James: A College Girl Romance (3 page)

My eyebrows automatically popped up. I had expected Crystal to know all the regulars and high rollers. Recovering myself, I shrugged.

“No idea. I brought him one drink.”

Crystal made an impatient noise.

“Jerry said you talked to him.”

I looked past Crystal to Jerry, who shrugged at me. Was there anything he
didn’t
see? And couldn’t he have kept his mouth shut? Then again, at least he hadn’t told Crystal that the hot weirdo at table ten had requested me.

“I didn’t really
talk
to him,” I said lamely.

In a flash of clarity, I realized that if I didn’t appease this viper, she would fuck me over eventually. A lie was better than getting screwed for honesty.

“Well, he did say he wanted to know when you were dancing next.”

She made a high-pitched, breathy squeaking noise and motioned impatiently with one hand as she picked up her drink.

“
So
? What’d you tell him?”

“Tomorrow night, right?”

She turned to the others and continued to make noises like she was going to hyperventilate. Assuming I was excused, I started walking away. When I got to the end of the bar, Jerry whistled. I turned back with a wary expression and walked over to where he was waiting.

“You’re a smart kid, Cass. Just be careful,” he said, confusing the ever living crap out of me as he handed me an unmarked envelope.

I didn’t even bother asking him what he had meant. I just took the envelope, shoved it in my purse, and started walking toward the exit. Big Mike was at the door, waiting for me. Some of the bouncers were serious creepers, but Big Mike seemed like a good guy. No leering, no hitting on me, no trying to fleece me out of my tips.

“Hey, Little Red,” he said when I reached him. “How’s things?”

I smiled up at him.

“I’m ready to go home and crash.”

“You say that every night,” he laughed.

“It’s the truth.”

He walked me all the way to my beat-to-shit Honda Civic.

“I owe you, Big Mike.”

“You don’t owe me shit, Little Red,” he said good-naturedly. “Be safe drivin’ home.”

“I always am.”

After I got in the car, Mike closed the door after me and I hit the locks. Too curious to wait until I got back to my craptastic apartment, I took the envelope from my purse. It was sealed. I slid my thumb under the corner and tore open the paper. Looking inside, I gasped.

Crisp hundred-dollar bills. This would cover my over-priced rent for the next month—at least. Paper clipped to the bottom of the stack of bills was a business card. My hands shook as I slipped it out of the paperclip and turned it over.

James McDevitt
.

S
trip clubs. If memory served, Bennett had called them my “weakness.” That, or my “place of residence.” He had been right. He was always right. That was Ryan Bennett, for you, though. My roommate from freshman year of undergrad was one holier-than-thou son of a bitch. I laughed as I thought of the “advice” I had received from Alex, his eighteen-year-old
twoo wuv
—who must have been at least twenty-one or twenty-two by now.

Stop expecting the worst out of people, and try believing that someone out there will love you for who you are.
Blah, blah, blah.

That pair had been made for one another. Of course, I
had
thought about fucking her, for all of five seconds before common sense had kicked in. Bennett’s scandalous little fall from grace had made it even easier to get under his skin.
Falling in love
with a naïve little freshman in one of his classes? After ten years of his self-righteousness bullshit, I had enjoyed fucking with him. He was so easy to wind up—he had even stopped talking to me for the better part of six months. Something about life being too short for my bullshit.

The fact that he had come around meant maybe he had realized that no one—not even him—was perfect. That, or Papa Bennett’s cancer was causing Ryan to re-examine his sanctimonious douche-baggery. I felt for the guy. I could be a total prick—as I had been accused of being by many of the fairer sex—but it
was
his old man staring down death.

If I’d had a different relationship with my father, maybe I would give a rat’s ass what the fuck happened to him. No, that wasn’t accurate. I
wanted
to see my father go to hell, preferably screaming and in flames.

The truth was that I didn’t have a deep connection with anyone. Calling it a result of my childhood would have been pretentious psycho-babble. I liked it that way. A lack of emotional bullshit kept things simple. I was in the market for a good time, not drama.

I spent my life in airports and strip clubs in different cities. I referred to my part of the business as
client management
. Client management was a polite way of saying I mind-fucked people. Where the talent came in was making it all look like one long party full of naked, willing participants and expensive alcohol. I didn’t discriminate. Gay, straight, bi, man, woman—I was the guy who had made the party happen.

Tonight had just been about unwinding. A little strip club off I-80. It was quiet, out of the way, and it stocked my usual flavor—dumb, dyed blonde, and desperate for my dick. Kinda like Bennett’s ex, but that was another story.

