Love & Geckos (multiple-author collaboration)

Chapter 18: Alyssa

"There was an incident at the pet store," Alyssa said shortly. She didn't feel like explaining to her mortal enemy about how she had single-handedly caused the escape of over 200 geckos, the collapse of an entire pet store, and thousands of dollars worth of property damage.

Unfortunately for her, Jordan was more perceptive than she'd given him credit for. "Don't you work at the bubble tea shop? Are you working at the pet store too? That's a lot of jobs."

"It's a long story." Alyssa took off her sweater and started squeezing the water back into the fountain.

"We got time. I mean, my grandma is probably busy buying all the shoes that might remotely have a chance of fitting us, which I'm sure will take awhile."

Alyssa shook her head. She had finished wringing out her sweater, and was now starting on her shoes. This proved considerably less straightforward, given that they were, well, shoes, and not exactly designed to be wrung like a sweater.

"Need some help?" said Dakota. "Maybe if you whacked them against the fountain—"

"I don't need your help."

"Okay..."

Alyssa turned to Dakota, brushing her wet hair from her eyes. Even being dunked in the fountain hadn't done much to quell its natural frizz, and she knew she really must look like a swamp thing. No wonder that mother had dragged her little boy away.

But that didn't matter now. Alyssa had suddenly realized what Dakota's being here meant—or rather, what it didn't mean: namely that if he was here with one of his pals, then he wasn't with Sandra!

It didn't matter if she loathed the idea of them being together. If he had ditched Sandra and broken her heart, he was going down.

"You!"

She jabbed a finger at Dakota's chest.

He looked down at it in confusion. "Uh... me?"

"Where's Sandra?"

"... At home, probably? Why?"

She barked what was possibly the least amused laugh she could muster and advanced on him, arms folded, lips drawn back in a snarl. "What kind of boyfriend just abandons his Valentine on Valentine's Day?"

Dakota blinked at her, a deer caught in the headlights.

Then he said, with an uncomfortable shrug:

"I guess it's ok to talk about it, since Valentine's Day is nearly over. We're not actually dating. It was just a fake thing we set up so random dudes would stop asking Sandra out for Valentine's Day. They kept harassing her about it, and it was driving her nuts."

"Oh," said Alyssa.

It was as though the bottom had dropped out of her stomach, leaving her dinner sloshing somewhere around the level of her pelvis. Dropping her shoe, she shuffled back to the bench and sat down.

"Um, are you okay?" said Dakota.

No. She was damn well not okay! She was barely scraping by financially, she had just single-handedly demolished a pet store, she had a metric fuckton of geckoes to catch—and now she didn't even have her self-righteous anger against Dakota to keep her going.

But that wasn't even the biggest reason her life sucked right now.

The worst part—the very worst part of all this—was that Sandra had chosen Dakota for her stupid scheme. She could have asked Alyssa to help her deal with all the people who were bothering her, but she hadn't. Hell, she hadn't even mentioned her plan to Alyssa at all. Somehow, that stung worse than seeing her ask Dakota out to begin with.