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“You bastard,” she breathes. “Here I am, stupid me, and you’re just going to share your knowledge with me, you magnanimous…bastard, you!”
“You repeated yourself,” I say sarcastically and I know I shouldn’t be feeding the fire but really, her pissy attitude is more than I can take. If she won’t even listen to me, fuck her.
She shoves back from the table, hands trembling as she goes.
“Fuck you,” she says, enunciating both words between gritted teeth. Her eyes are drilling into me and her tits are heaving and I have the strongest desire to reach out and pull her across the table and kiss the fuck out of her and teach her who is boss, but before I can move, she’s storming off, every movement jerky with anger.
I stand up and pull my wallet out. I’ll give the waiter my black card, pay for this godforsaken meal, and get the hell out of here. Maybe I’ll call Tiffani after all. I hadn’t called her last week when I’d first met Ashley because I’d been stupidly enamored with her but that ended now. I am going to fuck Tiffani and a busload of her closest stripper friends.
Ashley slides back into her seat and I stop awkwardly, my credit card halfway out of my wallet.
“They won’t do doggie bags here,” she said with a shrug, “and I’m hungry.” She reaches over and grabs a bite of my porterhouse steak off my plate. “Do you mind?” she asks and pops it into her mouth before I can answer.
She exaggerates every movement as she chews her way through the bite, smirking at me as I stare at her.
“Goodbye, Ashley,” I tell her. “Look me up if you ever choose not to be a bitch.”
And I walk away, just like I should’ve done from the beginning.
And I don’t look back, because that would show her that she won, and she hasn’t. She fucking hasn’t.
No one beats the Wolf of New York.
114
Ashley
This weekend has sucked ass. I spent two hours at the gym, running and trying to pretend that I could lift more than fifteen pounds at a time with the dumbbells (which I can’t, but I’m not going to admit that), and then I went to an art class down at All Hands on Deck studio and pretended that I could paint with watercolors (which I can’t do that either and thus am now the proud owner of a blobby looking mess that I hung up on my fridge. I paid $20 to paint that fucker. I’m not throwing it away now.).
And now, to top it all off, I’m on a date with Fredrick.
I know, I know, I made fun of him for being a groveling, panty-waisted wimp, but c’mon, it’s Saturday night. Any guy worth actually going on a date with is already taken. I can’t just sit at home and watch Sleepless in Seattle for the seven-hundredth time and cry. Again. I gotta put myself out there in order to find Mr. Right, right?
Except, I’m damn sure Fredrick isn’t it.
“So last night,” he says after he takes an oversized bite of his oversized burger and then chews noisily, a chunk falling out, “I actually put my Star Wars figurine collection in the order that I think it’s going to stay in. It’s so hard to know how to arrange them all, you know? I could do them by height or by movie or by age, but I deci—”
“Hold on,” I interrupt, and I don’t even care that I’m being rude by interrupting him. Anyone who chews with his mouth open isn’t worth worrying about whether or not I’m being rude. “How can you organize them by age?” Even I know that the Star Wars series is six movies long and covers, like, a lot of time. In the first ones, Darth Vader isn’t even Darth Vader, for hell’s sake.
Not that I’m sitting around memorizing Star Wars info, but you’d have to be dead to not know at least that much.
“By calculating their birth dates, duh,” he says. “I put each character onto a timeline and then hung the timeline around my—”
So, he finishes that sentence, and I don’t even interrupt him. But I can’t tell you what he’s saying ‘cause if I spare any more brain cells for inane blathering, I’m afraid I’m going to lose IQ points.
Note to self: The next time I’m so desperate for a date, and I think Fredrick is a good idea, remind me to take the evening and wash my hair. Twice.
Fina-fuckingly, we stand up from the table at Five Guys and head out the door. I want to cry, Nobu57 one night, Five Guys the next…
How did I fall this far this fast? What did I do to deserve this?
I wave down a passing yellow cab and start to climb in. “Hey, hold on, let me come with,” Freddie says and slides in next to me. I shrug. Whatever. He can pay for my cab ride home; I’ll let ‘im. My bank account could use the help.
Except, after I give the cabbie my address and settle back into my seat, Fredrick isn’t settling back into his. He seems to be inching his way toward me, instead.
“Ashley, I just have to tell you that—”
“Fredrick, you need to put your seat belt on,” I say, cutting him off. I’m not about to let him finish a sentence that starts out with that ominous wording.
