted to go back to ignoring the problem. She almost wished she hadn’t dragged them into this conversation. “Maybe we don’t have to,” she said. “You’ll keep on managing Hey Joe. It won’t be the same, but you’ll learn to love it. I’ll graduate from bar wench to cocktail waitress. Or maybe we get new jobs in a different dive bar. Things would be tight while we transitioned, but they’d settle and we’d get back to where we are now.” Lola’s voice softened with defeat as she spoke, but she hoped Johnny wouldn’t pick up on it
.
“Because where we are now is the best option,” he said. “You don’t think I’ll ever be able to give you more than this. Not without someone else’s money.”
“That isn’t what I said.”
“You might as well say it. I’ll never be more than what I am in this moment.”
“I’m trying to be realistic,” she said. “If we want more, then I have to do this. If I don’t, then this is how things will be. It was enough before Beau came along, but is it enough now? I don’t know, Johnny. I don’t know the answer to any of this.”
He threw open the car door, jumped out and looked back at her. “You want to do this because you think it’s our only chance.”
Lola also got out of the car. Their doors slammed at the same time. “Don’t turn this around on me because I have the guts to say what we’re both thinking,” she said, hurrying to keep up with him. “This could be our only chance. It’s not like I want this.”
He kept walking.
“I know you want me to do it,” she said, raising her voice. “Why don’t you man up and tell me the truth?”
He turned around and pointed a finger at her. “You want truth so goddamn bad? The money’s all I think about. And the things I could finally do. I’m six-foot-two, two hundred pounds, but I’m half a man because I can’t take care of you.”
Lola reached for him. “But you do take care of me.”
“No, I don’t,” he said, stepping back. “Five nights a week we get off work while the rest of the world sleeps. We work our asses off, and we’re still struggling to get by. If I lose this job, I’ll have to start all over somewhere else. I have no other skills. You think you have nothing now? It’s about to get a lot worse.”
“When did I say I had nothing? Would I like a washer and dryer of my own so I don’t have to schlep down the street? Would I like to quit this job one day and try something else? Yes. But that doesn’t mean I have nothing. If I do this, it’s for the things that can’t be bought—like our future.”
“If this, if that. I’m tired of this shit. Just make a decision.”
“I can’t, Johnny,” she said, shaking her head. “You have to do it.”
“This has to be your choice. I’m not going to send you into another man’s bed no matter what I want.”
She put her hand to the base of her throat. “Want?” she choked. “Are you saying you want me to do this?”
“No,” he said. In the dark, their eyes were narrowed on each other. The silence was thick. “I’m saying I won’t stop you.”
6
He slept in bed next to Lola, but Johnny, who was usually unconscious as soon as the lights went out, breathed unevenly. He was awake. He flipped back and forth every few minutes. His mind was elsewhere. They each stayed on their sides of the bed.
It went on for days. When they were alone, he barely looked at her, but she often caught him staring during work. Waiting. For her to bring it up again? For her to make the decision? Did he hope she’d say yes? Or no? His silence meant she had to choose for both of them.
The more silence drew out between them, the more time Lola had alone. Beau was a strong presence in her thoughts. She couldn’t forget him in his urbane suit, giving all his attention to whatever he was doing at that moment, whether it was throwing darts, savoring his Macallan—or looking at her. Being near her. Flirting with her. Everything he did, he did a hundred percent.
During a night off, while Johnny worked, Lola finally gave in to her curiosity and looked Beau up online. He hadn’t always been wealthy. He’d even grown up twenty minutes from Lola. It was well known that he was a self-made millionaire and that he co-founded Bolt Ventures but had his hand in many different projects. At thirty-seven, he’d never been married, and except for stints here and there, he’d always lived in Los Angeles.
Lola looked for details about him before he’d sold his seventh try at a website, but they were hard to come by. His father had died in a car accident in France. He’d worked part-time jobs and developed his own projects in his spare time, mostly at night.
When she was about to give up, she found one of his first interviews from years earlier. The interviewer had asked what his least favorite job had been before he’d struck it rich. She had to read his answer twice—it was a six-month bartending gig at a hole-in-the-wall place in the Valley. He’d quit because with a thirty-minute commute each way, gas ate into his tips and he wouldn’t get home until an unreasonable hour.
