It was too bad that the fantasy would never be real.
Chapter Five
Liam
Most people thought that driving a Hummer was a bit much. Particularly considering I loved in the city. Bakersville was one thing, but L.A. was supposed to be civilized and advanced. Usually said by people who had never been to Echo Park where I had grown up, back before the infamous gang injunction.
People often wondered how I could be so calm around gunfire while in action. The truth was I had been hearing it since I was born.
The Hummer was also the closest to the military vehicles I had been driving almost exclusively for two decades since enlisting at eighteen. I had tried to drive other vehicles but could never really get used to them. A habitual response that did not, however, extend to guns.
I could still field strip three different kinds of firearms while blindfolded but had no desire to. I hadn’t actually touched a firearm since handing in my service weapon after being honorably discharged due to injury, following an unfortunate meeting with a roadside IED. I pulled up into the driveway of my mansion, retrieving my cane from the passenger seat as I opened to the door. The house was one of those almost laughably tacky modern constructions built exclusively for the neuvou riche. There were even stone loins set up to guard the electric gate. I mostly bought it because it was what I thought a millionaire was supposed to do. I quickly bought a second house, a much more modest beachfront bungalow in Big Sur, where I spent as much time as I could when I wasn’t working.
Because of the mansion’s new building status, it was easy to get the permissions needed to put in an elevator. The door of which was on the main floor as close to the front door as possible without compromising the structure. Pushing the button with the end of the cane, well before I got there, the elevator doors were open by the time I needed to step in. I hit the button for the third floor and waited patiently as the box cranked its way through the guts of the behemoth structure.
The bedroom was fucking huge. The floor space coming out to at least twice of most of the apartments I’d had before starting my company and making my fortune. It was still mostly open space; my furniture needs still being fairly sparse. There was a king-sized bed in one corner, made with hospital corners, and an uber-efficient modern style desk across from it. I had heard most of the kids had switched over to their phones as their main devices. I’d grown up with desktops, however, and was still mostly used to mouse and keyboard. Desktops no longer widely available, I compromised with attaching an external keyboard to an older model desktop. Not because they were cheap but because they were easier to use, and I wasn’t afraid of breaking it in half by typing too hard, which was often the case with some of the newer slim models. I had attached a holder to the edge of the computer desk to hold my cane. Hooking the handle into it, I sat down in the retro chair made of metal and upholstery as opposed to plastic and vinyl and sighed.
Things hadn’t gone well with Hayley. It was really no one’s fault. I was who I was, and she happened to find that intimidating. I couldn’t really blame her for that. Everyone had their own perspective, and I could understand her perspective, able to put myself in her place were our positions reversed. I felt a bit bad for putting her through all that in the first place.
I wasn’t really ready to give up on going to the wedding, and I still didn’t want to show up alone. My ego just couldn’t take it. I decided that if I was going to go along with the fake fiancée idea, I might as well try and find someone who I knew would be open to it. I would have preferred a female friend, but I hadn’t really had any of those since high school. There were a few women I knew in the military, but I tended to be focused on the job at hand and was one of the few to actually take the anti-fraternization regulations seriously.
This really only left the idea of an escort. There was part of me that recoiled at the idea. People could do what they wanted with themselves, but I didn’t feel quite right about exploiting this fact. The only real conciliation was I wasn’t planning on fucking her, making the whole thing basically an acting gig. Which I was okay paying for.
Being both an obsessive and something in desperate need of efficiency, I actually looked up a list of the best escort sites before embarking on my search. I didn’t want to waste my time with dead ends and human traffickers. I still had my standards.