Page 2 of My Fearless Fake Fling

No, I wasn’t proud to admit that when I found out about New Zealand Kiki, I’d done some internet stalking, and her instaphoto page she’d left open to the public. I pressed the app button, waiting for it to load completely. Then I typed in her name. The first picture to load was a picture of her outstretched left hand sporting a giant teardrop diamond.

Very pretty. I always knew Brian would have good taste.

Not sure of the protocol here, did I leave a comment of congratulations to show no hard feelings? She’d written a caption beneath the picture:One and a half years together and he finally proposed.

Wait. That could not be right.

He’d only known her for a little less than a year. A year and a half ago, he’d still been with me.

Confused, I scrolled down to read some of the comments. One of them from Deirdre, a girl I considered a close friend:Congratulations, Kiki! I know it had to be hard to wait for him to dump crazy Kami, but it was worth the wait.

Dump crazy Kami?

So it wasn’t a typo. They’d really been together a year and a half.

The rapid blinking, which usually worked to stave off unwanted tears, helped not one bit. Tears rimmed my eyes and began to spill faster than I could wipe them away.

There, feeling more stupid than hurt, I sat sobbing my eyes out like a total loser as the parking lot emptied around me.

“I need a drink.” Only the empty car heard me lamenting on how my whole life had been a lie. How many other friends knew about Brian cheating?

At a time like this, it would’ve been nice to have tiny windshield wipers for my eyes as I backed out of my spot.

On the street, just past the airfield, I almost passed the turn into an old dive bar. The sign read Smokey’s. It looked grimy and sad. Exactly what I needed to get through the rest of the day because I couldn’t handle happy drunks. Not now. I needed people who had given up on life. People who the brightest part of their day came at the bottom of a whiskey bottle.

Slamming on the brakes, I made a quick turn into the lot, found a space, and shut the car off. Only four other cars and two bikes sat parked in the lot with me.

When I walked in, heads tilted up momentarily, eyes squinted at me, then those same heads dropped back to their glasses.

The grimy exterior perfectly matched the grubby atmosphere inside, along with the one waitress working. She looked as haggard as the outside of the building. Overly skinny, but not toned, she approached my table and stood there with her hip cocked, not speaking a word to me.

Apparently, the half a minute I took to decide on my drink was a half a minute too long for her. “Come on, blondie. I don’t got all day.” She griped in a voice of pure gravel. I looked up to give her my order, noticing she missed both of her top and one of her bottom front teeth. The hand holding two empty glasses from a neighboring table had yellowed fingers. Obviously, her dominant hand, the one she held her cigarettes with.

Her unnatural dye job needed a touchup. At least an inch of gray roots showed. That color red didn’t fit her skin tone. Since I worked as a stylist, I felt pretty confident in my assessment.

“Gin and tonic,” I ordered.

Now, I didn’t particularly care for the taste of gin, but I remembered being told that it would get you drunk pretty quickly, and I desperately needed dunk and quick.

Before she left, I amended my order. “Make it two.”

It wasn’t but a minute later when she came back with my two gin and tonics. I slammed the first one like I’d slammed back a shot to get the alcohol infused into my system as fast as possible.

I needed not to feel. What I didn’t need was for the other skydive instructor to pull out the chair next to mine and plop down into it.

Not for the first time, I noticed how incredibly handsome he looked both in and out of a jumpsuit. More than hot, although he had that going for him too. Thick, brown, wavy hair just long enough to run fingers through and enjoy it. Crystal blue eyes. Depthless crystal blue eyes a girl could spend her life gazing into, a strong square jaw and a dimple peeking out from the corner of his cocky smirk. Not to mention his killer ‘I jump out of airplanes for a living’ body. Though I felt kind of meh about that. Brian had the same kind of killer bod, and look where that got me.

“Done staring?” he asked—no, that wasn’t right. He mused, as if any part of him being here tonight of all nights could possibly be construed as funny.

“Pardon?” I did ask, jolted out of my hot guy trance.

“Heard Lacy dumped you.”

Clearly, he’d sat down to be a donkey’s butt. Yes, I’d been a coward once again. Didn’t mean he had to rub my face in it. Which meant in lieu of answering, I sipped on my drink, wearing my most rueful face. But only partly due to his presence. The other part because I really detested the taste of gin. No matter. He didn’t take my rueful face as the unspoken request I meant it to be—to go away.

“Appears she has a conscience. I don’t have that problem and would be more than happy to be your new jump instructor.” He used air quotes when he said “jump instructor.” Then he took a drink of what smelled strongly of whiskey. “We can even meet here, eliminate the pilot fee.” He snickered into his glass.

“No one invited you to sit, so you can go at any time.”

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