Page 17 of Intoxicated
Oh, no, whatever shall I do if I ever become the next Mrs. Benton? Ha! Sure.
“His sister is the one about to take over the company, though.” A barista pops out with Stella’s to-go order. She thanks him and returns to her files. “After he graduated from Lewis & Clark, Drew struck out on his own. Had a few startups that didn’t go anywhere, until he finally landed into something big. Really big. You, uh, should probably know about it.”
I raise a concerned eyebrow. “Tell me, is this the one who could check ‘drug lord’ off my bingo sheet?”
“Nothing like that. Well, nothing illegal. Morally reprehensible? Hmm.”
She definitely has my attention now. “Excuse me?”
“Have you ever heard of Benton Leveraging?”
“No, I can’t say I have.”
“I didn’t think so. It’s an LLC based out of Seattle. They’re commercially classified as ‘relationship consultants.’”
There’s no way to tell where this is going, and I donotlike it. “What does this mean? Relationship consulting? Don’t tell me Drew is a couples’ therapist or something.” That would definitely be new. And unexpected. “Or is he living the Hitch life?”
“One of those isa lotcloser than you may anticipate.”
Both of my eyebrows are up now. “I was joking about the Hitch thing.” Awful movie. Awful premise. Awful everything.
“Drew is not a Hitch. He’s like… an anti-Hitch.”
“He’swhat?”
I’m presented with print-outs of a website. “Benton Leveraging” requires a paid membership to gain access to the juicy details of the site. When I look closely at the “Our Services” printout, I nearly gag.
“He’s a professional heartbreaker, Cher.” Stella spreads out more pages. Some of them are emails of her posing as a Vancouver-based millionaire having problems with his needy ex-girlfriend. Some guy named Brent goes over the same information available on the website while also saying,“Our guy knows how to get the job done. He has a 96% approval rating from past clients. I’m sure he can help you with your little ex-girlfriend problem.”“Men hire him to fuck up their exes or other women they want ‘rid of.’ We’re talking some really nasty shit.” What she brings up on her tablet is from a private forum of women discussing Benton Leveraging. Some of them are talking about a group lawsuit to sue for emotional damages. “To put it briefly, Drew Benton is a guy creepy exes hire to pump and dump the women they want taken down a peg. Drew has an amazing track record of getting women to fall in love with him and then dumping them in humiliating ways.”
“So I see.” My hands are shaking. Why? So Drew has an abhorrent business. It’s not like I’m in love with the guy. I was merely fantasizing about riding his face for a few days. Now I know he’s not someone I’m going to see anymore.
So why am Ireallyfucking angry?
“One of his marks from earlier this year was left at an altar in Vegas.”
“Isee.” I’m imagining some lost woman standing in front of an Elvis impersonator as she looks around the Vegas chapel, wondering where the man she drunkenly agreed to marry has gone. I’m guessing Drew either returned to Seattle or here. Was this before or after someone hired him to…
Hired him to…
“Who did it?” My hands grip the edge of the table. My knuckles turn white. “Which one of my bastard exes hired Drew Benton to fuck with me?”
Stella shuffles through more papers. The fact she hasn’t cracked a single joke, when she usually can’t help herself, must mean that she agrees with me about one thing: Drew Benton is beyond an asshole. He’s a dangerous slip in society, and he wasthisclose to getting his claws in me. If I had been anyone else, someone less cautious than the devilish beauty you see before you, I would be in a world of fucking hurt. I may be continuing to fall for Drew’s charms, like so many women before me have fallen for him. Women who were left standing at altars. Women who probably had their bank accounts cleared out. Women, I later discover, led to believe they were pregnant with Drew’s baby because that was one of their nightmares come true. The cherry on the shit sundae is the woman who was put on a train to Amarillo, Texas, without any money or a change of clothes. The police report Stella dug up says that the woman was too intoxicated to know what she had been doing, but I know now.
Drew got her nice and fucked up, dumped her, and sent her on her way.
“Jason Rothchild,” Stella finally says. “According to what I can find in his website’s database, that was the last so-called client to be in contact with him. Well, one who has any connection to you, anyway. I remember doing a search on him for you last summer.”
“Jason,” I hiss. “That ratbastard!”
My voice carries from the patio into the streets below. A small fleet of tourists looks up at us as if we have single-handedly corrupted their young children’s minds. Oh, the things I could tell them about the men of this world!
“I can’t 100% confirm that it was him, of course, but if it makes sense to you…”
“It does. Jason took our breakup particularly rough.” It’s been months, though! Months since he sprung a last-minute marriage proposal on me at his family’s Christmas party! I can still feel the horror bubbling up inside of me when I think back on that awful moment. Jason had been a lot of things, but impulsive wasn’t one of them. This was a man who read every Yelp! review before taking me to dinner somewhere. He also refused to buy me clothes from department stores when he had a “qualified tailor” to make me whatever I wanted. When we went on a weekend trip somewhere, he planned it down to the last second, including where we would stop for me to pee.
So imagine my shock when we were having a semi-nice time at his family’s house and he springsthaton me! Got down on one fucking knee and showed me his grandmother’s engagement ring from Germany. His whole family fell into a hush of premature thrills. They really thought I was going to say yes.
Jason thought I would say yes.
