I can't decide if I like this or hate this.
The second floor was unexpectedly calm, which made a little bit of sense since there were less people. The music they played there wasn't anything that people could dance to, but the kind of music that you'd just want to kick back and relax to. The VIP section was filled with C-listers: fashion models, record producers, one-hit wonders and the like. I was surprised by how familiar Cody seemed with so many people there. I was even more surprised by his ability to smile. But I was most surprised by his nonchalance towards people mistaking me for his girlfriend. There was one guy in particular (Joe? Joel? Jules?), a producer who didn't look like a producer at all, who ended the conversation with a gracious, "See you around, Cody, and again – you and your girl – beautiful couple, man. Love it."
I maintained my forced smile until Jude was out of earshot. Then I turned my attention to Cody. "What's up with that? That's like the third person to call me your girlfriend. Do people honestly not believe that men and women can be friends anymore?"
"To be honest, I didn't notice at all. I'm still stuck on what Amara said earlier. What was it that she said? You remember?" A teasing grin spread across his face and I couldn't roll my eyes any harder. "Just... something about my voice? And how you..."
"You're so annoying." I groaned out of embarrassment, much to his childish joy. "Anyways, where's Amara? I keep losing track of her."
"Over there." He vaguely gestured to a corner with a nod, but I spotted them quickly after that.
The second floor was filled with these funny egg loveseats. They looked a bit like the ones you'd see in a movie, the kind that an evil mastermind turns around dramatically in while petting an equally evil white Persian cat. They were a little wider than that, though, supposedly wide enough to fit a couple. Cody and I tried sitting in one together since there was a complete lack of seating, but at some point he stood and let me stretch out. My feet were aching from my heels but I refused to complain. But Amara and Marlon looked cozy. She was cradling one of his arms to his chest while he gripped one of her legs as if it were his own. I sincerely hoped that she wasn't planning on going home with him, since she was my ride there. I watched them for a moment before looking back up at Cody, who had an elbow propped on the top of my egg chair. "Is this bad?"
"Is what bad?"
"Is it bad for you to... like, talk to clients? Outside of the case, I mean."
"Mm, it's not preferred. But it's bound to happen when you're working within a smaller community. I don't think about it too much. If it gets unprofessional at some point then I handle it then." He wasn't a fan of eye contact, I noticed. He was always looking somewhere other than me. He seemed very interested in something in Marlon and Amara's direction, but I couldn't figure out what it was.
"Has it ever gotten unprofessional?"
He hesitated. Then, with an intriguing amount of heaviness in his voice: "One time."
"Oh my God, was it a girl? Am I allowed to ask that? Or was it like a fight? It's kind of risky doing surveillance on people, I'll bet, especially if you're supposed to keep watch on some big burly guy and you get caught."
"No, no. Not a fight. It... it was a girl, kind of. You could say it had to do with a girl."
"Can I ask what happened? Like the gist of it? Probably not, right?"
"I could tell you."
"But you're not going to." I finished. I tried to make the disappointment obvious with the vain hope that he'd cave in and tell me what happened.
After a moment of clear deliberation, he said suddenly, "No, I will."
I didn't say anything. I was at the edge of my seat and trying to not look too desperate. Cody cleared his throat, looked around very carefully before admitting, "It did get unprofessional. There was... there was this one girl. And I found out that she had this weird, like, thing for voices..."
"I'm kind of starting to hate you." I sighed like I was exhausted and tried to not crack a smile at his poor attempt to stifle his laughter. "You're just tickling yourself over there. I thought you were a mature guy, but apparently I was wrong."
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry." He recovered quickly and brought a hand to his chest for effect. I recalled the small characters tattooed on the knuckle of each finger. "I'll be nice to you. You have to admit that you're easy to tease, though. Your ears get really red."
I touched my ears self-consciously. "Just be nice to me!"
"Aw, don't be embarrassed. It's kind of cute."
"Just kind of."
"Take whatever compliment you can get from me."
I made a face before remembering that I had a question for him. I pointed at Cody's hand. "What do those tattoos say? On your fingers."
Cody glanced down at his hand like he was surprised he had one. Then he presented me with his closed fist, knuckles up. "A really rough translation would be 'You are alone.' That's the spirit of what it means, anyways. Hangul is different from the English alphabet, obviously, so it doesn't read the way most English speakers would think it does."
"That's so morbid."
"I'm a morbid person."
"Hangul." I tried to store away that word for knowledge's sake. "Are you fluent in Korean?"
"I am. Born and raised in Busan." He drummed a beat on the top of the egg chair with his opposite hand.
"I wish I was bilingual. I do know some Hebrew though, but I had to for my bat mitzvah. I'm not fluent in anything, though. Nothing but English." I leaned back into my chair.
"That's interesting to me, though. Haven't met a lot of Hebrew speakers." Cody said. After a moment, he perked up suddenly and announced, "I'm going to step out on the balcony for a smoke."
"Go ahead! Leave me alone like everyone else in my life." I said with an intentionally weepy voice.
"You can join me if you don't mind poisoning yourself." He joked.
"I do mind. I'll be alone."
Alone. Speaking of that. I glanced over to Amara and Marlon's direction once again. My eyes nearly fell out of my head. They were kissing, but much more passionately and feverishly than I would have expected. It was somewhere between kissing and a make-out session. I glanced behind me towards Cody's direction, and I found that he hadn't even made it to the balcony successfully. Instead, he was standing about two feet from the double glass doors and had his head ducked down while he spoke into a phone. He glanced in Amara and Marlon's direction for a second, but then he noticed me and fully retreated onto the balcony.
He's been looking at them a lot. I looked back at the new couple.
I glanced at the balcony. Did he say he was on a case? He didn't confirm or deny that, did he? Is he targeting Marlon, maybe? Or am I just being paranoid?
