AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“And you didn’t tell him?”
“Josie, I jumped on his bike and implicated him in my crime,” I reminded her. “The last thing I need is for him to actually know who I am, and have him coming around and asking questions.”
“I guess that’s true,” she agreed, looking a little crestfallen.
Josie was of the hopeless romantic class of people.
She cried over rom-coms and those really dramatic, drawn-out-over-ten-seasons love stories on TV. She always had a romance novel in her top desk drawer since her job didn’t require a lot of her during the day.
I knew that she had her heart set on a happily-ever-after of her own. And, because she loved me, one for me as well.
Even if I was decidedly less romantic.
I mean, don’t get me wrong. I had some love stories I enjoyed. Gomez and Morticia were couple goals if I’d ever seen them. But I’d just… never been in love, y’know? And if you reach the old age of twenty-six without ever being in love—even young, puppy love as a teen—you start to question if it really exists at all, or if it was just something novelists, producers, and poets all made up out of some sincere wish that it were real.
So, yeah, I wasn’t planning on some man to sweep me off my feet.
And my version of a happily-ever-after was me on the balcony of my penthouse with a margarita in my hand, watching the sunset after a long day of doing something mildly crazy, and not having to work anymore.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed my job. I just didn’t want to do it forever. And since a lot of what I did relied on using my physical appearance as bait or a distraction, I understood that there was a clock on how long I could do it anyway. I figured I had until my mid-thirties to build my nest egg.
I mean, sure, I planned to be a banging hot old lady in the nursing home, but let’s face it… guys are nothing if not predictable. The second they spotted a set of crow’s feet, they were looking for someone more perky and bouncy and not at you anymore.
This meant that the clock was ticking, and I was busting ass these days to make every minute of it count.
Hence, the shitshow that was the job the night before.
Were I still twenty years old with all the time in the world ahead of me, I wouldn’t have taken one on such short notice with the small amount of planning I had. But I was trying not to turn away good money when a job did fall in my lap.
My job was pretty in-demand, since not many people thought to open up a practice like mine, but that didn’t mean that I had clients coming out of my ears every day.
I used to be okay with doing some thumb-twiddling between clients, but now I just wanted as full a calendar as possible.
I mean, sure, I had a nice apartment. And I even had a good savings going. Even if I invested that money wisely, though, I doubted my ability to make it until my timely death at one-hundred-and-one years old, after just having given an interview to the local news station telling them that tequila, coffee, soda, and junk food were the secret to my longevity, with just what I had stored away now.
And I didn’t want to struggle, to pinch pennies and cut coupons. I wanted a long and easy retirement from the age of thirty-five on. Which meant hustling hard now.
“That was too close of a call last night,” I admitted to Josie. Since she was the only person I ever confessed that sort of thing to.
“Yeah, it sounds like it could have ended really badly.”
It could have.
I’d been lucky.
I mean, to be fair, I was skilled and adaptive, so I would have found another way if the biker hadn’t just been sitting there like an open invitation to hop on.
But it would have been harder to get away under a different circumstance. I’d have managed, but still.
It was too close.
I had to be smarter.
“You know, I could—“ Josie started to offer.
“Absolutely not,” I cut her off, knowing what she was going to offer to do. Be a wheelman for me on iffy jobs.
But this wasJosiewe were talking about here. The girl who had a granny tap on her accelerator. The one who signaled way ahead of her turns. Who allowed everyone to cut into traffic ahead of her. She was careful and courteous. Which was great for society, but shit for a wheelman.
