Page 65 of Pumpkin
“Are you here to bid?” Frankie asked as a young man stepped on stage. He was wearing glasses and looked far younger than the others wearing a cut.
“No!” Calliope exclaimed with a nervous laugh. “Just here for the view.”
“Who’s that?” Dosia asked Frankie. Based on the looks of the women in the crowd, they were not overly excited for this man’s bid as they had been for the other men.
“Keys,” Frankie answered, a bit distracted. It looked like she was noticing the crowd’s disinterest in this man too as Louisa introduced him. According to the card she was reading off of, Keys was a computer expert and the club’s Tech.
“We’ll open the bidding at fifty dollars,” Louisa announced.
Crickets fell as no one bid for several heartbeats. Dosia looked around. The man, Keys, was young, sure, but he was cute in a nerdy kind of way. There had to be someone in the crowd that would want to bid on him.
Louisa said a bit nervously into the mic, “Come on, ladies. I’m sure one of you needs a tune-up on your computer or to have a website built.”
Still, there was nothing.
Frankie was half out of her chair when nearly every device on and off stage suddenly beeped with a message.
Like everyone else in the audience, Dosia looked down at her phone.
Unknown: $50,000
“Holy shit,” she breathed out. “Is that for real?”
Frankie shrugged, retaking her seat. Louisa was showing Keys her phone and asking him the same question that Dosia had asked Frankie.
Keys did something on the phone and then nodded.
“It looks like we have a new high bid!” Louisa announced to the crowd. “Fifty thousand! Going once, going twice,sold!” she shouted without waiting a heartbeat like she normally did.
Keys practically ran off the stage.
“Who could have sent that?” Dosia asked Frankie.
“Knowing Keys, it could be anyone. He has cyber contacts everywhere,” Frankie answered, an odd note in her voice. “But there’s also the possibility Keys bid on himself just to get out of the embarrassment of that.”
Calliope shook her head as she stared up at the afternoon sky like she could still see the stars. “No,” she said with a small smile on her lips. “It was real. ‘A rose does not answer its enemies with words, but with beauty’,” she quoted.
The last man took the stage, but there was a very different reaction to the crowd this time. There were even some catcalls from a group of young women, followed by incessant giggling. Dosia had to hand it to them, the guy was fucking hot. Tall with muscles and tattoos. He even played up Louisa’s announcement of him by flashing the women his abs. Even from the distance Dosia’s table was, she could see their definition.
Frankie, though, rolled her eyes. “Starbucks. Never saw a vagina he didn’t want.”
Dosia snorted into her hot chocolate and shot a glance at JJ, who thankfully didn’t seem to have heard or understood Frankie’s comment. Calliope, though, stiffened.
“Opening bid—” Louisa started, but one of the women from that group called out, “Two hundred!”
“Two-twenty!” a blonde next to her offered.
As younger women, likely college age, they didn’t have the money to bid in higher increments.
“Two-fifty!”
“Two-fifty-one!”
“Ladies,” Louisa scolded. “Serious bids only please. And you know the rules, bids are supposed to be made in increments of fifty dollars. So we’re back to two-fifty being the highest bid,” Louisa said, pointing to the woman who offered that.
“Three hundred,” the first woman shouted with a flirty wave towards Starbucks. He winked back at her and the woman practically fell over swooning.
Dosia was losing interest in the bidding war of immature women when Calliope suddenly gasped, her eyes going wide. Dosia didn’t get a chance to ask what had happened before Calliope grabbed for her wrist, gripping it hard. “Calliope, what?—”