There was only one way to find that out. I looked him up in my phone, which I realized was something that I should've done a while before, and found within the minute that Marlon Reeves had a long-term girlfriend. He had the same girlfriend for three years, apparently. The last photo of them had been taken three days prior, but that didn't mean they were still together. It was a head scratcher. But I wasn't going to risk it. My method of getting friends out of parties and clubs had been perfected over the years. I stood up, marched over to them and played up the ache in the heel of my foot to the best of my ability. I yelped and practically threw myself onto Amara's lap. It forced her and Marlon to detangle.
"Zo, you okay?" Amara attempted to pull me up to my feet.
"Yeah, no. No, no, I'm super drunk. I really want to go home, 'mara. Can we go? I'm super sorry guys, I'm just..." I did my best impression of a whiny drunk girl and let my head loll around.
"No, it's totally fine." Amara grumpily reassured me as she stood up. "I've been a bad friend this whole outing anyways. I drove us here and ended up drinking so..."
"You want me to call a cab for you guys?" Marlon touched her arm. He sounded surprisingly concerned.
"Yeah, that would be great, babe."
Babe? Amara released me on to the couch and resumed banter with Marlon. Since I accomplished what I had set out to do, I took the chance to say goodbye to Cody, who was finally smoking that cigarette on the balcony. I almost didn't say anything to him at all the moment I noticed that he was talking to some leggy modelesque brunette, but he ended the conversation quickly to wave me over. I opened a door and awkwardly stuck a head out. "Sorry to butt in."
"You're not butting in at all." Cody replied cheerfully. "Did you change your mind about that secondhand smoke?"
The brunette looked annoyed by my very presence.
"Oh, not at all. I'm still not interested in long-term health issues, unfortunately. I just wanted to tell you that me and Amara are going to be heading out soon. So this is me saying goodbye." I gave him a little wave. "So, good night."
"All right. I'll give you a call by Monday, okay?"
I gave him a thumbs-up and flashed a smile at his annoyed model friend before departing. By the time I returned to Amara on the opposite end of the floor, Marlon had already made the call.
Amara and I took an excellent nap in the cab and woke up on my block feeling even more exhausted. We agreed that the best thing to do for that night was to just spend it at my apartment, and we'd figure out how to get her car back the next morning. Amara passed out on my couch without saying a single word to me. After forcing a pillow under her head and a blanket over her body, I crawled into my own bed. My feet were singing with joy over being freed from the confines of my shoes. My skin was a little sweaty and sticky, and my whole body felt a little icky. I enjoyed the idea that there was finally someone else in the house with me. There was finally some other drunk asleep on my couch aside from me.
But my bed was still empty. The pillow to the right of my head still smelled faintly of Cameron's signature cologne. The sheets and the blankets smelled like him even after being washed, and I couldn't tell if he was that deeply embedded in all the fabrics of the apartment or if he was just that deeply embedded in my mind. The scent of him made my eyes prick. Please don't cry. I spent a whole night trying to escape him and somehow it all came back to him. Six years couldn't be swept under the rug that easily.
Please come back.
But don't. I didn't know if I could deny him. I didn't want to think of myself as the kind of girl that would accept someone that despicable back into her life so easily. I didn't really want him to come back.
Like every other night that week, I fell asleep with him on my mind.
I felt like shit in the morning. This time it wasn't a hangover, but a general bodyache from sleeping in crazy positions. My hair was crunchy from being curled with an iron the night before, and some of my eye make-up hadn't been successfully removed. After rubbing my face down again, I walked into the living room to find that Amara was wide awake and equally as bad looking. One of her fake eyelashes was hanging onto her eyelid for dear life. "You look horrible," she said.
"You're a stunner this morning too." I shot back while I plopped into the armchair perpendicular to the couch. She was watching the news channel.
She smiled. I smiled back. "Last night was pretty great."
"Mm." I crossed my legs. "Aside from the fact that you left your car there, I had a run-in with a weirdo, spent the entire time being weirdly close with the detective and you may have hooked up with a guy that could have a girlfriend. Possibly."
Amara sat upright at the last note. "Girlfriend?"
"Listen, I actually don't know for sure. But I wanted to get you out of that situation somehow. I looked Marlon up last night and all of his main biographies and social media accounts make mention of this girl. She's like a glamour model or something and they've been going at it for three years. I don't know if they were still together last night, like, if she's still in the picture. That's just what I read, so don't be too upset. Best thing is to just ask him." I rubbed my face. "I had this weird feeling that Cody was there to do surveillance on him."
"You think so?" Amara groaned as she fell back into the couch. "That bastard."
"Marlon or Cody?"
"The both of them! Shit. You know, I knew Cody was up to something. I love him because he's helped me out so much with Marcus's bum ass, but he is so shady too. I felt like someone was looking at us the whole time but I figured it was just in my head."
I didn't really know what to say. "Do you want coffee?"
She sighed and draped an arm over her face. "Yeah, sure. Let's figure out how to get my car back."
I hopped up from the seat to go make us some coffee. In a completely airheaded moment, I suggested, "Why not just borrow my mom's car? I'll drive us there and you can get it and then we'll drive back."
"That'd be perfect, but isn't your mom mad at you?"
"Right." I paused. Then I continued with my coffee-making work. "Whatever. I'll just have to sort it out with her today, then. We need to get your car back somehow, right?"
My life kind of sucks.
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A/N: Eh... not crazy about this chapter. School has been so hectic lately. But I figured it would just be good to force something to be out there. Once I complete this story (which won't be for a while, I think), I'm going to totally edit and redo the chapters. I want everything to be a little more polished.
Peep Amara's romantic dilemma on the side! From right to left: Marlon, Amara and Marcus (hint: he is not out of the picture just yet)!