Page 6 of A Favor Owed

Give me a break, I text back.She doesn’t look anything like her pics. Didn’t want to screw it up. Some of us aren’t pros at this.

Nice going. Keep tabs. Keep me posted.

Yep.

Unwittingly, my thoughts return to Angela Pines. The girl with a delicate oval face, silvery purple hair, and turquoise eyes. She looks like a unicorn who turned into a human. Her hair has been up every day since school started, due to the heat, I suppose. I wonder if it’s still as long as it was in the pictures. I wonder what it feels like.

Knock it off, Brady McIdiot, I tell myself.

Angela is fascinating and gorgeous but 1,000 percent off-limits. I don’t want to touch her or her world with a ten-foot pole. Her kind have already sucked me into something I want nothing to do with and irrevocably screwed up my life. No matter that even all hot and sweaty she still smells like that Sephora place that guys pretend to hate to be dragged into—Angela Pines is a hard no.

I shake her off and drive home. As much as I dislike California, I have to admit that my apartment here is a lot nicer than the shoebox I had in the Bronx. Best of all, it’s roommate free. It’s in a four-story building with a pool, exercise room, and groundskeepers. My one-bedroom apartment is on the top floor and has central air and a view of the Sierra Nevada foothills, the two highest of which give Dos Torres its name.

I stow my backpack in my bedroom and do some work before getting ready for the weekly law student Friday night bar crawl. It won’t involve Finnegan’s, which is fine. I don’t want to seem like a stalker. Even though technically I kind of am.

Finnegan’s will wait until Saturday, at which time I’ll surreptitiously observe Angela and see if I can pick up any useful details. Nothing obvious.

Good plan.

And like all good plans, this one is destined to bite me in the ass.

Chapter Three

Angela

Getting drinks with Brady has almost made me late for work. After leaving him at Finnegan’s, I hurry back to campus, unlock my secondhand beach cruiser, and bike the twenty minutes to my apartment. I use that term loosely. It’s actually a rundown converted garage on my landlady’s equally rundown property on the outskirts of Dos Torres. Lizette inherited the property from her parents, but thanks to a nasty divorce, a minimum-wage job at a diner, and a drug-addicted adult son, she doesn’t have the money to keep it up. Fortunately for me, that means cheap rent, few questions, and no roommates.

Lizette lives on the main part of the property, a three-bedroom ranch house that may have once been lovely but desperately needs a new coat of paint, a new roof, and a carpenter with magical powers. The front lawn is various shades of brown, including piles of dark brown, courtesy of her son’s Rottweiler, Ganja. The backyard, which abuts a vast expanse of dry wasteland that had once been cattle pasture, is equally hideous, with rusted old lawn furniture and dying fruit trees.

I unlock my door and bring my bike inside. It’s dark, all the blinds closed to keep out the sun and the broiling heat. I switch on the single window unit, and it greets me with its sputtering, watery, chugging noise. The carpet has to be twenty years old, a dull gray with brown stains that I hope aren’t blood, or worse. The popcorn ceiling is discolored by cigarette smoke and chipping in places. The beige paint on the walls has water stains from the leaking windowsills.

I go into the kitchen and open the rusting refrigerator to grab a bottle of water that I proceed to chug. The peeling linoleum floor is cool on my bare feet, and I lean against the faded, chipped Formica counter and feel the sweat slide down my face and neck and back.

I make a quick salad and eat it at the cloth-upholstered bistro table that I found outside the neighbor’s house with the trash. As I eat, I think of the mansion where I lived my entire life until three months ago. It’s everything this place isn’t: opulent, spacious, cool in summer, warm in winter, every appliance new and gleaming, every piece of furniture as stylish as it is uncomfortable. It has a pool, an outdoor kitchen, a tennis court, and a four-car carriage-house garage. Each bedroom has an en suite bathroom with a stone-floor shower and jacuzzi tub.

It’s also probably bugged and no doubt being watched by FBI agents.

I sigh and remind myself of that fact as I make my way to my least favorite part of my apartment: the bathroom. My shower is narrow and as stained and chipped as everything else in this place. I just stopped wearing flip-flops in it a few days ago, more out of resignation than confidence in my cleaning abilities. The water comes out in hot and cold pelting spurts rather than a warm, soothing stream. Nevertheless, it feels good to unbraid my hair, peel off my sweat-drenched clothes, and wash off the dust, heat, and stress of the day.

Once I’m showered, I blow my hair dry. This time I remember to turn off the window unit; the several times I’ve failed to do so have resulted in a blown fuse and the need to go outside to the spider-infested electrical box to flip the switch. By the time I’m dry, deodorized, moisturized, made up, and spritzed with the custom-made Jo Malone perfume I brought from home, it’s almost seven o’clock. Time to go to work.

Kelsey gives me a disapproving look as soon as I walk in the door. “You’ve been holding out on me!” she complains.

“What?” I say.

“Brady McDaniels!” she says, following me as I head to the restroom to change my clothes. “He finally asked you out after two weeks of sniffing around here.”

“We’re in class together, Kelse,” I say, smoothing my braid and refreshing my lip gloss in the cracked mirror. “He asked me to get a drink and that was it.”

“Don’t be so sure about that,” she says, smirking at my reflection.

“Why the hell not?”

“I think he likes you.”

“He seems to like everyone,” I say doubtfully. I head out of the restroom and toward the office, Kelsey in tow. I lock my tote and purse in the desk drawer with Kelsey’s. “He’s just a friendly guy. Besides, I’m not interested.”

“You looked hella interested, girl,” she says. “You looked like you wanted to lick the words coming out of that man’s mouth.”

---