Random Acts of Hope (5 page)

Plus, I earned more than $400 for a night’s work. If I ha
d
to deliver one package, it was worth it.

Even if it involve
d
seeing Liam.

I could call him. I could email or text or just try to find his address and mail his plastic girlfriend to him. With a DVD copy of
Lars and the Real Girl
.

He want
ed
to see me. Right? He wouldn’t have asked for in-person delivery
otherwise.
 

I ha
d
n’t heard a word from him or his mom since th
e bachelorette party
. Sybil was spitting nails, and stormed out with apologies to the bride that night. She missed Liam’s flesh show, but I suspect that was the point.

The night passed in such a blur and it was hard to believe two weeks had disappeared in a blip. Marian’s pregnancy turned out to be a late period, her cries of happiness and screams for a tampon loud enough to be heard through two floors. Her friends took her out and got her nice and drunk that night.

And the next morning I escorted her to campus health services for an appointment to discuss birth control methods with one of the nurses.

The usual hustle and bustle of the start of the semester kicked in. I felt old. Twenty-four and I felt
old
already, into my second year of grad school. Being a Resident Director was a lot like I imagined motherhood, managing too many details and far too many emotions from other people, and you’re expected to do it all with grace.

A pang, five years old, resonated deep within.
Mother.
 

“You are a mother and always will be,” my grief counselor had told me after the D&C. After I told her I’d planned to keep and raise the baby. At six weeks I’d been unsure. At nine I had panicked. And at ten weeks a calm had descended. I knew what I wanted to do, but I was grateful I also had choices.

Losing the baby to miscarriage hadn’t been anywhere on my list of options.
It took the choice away from me, and while there was a tiny layer of relief, there was so much sorrow.
When the bleeding started and the cramping seized me,
I
realized qui
c
kly that no matter how much we think we’re in control, we aren’t.

And that’s what I grieved most.

A shadow had hung over me then. And now, here it was, re-emerging, hov
er
ing, blocking out the light.
Liam
.

And he wanted to see me “in person.”

Fuck you, Liam. Five years and one baby and you reject me?

I’ll see you on my own terms.

I logged in to my computer and began a search, finding what I needed within a minute.

You show up unexpectedly at
my
job?

One good turn deserves another.

Charlotte

“You sure about this?” Maggie whispered furiously. For a woman with green hair and an attitude bigger than a Pats fan after a win, she seemed surprisingly meek right now.

“Yes, I am. I’m just doing my job.” We were cruising down the Mass Pike toward downtown Boston. Random Acts of Crazy had a gig in a place that impressed me. A bar somewhere between a
frat-boy
pit and
a condemned artist’s studio (with alcohol)
. They were moving up in the world, it seemed. Even with my first paper of the semester staring me in the face like a showdown in a  
Quentin Tarantino
western, I was taking the time to deliver Liam’s goods to him.

Quite publicly.

Maggie looked nervously
at
the back seat.
It was the twentieth time.
 

“Is she…okay back there?” Maggie asked, stretching out the word “she.”

I smoothed my skirt over my legs and tried
to
formulate an answer. Instead, I just rubbed the shiny cloth of my new
purple
dress
against my sweaty palm
. Mod Cloth’s picking
s
were fabulous for my figure, with a small waist and a big chest and butt. Liam used to tell me I had the most luscious—

No.
No
.
I was n
ot going to do this. I wasn’t about to let all those lovely
memories of
compliments sway me. Nor would I think about how he took his time inhaling deeply from my skin, or
how
he stroked me from toe to eyebrow, the lingering trail making me glow….

Damn it.

The dress tied in a red bow right behind my neck, and my hair flowed over it, curled with big rollers like the
fifties
pinup girls wore their hair. Mary Janes were my favorite shoes, and Maggie and I looked like some kind of Battle of the Decades reality show. She was more Marilyn Manson than Marilyn Monroe in her torn black leather and crazy hair.

