Desperately Seeking Epic(36)

Distraction found.

With a jut of my chin, I motioned for the bartender to put their drinks on my tab.

“Which one are you going for?” Marcus asked as he lifted his glass in a silent toast to the ladies. The women smiled, glancing at each other before looking back at Marcus. You would think his height would make it difficult for him to get women, but it was quite the contrary. There would always be one intrigued by the idea of hooking up with a little person. He was at perfect eye level, after all. Maybe they were just curious. The list of women interested ran a mile long. But I’ll be damned if more often than not, that one hookup would turn into several. Marcus always joked he had a cock of gold, and I didn’t doubt it.

“Either one will do.” I shrugged. Women were all the same to me then. I had no desire to settle down . . . at all. Settling down meant losing my freedom, and my freedom was too precious to me. I needed to be able to pack up on a whim and hop a plane to Brazil, or anywhere, if I felt the need. Having a girlfriend or wife wouldn’t allow that luxury.

“What’s with you today?” he asked, his face scrunched up. “You seem . . . off.”

Sitting up straight, I widen my eyes in an attempt to look full of pep. “Nothing.”

Marcus eyed me with an inquisitive brow. “You worried about the shrew?”

“Pfft. Why would I be?” I feigned.

“She’s going to breathe fire in our faces tomorrow,” Marcus grumbled before popping the peanut he just shelled into his mouth.

I gave another nonchalant shrug. I wished he’d stop talking about her already. “She’ll get over it.” The side of his mouth quirked up as if he didn’t believe me. I did not want to discuss Clara with Marcus. I needed to change the subject. “I’m hungry, bro. You wanna order some food?”

He tilted his head as he snorted and took a swig of his beer. I wasn’t fooling him. But he didn’t push. After eating some cheap, grease-filled dinner, having two more beers, and playing a game of darts, I drove Marcus to his home behind the office. It was just past ten when we passed the front of the office and noticed only Clara’s shitty little car in the lot.

“Looks like no one showed up,” Marcus pointed out, snorting out a laugh.

“No surprise there,” I murmured.

When I parked my truck and he started to open the door to climb out, he turned back and said, “It’s too bad she’s such a stickin-the-mud. She’s actually pretty f*cking hot.”

I nodded in agreement as I stared ahead. He wasn’t kidding. Clara was extremely attractive. Not in an obvious, needed to wear slutty clothes and lots of makeup kind of way, but in a soft way, almost as if she didn’t even know how beautiful she was. Too bad her looks were shadowed by her tyrannical personality.

When I glanced back to Marcus, he was smirking at me, and shaking his head. “You want to sleep with her.” He wasn’t asking, he was stating it. What the f*ck ever.

“Pfft. She’d likely rather get mulled by a bear than hook up with me.”

“That wasn’t a no, Paul.”

“It wasn’t a yes, asswipe,” I argued.

“But still not a no,” he snickered. “Really, Paul? You’d do the shrew?”

“Get out of my truck,” I grunted. “We gotta work tomorrow.”

Shaking his head, he sighed, “Yeah, okay. See ya.” Then he slid off of the seat slowly until he hit the ground, shut the truck door, and went inside.

I rounded the building. As I approached the office’s lot, I still didn’t know why I pulled in. I told myself I wanted to see her suffer; see how she looked when she realized she couldn’t just whoosh in here and change everything. This was my f*cking domain. I wanted to see her broken. But, I know now, no matter what I told myself then, I just wanted to see her.

When I entered, the intense paint odor hit me at once. She’d successfully painted one wall and was standing near a table looking through some of the framed photos she’d taken down as she placed them in a box. Her head whipped around when she heard me enter. Her surprised expression faded quickly into a look of annoyance. “Here to gloat?”

“Maybe,” I teased as I approached. She was wearing a pair of sweats that did absolutely nothing for her ass. Her hair was tied up in some weird bird’s nest looking thing and she was wearing a faded Michael Jackson T-shirt that was two sizes too big for her. But damn. Even amidst the paint fumes that smell of clean linens found me. “You’re not throwing those out, are you?” The photos were of me, some of the few I still had from my short career as a stuntman. Those photos were some of my prized possessions. Once upon a time, people thought I’d be the next Evel Knievel. I was hot shit . . . or at least they thought I was.

“How’d you get into that kind of business? The stunt business, I mean.”

Small talk. Really? Tilting my head, I studied her, searching for a hint of sarcasm, but didn’t find a trace. Shit. Did she really want to know something about me? “When I was a kid, I was always skateboarding, snowboarding, biking, and causing my mother to panic.” I chuckled as the memory of my mother worrying her head off came to mind. The things I put that poor woman through. “When I was eighteen, I attended this motorbike event in California and won. Someone there was a director and they liked what they saw.” I shrugged one shoulder. “Voilà. I became an instant stuntman for movies.” I was invincible. Fearless. “They were the best days of my life,” I admitted as I picked up a photo of me riding a bike off a burning building.