At the end of the day, I just wanted to turn it all off. Have a good drink and bury my dick balls-deep in pussy and fuck until she screamed “
Yes! God! Yes!
” The who of it didn’t matter. Strippers had been my
Eureka!
moment in college. Commitment-free and plentiful. It was a mutually beneficial relationship.

Destiny or Faith or Jade would get enough money to fuel whatever habit it was she was stripping to support—be it drugs, shopping, or gambling—and I would get a no-strings-attached fuck. I didn’t fuck the single moms—too much baggage—but I did tip them enough on most nights to feed their kids for six months. Because I could.

Most guys I came across who did strippers or prostitutes chose their bedmates because, deep down, they hated woman. Naturally, they couldn’t make a woman come if their lives depended on it—or they straight up didn’t give a fuck if the other parties involved enjoyed themselves. To me, there was no goddamned point if I wasn’t making a woman scream as her pussy tightened around my dick.

The cocktail waitress from tonight? All I had wanted was to drag her into my lap, pull her panties to the side, and watch her face as she slipped onto my dick.

Instead, I was leaning against the hood of the Tesla and watching as the big bouncer escorted her to her car. I had given the bartender a couple of bills to find out her full name.
Cassia Flynn
.

Cass. Or Little Red to the bouncer.

She sat down in the driver’s seat and looked down. She was opening the envelope I had left with the bartender. A few seconds later, her head popped up and she looked around with an expression of shock and suspicion. What I wasn’t expecting was for her to burst into tears. Within a minute, she had pulled herself together and was starting up the shit-box she was driving.

There was definitely a story there.

While I liked my fucking to be commitment-free, I also enjoyed a challenge—and Cassia Flynn was going to be a fucking challenge. I could feel it.

A minute later, a dickhead in a monster truck pulled up and laid on the horn. The night’s main-stage entertainment came teetering out of the club in her stilettoes and climbed into the cab.

That was another thing I avoided—cheating whores. Not my style. I had zero interest in monogamy, but I wasn’t going to be anyone’s back-door man. Bennett had once called monogamy my kryptonite, but just because Wonder Boy was desperate to settle into domestic bliss didn’t make it my fucking life’s goal.

My rules were simple.

One: Consenting adults.

Two: No virgins, no attached broads. I’d made an exception for Bennett’s ex when they’d been together, but that had been to prove a point. Namely, that my friend had been about to marry a cheating whore. Gretchen. What a fucking harpy. He should have thanked me for fucking her.

Three: Birth control.

Four: Never get involved.

Five: Never mix business with pleasure.

Six: Clean bill of health, in writing.

Of course, people did lie about their STD history, in which case it was very useful to have a competent hacker to rifle their health records. If they weren’t getting tested monthly, they were suspect. If they wouldn’t produce a clean STD report, which I was more than willing to provide, then they were a no-go.

Papa McDevitt, health insurance company CEO and dickface extraordinaire, would publically frown upon such flagrant HIPAA violations—but the health insurance industry was all about ass fucking the general populace in the most painful ways possible to increase its bottom line, not to mention CEO bonuses.

If I was an unrepentant prick, then Papa McDevitt was Satan in all his hoofed and horned glory.

I texted Matt Irving. He wasn’t my business partner. He wasn’t my friend. He was more the younger brother I’d never had. He was also my bitch, for all intents and purposes, receiving calls and texts at all hours to hack whoever I needed him to hack. Not that Irving was poorly compensated for being on-call whenever I needed him to be.

Tonight, I sent him the general details: full name, the university she most likely attended, general age bracket. All I wanted were any red flags. Then I got in the car and started driving back toward the house. Bennett had nearly shat himself upon hearing of my purchase. I had, years ago, accused him of settling into rural domesticity. That was before I had discovered this little college town had its merits, including fuckable little redheads who apparently stripped at clubs off the interstate to support their education.

The good thing about my “job,” which hadn’t been so much a job as an investment since going public, was that I never really had to be anywhere in particular at any specific time. Then there was my inheritance. Great-granddad had made a fucking mint in timber, or at least that was the story. Rumors, which were probably closer to the truth, had it that the real money had been made by great-great-granddad, who had been a bit of a bastard himself, so no one talked about that part of the family history—hence, I was James McDevitt IV, not James McDevitt V.

Long story short: I was what people often referred to as a “lucky bastard” with a trust fund that Papa McDevitt couldn’t fuck with.

Add onto that the fact that the Internet and tech start-up I was a partner in had gone from longshot to a multi-billion-dollar IPO, causing a truly ridiculous amount of money to rain from the sky. On paper, I was worth twenty billion more than Papa McDevitt—and he was a rich motherfucker. Operative word being
motherfucker
.

