“I’m leaving,” I said, and he smiled.
“Where you headed next, princess?”
“Helena, wait,” Julie’s voice said from behind me, and I cringed, downing the entire rest of my drink too and setting it down. My stomach turned unpleasantly, and Julie got in between me and the door before I could make a break for it. “Please—I need to talk, it’s about Jewel—”
“Go away. I told you to leave,” I said, my voice ragged. The man who had sidled up saw his moment, because he stepped in between me and Julie.
“Give us a little space, little missy,” he said, and I scowled at him.
“Hey—fuck off. Touch her once and I’ll break your arm.”
He shot me an incredulous look. “Do you want her here or not?”
God, that was the question, wasn’t it? “I don’t want you here, that’s for sure.”
A uniformed security guard stepped in, a man with a lean build and sharp eyes. “Everything okay over here?”
The man in the red suit gestured to Julie. “She was just harassing my friend—”
I spoke over him, gesturing between him and Julie. “He was yelling at my date.”
“What?” He threw his hands up, stepping back. “You know—forget it. I don’t fuck with crazy assholes anyway.”
The security guard looked between us. “All good?” he said, and I sighed.
“Thanks.”
He nodded, stepping away. Estelle was right, because I did feel differently after getting a drink or two in me, which I should not have done. How childish did I have to be to shotgun two drinks just so Julie couldn’t have one?
I sighed, turning back to where Julie held herself smaller this time. The surging feelings had melted out into something else, and now I was just… tired. Deeply tired and crushingly sad, like the weight of the past couple of days had hit me all at once.
“He didn’t touch you or anything, did he?” Julie said, and I shook my head.
“No. Just tried to invite himself along after me if I left, or else I’d be out of here, leaving you high and dry to plan yourflight back to Missouri and…” I rubbed my forehead. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you. What’s… are you okay? Did you get into a hotel?”
“Yeah. Payment went through. Debt paid. Set up in a hotel room for now. Um… are you good? You look a little dizzy.”
“I’m not good at shotgunning drinks.”
“Let’s sit you down.”
“I should buy you a replacement drink.”
She laughed nervously. “It’s not important. Let’s sit you down,” she repeated, and I was sitting down before long, at a high table by the railing, where Julie struggled a bit with the high chair across from me.
“You have your suit again…”
“Kingmaker dug it out of a dumpster for me. I got my stuff back, mostly. The landlord shoved it all into a couple trash bags, flung them into a dumpster a few blocks down. But Kingmaker’s got, uh… trash… contacts.”
“How did you even find him?”
“Imagine the sketchiest flyer you’ve ever seen. Now make it sketchier.”
“And you responded to it.”
“I’d just hit rock bottom,” she sighed. “My girlfriend who hadn’t really been seeing me anyway had dumped me, and it made me realize I was just some fucked-up loser who’d been promising she’d have abig breaksoon for the past two years, nothing to show for it, living in a laundry closet, doing delivery driving to make ends meet.”
“When you say laundry closet…”
