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The idea was to meet up at a coffee shop in my hood and get something of a game plan established. What that meant, exactly, I could only guess. But one thing was for sure—what we’d almost gotten up to in the pool was definitely, most certainly, not going to come close to happening again.
Not a chance in hell.
Right at the moment I pulled off Sunset and onto North Benton, my phone buzzed in my pocket. And it was the sharp, quick buzz of a text, not the slightly longer buzz of a random social media notification. My eyes still fixed on the traffic ahead, I pulled the phone out and brought it up to my face.
Sure enough, it was a text. But not one from anyone I would’ve liked—no, no, no. This one was from my bank. A bank getting in touch with you, in my experience, was never good. Them sending you a text was even less than “never good.”
“Shit,” I said, not wanting to read and drive, anxiety building in me as I gripped the phone.
A horn blared at me as I cut across the right lane, and seconds later I was pulled over in the parking lot of a CVS, my phone in front of my face as I read the text.
“Overdrawn?” I asked to no one in particular. “Are you kidding me?”
Sure enough, that’s what the text said. In its super-blasé tone, the text let me know that I had less than zero dollars in my account.
“Shit,” I said, over and over.
I pulled up my mobile banking app, my hands shaking, as I tried to figure out what the hell had gone wrong. After a few seconds of scanning, I had the answer—the bank had done that really, really annoying thing where the take the big purchases out first to put you in the negative, then hit you with those random coffees and In-and-Out burgers to squeeze every drop that they could.
It wasn’t the end of the world—I had money in my savings account that I could use to cover the negative, hopefully before the fees hit. But that money wasn’t just a random pile of cash I had sitting around. That money was the little bit of savings I’d been setting aside to cover the initial fees from my spa.
And rather than growing, it’d had been getting smaller and smaller. My pay at Circus Maximus hadn’t risen in a long while, and the cost of living in LA didn’t seem to have any ceiling. Each year that passed it felt like I’d taken a pay cut, instead of the other way around.
I grumbled as I moved the money over from one account to the other, each dollar taken out of my savings pushing my dream a little further into the future, becoming hazier and hazier as it went.
Once I’d transferred enough cash to cover me until the next payday, I tossed my phone onto the passenger’s seat and pulled out of the parking lot. I had enough on my mind, and the last thing I needed was to bring the anxiety from all that money crap into my meeting, or whatever it was, with Sean.
A few minutes later I was pulling into a different parking lot, that of Intelligentsia Coffee, one of my usual spots in the neighborhood when I needed a caffeine fix. A space was open next to a dark blue sports car, and I had a feeling that it belonged to Sean.
I stepped into the cafe, and the smell of delicious coffee wafted in the air and mixed with the light din of conversation. Sean sat at a table at the back side of the place, but he got up as soon as he spotted me.
“There she is.” A charming smile lit his face.
Sean was dressed simply but nicely, in a pair of dark brown boots, fitted midnight-blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and a military-style jacket completing the look. A silver necklace hung over his chest, the chain drawing attention to his strong, muscular traps. Damn, the man looked good.
He brought me in for a hug, a soft, musky-smelling cologne wrapping around me. I’d never been big into scents on guys, but Sean could get away with it. Or maybe it was because my attraction to him was making me overlook something that I otherwise wouldn’t have been a big fan of. Halo effect, I’d heard it called? Where someone hot can get away with anything?
No time to worry about that.
“Hey!” A tinge of heat ran through my pussy at his touch, one that I desperately tried to ignore.
“Have a seat.” He gestured to the open chair across from his. “I wasn’t sure what you liked, so I went with a regular latte. Figure you can’t go wrong with that.”
“Good call.” I sat down and wrapped my hands around the warm paper cup. “That’s what I would’ve picked. Thank you.”
