Page 1 of Guarding Her Love

1

Dawson

“Bitch, if you don’t move the fuck over, I’m going to literally pee on you!”

“Bitch, you do that, and I’ll dump this vodka on your fucking bed!”

Yeah, this is my life now, I think as what I hope will be my last fare of the night hops into my car for their Uber ride home. I never thought after enlisting in the Marines, serving my country in the Middle East, that I’d end up doing this for a living.

But what do you do when your wife, who you thought was the love of your life since high school, leaves you for who you thought was your best friend? I trained for the worst of the worst, but nothing prepares you for being blindsided like that.

The girls pile onto each other in the back seat and I pull away from the club as they both immediately get on their phones and start drunk-texting.

“Ew, Josh wants me to come over,” the blonde groans. “Says he wants to cuddle.”

“Aka, fuck,” her friend, the redhead, replies.

“Been there, done that,” the blonde laughs. “No thanks.”

“I thought you liked Josh?”

“I like his apartment! I like his car! What I don’t like is his Millimeter-Peter and disgusting back hair.”

Shoot me. Just shoot me.

It’s almost 1AM and I just want to get home, watch some Netflix and crash. I’ve been driving all day, as I have for the last six days. Gloria took half of what I had in the divorce, and I blew through a good chunk of what I had left on booze, just trying to forget about her.

“Um, can you drive a little faster?” the redhead asks. “Or do you have like…a bottle? I really have to pee.”

“You want me to break the speed limit?” I ask.

“Um, everyone breaks the speed limit,” she replies. I’m already going five over, but I push it to ten; I want to get these girls out of here just as badly as they want to be gone.

I’ve had about all I can take of their gossip by the time I pull up in front of their apartment and let them out. They don’t even say anything; they just clamber out of the car and wobble across the road in their heels. My phone dings and I see they didn’t bother tipping me either. Typical.

My phone rings as I’m pulling away from the curb. It’s Tim, a buddy from my unit who I recently got in touch with when he moved to the area.

“Dawson’s Pizza,” I answer.

“Yeah, I’d like a large sausage,” Tim replies.

“Oh, I bet you would,” I laugh.

“Heading home?” he asks.

“Thank God.”

“One of those nights, eh?”

“One of those days.”

“Come on, man,” he chuckles. “No prospective girlfriends in those twelve hours? Weren’t you driving near the clubs tonight?”

“Sure was,” I sigh. “Think I’d rather be driving downtown by the pet shop. How bad of a look is it for a 32-year-old single man to get a cat?”

“Cat? You lost your mind, dude?” Tim replies. I can hear the disgusted expression on his face through the phone. “Oh, that’s right; you’d prefer a pet to the real thing.”

“Hey, at least a cat won’t leave you.”

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