Our backseat companion wore a t-shirt
someone in college had given me, one of the earlier prints for Random Acts of Crazy. “I hear they’re from your hometown,” Jared had said, beer goggles firmly on back then. He seemed to have thought that giving me a t-shirt would get him laid, but instead he got a sneer and twelve hours of sobbing from me.
 

He’d wandered out of my room and found another sophomore for a booty call. But the t-shirt remained.

Now Esmerelda (Maggie named her) sat at a half-slump, firmly secured in her seatbelt, face in a permanent expression of surprise. We’d made her up for her first date, because Liam deserved only the best.

Random Acts of Crazy t-shirt to show she was a groupie?
Check
.

Enough make up to make her look like a Bourbon Street stripper?
Check
.

G-string that would cause most women to be cut in two via anus?
Check
.

Maggie had found an old pair of neon puffy pants (“
Eightie
s party at my old school.
What?
”) and Esmerelda looked gorgeous. Her plastic brown hair didn’t do much for her, but the makers of the blowup sex doll had given her lovely red lips and a mouth that turned into a six-inch tunnel, a perfect cylinder that touched the back of her head.

Who needs brains when you
have a mouth like that?
 

The interchan
g
e between I-90 and I-95 meant we needed to slow down and pay the toll. As I stopped the car and reached out with my money and the ticket, the toll booth operator, a
Chinese dude
about our age, barely looked up.

He did look up
just
enough, though, and did a double take.

“Nice friend. She looking for a hook-up?”

Maggie snorted.

“She’s taken, actually,” I said.

He gave me a
WTF?
l
ook and peered in the back seat. “Nice shoes she’s wearing.” Maggie had given some freshman a pair of thrift sh
o
p white leather sandals and told them we were having a Mardi Gras contest.
The freshman took them back to her room and together with a bunch of friends produced a masterpiece you could only find on Pinterest.
 

Smuggling Esmerelda out of my apartment had been
second
hardest part
of the night
.
Delivering Liam’s new “girlfriend” would be the hardest.
 

Five years.

“
Have fun in town,” the toll guy said as he handed me my change. I hit the gas and Maggie laughed.
 

“Five fucking years and all he says to me is that he’s buying female sex replacements and wants me to hand-deliver them,” I muttered as we sped over the bridge toward Newton. “Fucker.”

“You don’t have to do this.” Maggie’s voice
wa
s so reasonable all it d
id wa
s make me see red.

“Oh, I have to do this. You want me to deliver your sex hole ‘in person,’ Liam? Fuck you. You’re getting Esmerelda all right.” I was seething (understandably) and a little illogical (okay…a lot). But no—just no way I was letting him use me like this. No mindfucking allowed. I’d let him do that to me for five years and now…what did this mean?

Cracking open the mind of Liam McCarthy to understand his motives was something I’d spent far too much time trying to do. Understanding him was pointless.

Challenging him face to face was long overdue.

“Hold on, Esme,” I said as I floored it. “You’re getting your cherry popped tonight.”

Liam

I had to hand it to Darla—this new place was a step up. A giant chasm down from our stage on the island of Eden, but a step up from the usual Boston-area dives.

A real cover charge, too, which mean
t
we’d get a flat fee for performing plus a percentage of what came in at the door. Real money for once, and not just enough for a few beers and a tank of gas. If she kept booking us like this, Sam and I could slow down or even stop the stripping jobs.

Sound checks were in place and Darla was at the door, hand
ing out free download cards for new songs
and cha
t
ting up the customers. She ate that shit up, which was fine. Made her useful. Kept her busy. Tonight, Joe was stuck in Philly, going through some lame-ass law thing he swore he couldn’t get out of. That meant Tyler was here to fill in
on bass
.
The man was a walking
mural, so tatted up he looked like the practice canvas for
Miami Ink
.
 

