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When I arrive, I see Monroe through the window. She is wiping a table while Big Rick—a lonely regular with a monstrous crush—is making gaga eyes at her. She smiles at him over her shoulder. I don’t know what he’s said, but she laughs.
My anger has simmered and cooled into something that looks an awful lot like regret. Beck doesn’t need my drama, but I keep giving it to him again and again and again.
Sighing, I park, walk inside, and take a table in Roe’s section, then wait for her to notice. She starts with her usual greeting, which lately has been, “Well, well, well, if it isn’t Miss High-Falutin’, here to consort with the peasants on the?—”
But then she takes one look at me and the joke dies on her lips. She tosses the rag over her shoulder without looking and plops down in the booth.
“What happened, babe?”
I lay out the story. She listens with that trademark Monroe intensity.
“Fired, huh?” she says when I’m finished.
I nod. “It’s my fault. It was stupid. I should’ve just let her do her bitching and kept my mouth shut. But did I do that? No. Instead, I shoved her onto her ass.”
“I bet that was… Was it great? It had to be great.”
“It was wrong, is what it was. Now, I have no way to pay the Bloodhound.”
That’s the actual crux of the problem: the fact that if I don’t have the money to give him, he’s going to try to wriggle the money out of me some other way. He’s made it very clear what those “other ways” would look like.
Monroe nods. She’s a problem solver at heart. “Okay, so let’s see what we can figure out.” Pulling out her order pad, she has me tell her the total amount owed and the frequency of the payments.
“Do you have savings?”
“Not much. A couple payments’ worth, but I’ve had to dip in because he raised the interest rate or whatever.”
She sets the pen down and eyes me warily. “Maybe you should tell Beck. He would help you.”
“Roe…”
We’ve talked about this and she knows I would rather cut out my own tongue and smack myself with it than to tell him the mess I’m in.
She lays her hand on mine. “He’s a good guy, hon. He would understand. It’s your old man’s debt. Not yours.”
“It’s embarrassing. It’s shameful. I don’t want him to know my dad was involved with a guy like the Bloodhound.”
“Alright. Then what do you want to do?”
I rake my fingers through my hair. “I don’t know.”
She lowers her chin and turns the full power of herI know you know what I’m thinkinglook on me. “I won’t say it again, Sloan. But youdoknow that Beck is the answer. You just have to decide what’s worth more: your pride or your life?”
I press my forehead to the cold tabletop. When she’s right, she’s right, but I hate that she’s always right.
We do more math for a few minutes to figure I have enough money saved to get me through a month before I’ll need a paycheck to make my payments to the Bloodhound.
“Now,” she says when we’re finished, “let me get you something to eat.”
I shake my head. “Just a milkshake to go. I have to get home.”
I want to tell Beck my side of what happened, although I’m sure he’s already heard some skewed version of it. Nothing I can do about that, though.
Nothing but face the music.
19
BECK
