Crystal says, “Cut her some slack, Jake. She got beat up.”
Somehow that sounds sadder in the dull light of a strip club at eight a.m., the sun filtering through a few small dingy windows, while I stand next to a Budweiser sign and a poster advertising happy hour lap dances. Of course I got beat up. Getting knocked around is just an expected part of my life. I want to run away, back to a couple of days ago, when I thought I was a hot young Millennial on the verge of finding her condo on Ocean Boulevard, flirting with a cute scientist.
Ten seconds into this life, and I’m pretty much done. I’m going back to Ocean Boulevard. I’m going to be one of the hottest entrepreneurs in SoCal if it kills me. A little voice in my head says, Maybe that’s what happened last time.
“For real, Mia, you need me to beat him up?” he offers.
“As soon as I figure out who did it, you can totally beat him up.”
“So where’s my office?” I ask Crystal.
Jake laughs at my use of the word office. I saw that coming.
My office is just a storage room in the back of the club. A desk with a computer on it is tucked among boxes, papers, and costumes.
“I think some of your stuff is in here,” Crystal says.
“Where do I live?” I ask.
She shrugs. “I think you slept here some nights. JP’s sometimes. I know you had a place with Jesse for a while, but I’m not sure if you still do. I think you moved out when her boyfriend moved in. That was just last month.” I peek inside the boxes, which appear to be filled with the contents of my life.55 It seems like I might live in the back of GoldRush.
I sift through the boxes until Crystal says, “I have to get back to Kai. Will you drop me off?”
“Sure. And I better get back to JP’s.” Looking around, I can’t help but think that his proposal will be the quickest way out of here.
“You and JP—I just can’t, still.” She starts fanning her face to keep from laugh-crying.
“Why? What about him?”
“How much do you remember about JP?”
“Nothing. I only know what I read online.”
She laughs. “Oh, girl. JP owns GoldRush.”
55 Clothes, shampoo, makeup, a couple of wigs, a leather jacket. I’m not surprising myself with any medical textbooks or volumes of poetry.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
“What?” JP can’t own this place. He’s the king of chocolate! He donates to charities and good causes and…
Crystal stares at me. “Mia, for someone so smart, you are so dumb. Men like JP don’t just own a business. They have a portfolio of investments. You didn’t think he made a billion dollars off of chocolate, did you?”
I look at her, mouth agape. “Actually, I did.”
She laughs.
And why shouldn’t she? It’s comical. I was sheltering him from my reality when he was the secret money behind my abusive employer, GoldRush. I had everything so wrong. So, so wrong. I look around the room, trying to reimagine it with JP walking the floors. “Does he sit here every night in a shiny suit in his very own corner booth?”
“Nuh-uh. Never seen him here. Dude owns a lot of businesses, but his full-time focus is the chocolate company. He has minions who run these side hustles. He doesn’t even know about us. That’s how you scammed him.”
So that means I worked for him in a roundabout way, stole his business name and all of its advertising material, and now I’m dating him? I guess it makes sense that we were fighting in that flashback, especially if the club told him what I was up to. I can barely wrap my mind around it, so I say it out loud and slow. “Let me get this straight. He signed up for the matchmaking app and paid $35,000 to date me,” I say, “when he was already paying me to do books in this club?”
She puts her hands in the air like I’m Beyoncé belting out the lyrics to “Formation” and strutting. “You’re a genius. Straight up!”
I didn’t even take this dude to Red Lobster. Of course, if I’m following Beyoncé’s advice, he hasn’t earned that yet. Maaaaaybe later.
I look around at the club. It is literally a billionaire’s forgotten pocket change. He was in Switzerland skiing while everyone here worked two jobs and couldn’t afford to pay for childcare or get their cavities filled.56
“Girl, you worked for that rock you’re about to get. Don’t let him get away with some chippy little thing.”
I feel lightheaded. Suddenly, I flash back to a conversation I had with Max.
“You have no capacity for making decisions, especially big decisions,” he’d said. “Whatever you do, take it easy. Don’t do anything you can’t undo.”
I recall being offended at that statement.
“People base their decisions off their lived experience, their memories. You don’t have any right now,” he had said.
“If you haven’t noticed, I remember a lot of things,” I had responded.
“That’s true. You remember everything about everyone else. For instance, if someone proposed to one of the Kardashians, you’d be the first person I’d ask. You probably are more aware of their lived experiences and patterns of decision-making than they are.”
Max really is smart.
“One of the most vital purposes of memory is to guide decision-making,” he’d said. “It’s like they say—learn from history, or it’ll repeat itself.”
What do I do?
JP picks this moment to text. I told him I’d be home in an hour, which was almost two hours ago. I have not been the best girlfriend to this man, in so many ways.
He texts: Alone again…WRU?
On my way!
* * *
JP’s been waiting at home for me for hours while I’ve been tooling around LA in his Ferrari, again. I’m being such a jerk, but I laugh at the absurdity of my housebound billionaire. If he wanted to, he could probably have the dealership drop off another Ferrari this morning, a newer model even. Still, I’m a jerk.
I’m sort of impressed with myself for sticking it to the man so hard. I mean, that was one hell of a raise: a $35,000 bonus for one date, plus a billionaire fiancé, and my own company. Props, old me!
But mostly I feel sick. Actually sick. My stomach is all acid and bile, and I’m sweating all over the Ferrari. My thighs are pretty much stuck to the seats. JP really is an innocent babe in the woods who I’ve tricked into marrying me, not that he’s proposed yet. I love the beautiful house and JP seems swell, but I’m not sure I can do it, not without remembering everything I lived through to make me this messed up and angry. And was JP really the one I was mad at? He’s the innocent one, too sweet for his own good. If there’s such a thing as an innocent billionaire…