I had started calling him Frown because that’s all he did.
The guy warmed up, played, got paid, and left. No hanging out, no partying, nothing.
He was a
n inked-up
frown in human form, and while his performance had definitely improved over the handful of months he’d sat in for Joe, he was about as much fun as a wet, dead ra
c
coon.

“
Place is filling up, isn’t it?” Sam said, appearing at my elbow. He chugged down a half-liter of water in a handful of gulps.
 

“Amy here?”

“Nope. Papers to write.” Sam chewed on his inner cheek for a minute and said, “Charlotte, huh?” Sam was the last person I wanted to talk to about this. Hell,
everyone
was the last person I wanted to talk to about this.
 

“Shut up,” I muttered, looking around the rapidly filling room. I spotted Cari from the coffee shop. She had some nice cupcakes. And by cupcakes I mean
t
tits
.

“Liam!” she said, waving wildly. I shot Sam a
too bad,
so sad
look and sauntered off, my eye on my bedmate for the night.

“You have to pay for her!” Darla shouted suddenly, making me turn away from
Cari and toward a growing commotion at the door.
 

“
If I pay for her, does she need to meet the two-drink minimum?” said a very familiar voice. A voice that made my gut clench and my neck go tight, among other body parts.
 

G
od damn Charlotte.

The bar was dark, the lights dimmed in preparation for the stage lights to take precedence when it came to commanding attention. My contacts had started to dry out and my vision was already blurred a little. Bad genetics from my dad. Myopia was handed down like a curse between men in the generations of my Irish ancestors, and right now I couldn’t squint enough to make her out.

It didn’t help that I was on month three of cheap monthly contact lenses, but when you’re broke, you do what you have to do. Can’t exactly get on stage wearing geeky glasses.

“She looks like she can hold her liquor,” Darla said in a high,
giggly
voice. Who the hell were they talking about? I took a few steps forward and raucous laughter filled the room.

A
s
if on cue, Darla and a group of women around her parted to reveal Charlotte, some chick with bright green hair, and another woman who seemed pretty stiff and formal. Dark brown hair. Bright red, painted lips and a nice flush to her cheeks. Man, she was short, and wearing some kind of bright pants.

Charlotte stood on one side of her, hugging the woman to her like she was a life raft.

“Hey, Mac!” Darla shouted toward the bar where the manager was setting up a line of shots. “Add a te
q
uila for our friend here. What’ser name?” she asked Charlotte, who was smirking with her lip turned into a twitching smile.

“Esmerelda.” The green-haired chick caught my eye and went still. Who in the hell…?

“Esmer
e
lda, it’s so nice to meet you,” Darla said with a fake kind of formality. She shook her hand and the woman’s hand was stiff and limp at the same time. Weird. Already shitfaced before 9 p.m.

Hmmm. My kind of girl.

“Esme is here to see her new boyfriend,” Charlotte said in a voice made of chocolate and velvet. I tensed. Who was
Charlotte’s
boyfriend? I’d expected a call from her after I made that order at her party. Not that I could normally afford to blow that kind of cash on stupid sex toys, but it seemed like a great way to see if she’d see me.

Okay, frankly, it was a wuss move. If I wanted to see her I should have just said so. Called. Emailed. Sent a message by owl. Whatthefuckever. Instead I played a little game and—

And now here she was.

“New boyfriend? Lucky man,” Darla said. She threw an arm around the little woman and whispered something in her ear. It made Charlotte and Green Hair howl.

I hadn’t heard that laugh in five years. I missed it. A slow burn
c
rept up from my solar plexus through my scalp. Five years of being fucked over by the only woman I’d ever loved was long enough to go w
i
thout some answers.

Two more steps closer and I blinked furiously, the dry air and smoke machine tests really making it impossible to see.

“Liam!” Darla exclaimed, leaving her post to come over and give me a side hug. “Have you met Esmerelda?” She giggled.

“Actually,” Charlotte said slowly, leaning on the little woman and taking slow steps toward me, “this is Liam’s
e
mail-order bride.”