Working for worthless stock options suddenly hadn’t seemed like such “a colossally idiotic idea,” as my father had called it when I had taken tech geek Chris Hanover and turned his ideas into a multi-billion-dollar venture. My father was old school, and the only thing in life that mattered was cold, hard cash. Before Hanover Tech, Papa McDevitt had hoped I would become a lobbyist—to further his own aspirations.

And like I had told him back then—fuck that shit.

As I exited the interstate and drove through town, I could admit my appreciation for the almost complete stillness of a large, rural agricultural school in the middle of the summer. Sure, a couple of kids were still stumbling around the streets after the bars had closed—but that was about it.

I pulled into the garage, got out, and walked over to plug in. I had bought a Tesla and a house in the ’burbs all in one summer. Maybe Bennett was rubbing off on me. Next up, I’d be in
lurv
with some little college co-ed, thus heralding the Apocalypse.

I walked inside and looked around the modest little one-story. There was something to be said for coming home alone to a bottle of Macallan M I had lifted off the old man. Bastard had gotten it at auction for an unholy sum. It hadn’t been hard to guess the combination to the safe at his house in the Bahamas. 02-06-19-11. Ronald Reagan’s birthday.

I poured two fingers and sat on the sofa, raising my glass in salute to Papa McDevitt.

Bennett had never understood why I had always fucked with the old man as much as I had over the years. I still remembered my buddy’s sanctimonious shit in sophomore year when I had rented a Bentley on the old man’s tab and left it in the Tenderloin District of SF. Bennett’s family had its own demons—dead oldest son would fuck up anybody’s shit—but his family bullshit couldn’t touch mine.

The whisky soured on my tongue as I thought about my old man and his “proclivities.” An image of the girl from the club tonight caused me to crack my knuckles. My father was on wife number five, but his tastes outside of marriage ran on the young side, and consent was certainly questionable, given the sheer quantity of sedatives he had access to, his innate depravity, and the fact that he was as old as Monty Burns.

His wives, past and present—how had they coped with Pop? My mother? Suicide—though, it hadn’t been ruled such publically. After her? My guess was alcohol and healthy doses of pills, followed by powdered substances and apathy.

Maybe that was why I had given Bennett such shit about his conquest with his little freshman years back. The difference between him and my father, though, was that he had been twenty-eight to her eighteen and had thought he was in love with her. He still was in love with her more than three years later, if I believed the “official” announcement of their engagement. I knew full well that he had proposed more than three years ago, perhaps something Alex Reed hadn’t wanted to broadcast to her nearest and dearest at the tender age of eighteen.

Despite his scandal, Bennett was not the devil incarnate, unlike my father. Papa McDevitt was, I knew firsthand, incapable of love, familial or otherwise. He existed to fuck people over. Hence, health insurance CEO.

For anyone idealistic or ignorant enough to believe that new health insurance laws could protect the masses from the cannibalistic likes of him, dear old dad had armies of lawyers, politicians, and lobbyists in his pocket, all suing the government at every turn to protect his profit margins and the vomit-inducing bonuses his sociopathy has reaped.
Screw the sick and bankrupt the middle class!
That was my father’s motto.

My phone buzzed, and I looked down, studying Irving’s prelim report. I was starting to believe in fate, kismet, providence. Cassia Flynn’s father, Patrick Flynn, had been remanded to federal lock-up for embezzlement, attempted bribery, and a laundry list of other white-collar crimes. Prior to her college education, young Cassia had been raised by her mother, who had remarried while the girl was in high school.

Ms. Flynn was soon-to-be twenty-four. She also happened to be more than a year short on credits toward an undergraduate degree after being forced to drop classes at the university at the end of her junior year. Apparently, mommy and step-daddy had pulled all funding at the last possible moment while their stock portfolio happened to be doing quite well. Ah, and Mr. Agnew was still claiming her as a dependent on his tax returns—
nice
. And now this girl was working at a strip club off I-80.

Well, well.
Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Agnew on your parental decision-making
.

I made a mental note to have Irving dig deeper into the Agnews’ finances—because it was time for a little comeuppance of the McDevitt variety. Ryan Bennett had always believed any fuckery I brought down on other people was merely a symptom of my disregard for the human race. Not so. To be exact, I lived to fuck over only the people who truly deserved it—and those who thought they had purchased their way above the fray of everyday life. No one was immune.

I didn’t see myself as superior in any way. I was a sinner like all the rest. If I hadn’t been, I would have handed the little cocktail waitress from earlier in the evening a check for her studies as my good deed for the day and then left her the fuck alone.