“Here’s another one for you. Fuck you. Fuck you and this whole fucking thing. Fuck my lapse of judgment. Fuck the contract. Fuck the stupid competition. The only thing not getting fucked tonight is you.”
She shoved back her chair so quickly that it scraped noisily across the expensive tiled floor. At the moment, seeing a coating of hatred induced black, she couldn’t actually care. Everything seemed to slow down, including all the other people around them. Colette could feel the weight of their stares burning into her. She’d never been an object of scorn or ridicule before. She’d never actually asked for any kind of attention ever. Wearing a retro dress that cost twenty dollars, hardly any makeup, no plastic surgery, sans jewelry, and with only a couple grand to her name, she definitely stood out and not in a good way.
Blaze watched her every move, but even after she stormed away from the table and picked her way through the maze of tables, to the front of the extravagant restaurant with the fountain complete with koi fish and the chandelier that looked like it was probably thirty feet long. She rushed past the startled hostess and out into the night air.
It wasn’t cool and the humidity rose up to give her a wet slap to the face. She could almost instantly feel her hair straightening out and frizzing up top. A sticky sheen of sweat blanketed her skin as she walked, huffing, a few feet down the sidewalk.
Blaze still didn’t come after her.
Not that she wanted him to.
She meant what she said about the whole thing being a ridiculous mistake. Not that she’d said it like that. She could have been nice, but really, what was the need when Blaze so clearly loved being crass instead?
Her parents would have been ashamed of her. Her granny would have wept. And the fact that she thought about those two things made her want to scream. And scream and scream and scream. It didn’t matter if she walked down the sidewalk looking like a deranged psycho.
She made it down the block and Blaze never came out to see where she’d gone. He probably didn’t care. Probably wanted to finish that cheesecake. God, he probably had six other girls on speed-dial, if that was still even a thing, and was burning up his phone at the moment, ordering them to his house to fuck them in his huge bed, on the glass table, on his expensive furniture and in his kitchen.
Fuck Blaze Hanson.
Not literally.
Just figuratively.
Because she was so done with that. With guys who thought that being an ass was the only way to treat a woman. That all women were just pieces of meat and- and holes to stick their wieners in.
Colette managed to hold her head high as she marched down the street. She may have caved and looked behind her once but Blaze still wasn’t there. She was glad she had her purse and her phone and enough cash to call for a cab.
By the time she reached her apartment, an hour later, she’d decided that it didn’t matter if she stayed a virgin until she was fifty. If all that was out there were guys like Blaze Hanson, shiny and pretty on the surface, rotting on the inside, a wormy apple with in all actuality, a small dick- since he seemed to be compensating for so much by being rich and a huge jerk- she was just fine with staying single.
Maybe by the time she was fifty they would have invented robots and she could marry one of those. A robot that never talked back and answered politely, let her finish first in their strange (and likely very kinky) machine sex and actually helped around the house.
Yeah. Not likely. But she could always hope.
Until then, she was just fine with the fingers and the vibrator that Blaze had scorned. Screw him. He knew. Absolutely. Less. Than. Nothing. She’d given herself far more satisfaction in the past than he did with his stupid dinner and his stupid limo.
And no, no she wasn’t a liar.
CHAPTER 8
Colette
The shitty thing about messing up an already complicated date with a man-whore boss, was that the complications were tenfold. Colette spent the entire weekend worrying, sweating, anxiety and nerves gnawing away at her insides. She had all of Saturday and all of Sunday to think about how the date had gone wrong.
Correction. It went wrong from the second she walked into Blaze’s office and opened her big mouth. It just went downhill from there.
By the time Monday morning rolled around, Colette was such a mess that she was afraid she’d barf up the breakfast she hadn’t been able to eat, all over the elevator floor.
Somehow, she managed to make it up to her department without spewing, though bile flooded the back of her throat and her stomach felt like a tiny little boat trapped in the middle of a storm-tossed sea. Or maybe like she was on that boat. Maybe she could make an app about that. The user was the boat. Trying to navigate stormy, tossing waters before it sank.