LUCI (The Naughty Ones Book 2) Page 48

  “Nope. I win because you caught me.”

  ###

  LIAR

  Chapter 1

  “Oh my God! Disgusting! Clean up after your dog!”

  I looked over my shoulder to see that, without my noticing it, the teacup poodle — at least, I thought it was the teacup poodle — had been trailing small, spherical turds for the past few yards. A man in a very nice business suit had crossed paths with that problematic trail, and was now attempting to scrape the bottom of one of his expensive-looking loafers on the edge of the sidewalk, fuming at what he found on its sole.

  “Oh, dear,” I exclaimed. “Oh, sir, I am so sorry about your shoes. Why don’t you jot down an invoice real fast, and I’ll give it to Mr. DJ Stark for him to take care of?”

  The man stopped his irritable scraping for a moment and cocked his head in interest. “Mr. Stark? You mean that rat is the famous J. Stark's dog? Are all of these his dogs?”

  I struggled with my canine charges — all twelve of them — who were eager to continue our trek toward Central Park. It was the teacup poodle who had held us up, I wanted to reason with the Doberman that glanced balefully back at me. Don’t blame me.

  “Oh, no, sir,” I laughed. “Mr. Stark is a very busy man. He wouldn’t have time to take care of all these dogs. Just the teacup poodle. Oh, and the Doberman. The Doberman is new. They’re pals, though. So, Doberman, teacup poodle, for Mr. Stark."

  I steadily walked backward, the dogs begrudgingly following me, and picked up the tiny turds with my plastic bag during my entire monologue. The man stared at the dogs as if they were celebrities themselves, completely forgetting about the mess on the bottom of his shoe until I handed him a wet wipe and a tissue.

  “I bet if you put them in like a plastic bag or something, you could sell them on eBay,” I stage-whispered, raising my eyebrows at him.

  “Seriously?” He wrinkled his nose at me as the dogs barked at the passing traffic.

  “People love weird celebrity stuff like that,” I told him. “At the very least, you could shop the story on TMZ or something. Send them a photo. Want me to take a picture of you with your phone?”

  “With the dog?”

  “Oh, no, I’m so sorry,” I said, my hand fluttering over my chest. “Mr. Stark prefers it that his dogs try to have as normal a life as possible, away from the flashing lights. He’d fire me in a heartbeat if he realized I let someone take a photo of the dog, knowing it was his.”

  “That makes sense, I guess,” the man mused.

  “Well, I better be going before the rest of these poop grenades explode,” I said, smiling as I whipped my dark braid to the side. “Sorry again about your shoe.”

  I encouraged my pack of dogs forward, leaving the man standing, befuddled, with a shit-covered shoe. It was a beautiful day. Hopefully, he wouldn’t let that little close encounter ruin it. And at least he’d have a story to tell when he got back to the office.

  It didn’t really matter that the story wasn’t true.

  We rounded the corner, and the dogs, seeing and smelling the greenery just ahead, worked in tandem to yank me forward at a trot. I’d learned my lesson about walking dogs one of the first times I’d done it. Mix the breeds and sizes of dogs to give them less of a chance to ambush me. The first time I’d taken a group of dogs out from the boarding kennel where I worked, I’d unwittingly leashed up all big dogs. Our walk had been done at a dead sprint, and all of my coworkers had laughed at how bedraggled I was when I finally got back, panting and sore and only just beginning my shift.

  This was a good group of dogs — minus the teacup poodle. Little troublemaker. It was barely house trained and had a bad temper. It was afraid of the Doberman, which was why I’d put them closest together. Otherwise, the tiny dog would bully whichever animal had the misfortune of walking beside it. The Doberman was the only animal that could keep it in line.

  New York City was at its best in the summer, but that was just my opinion. I’d barely been in the city to experience all four seasons, but it was summer that had my heart. People peeled off their layers like unnecessary skin, lay in the grass like children to toast themselves in the sun, recharging themselves in the brightness before having to return to the buildings where they made their livings.

  I envied them, the ones filling the tall skyscrapers that formed that iconic New York City skyline. I even envied the nicely dressed man who had stepped in one of the teacup poodle’s landmines. I’d moved here immediately after college, so sure of myself, so sure that I was going to get hired to work in one of those glittering buildings. It was the Big Apple, for crying out loud. There had to be thousands of jobs that were just perfect for me, waiting for me to step in and fill them.

  I stayed in a hotel while I hunted for an apartment and a job, so certain that a job was a foregone conclusion and I would have to be on hand in the city to begin work immediately. After a full week of living in a hotel I definitely couldn’t afford, I had to downgrade to a hostel — dormitory bunkbeds, shoving my suitcases beneath the bottom bunk, hoping that their contents would be undisturbed by the time I got back, well after dark, from pounding the pavement, walking into the offices of the buildings I loved so much and getting turned down time and time again.

  I’d majored in communications at my university, enabling me to solve every problem that would possibly arise (I informed bored-looking interviewers). I sashayed into corporate offices, travel agencies, publishing houses, everywhere, certain that I’d soon land in the place where I was meant to be, ready to impart the bank of knowledge I’d amassed during college. I wasn’t sure what it was that had made me so overconfident. My mother was a strong possibility. From a very young age, she’d filled my mind with propaganda about how I would do great and amazing things.

  “Don’t settle for anything less than what you’re worth,” she’d commanded me. “You’re brave. That’s one good thing you’ve got going for you.”

  Brave, but maybe a little stupid. It was my second full week in the hostel when I finally “settled” for a job — a dog walker at a kennel. It was a paycheck that helped me stop the hemorrhaging from my savings account. And when I augmented it by cocktail waitressing at night, I was able to afford to move out of the hostel and into my very own shoebox studio apartment. Sure, I had to share the bathroom with the rest of the floor, but at least I’d already gotten used to that at the hostel.

  “Let’s go, everyone,” I announced to all of my furry charges. I picked up the last bit of offal — of course it was from the teacup poodle, who was definitely getting its owners’ money’s worth out of my services today — and started redirecting my pack back toward the kennel. It was a nice day, and I would’ve liked to keep them out at the park longer instead of locking them back in their crates, but that would be to the detriment of the next group I was supposed to take out.

  “Sorry,” I told one of the mutts as it gave me sad eyes. “If you got to stay out longer, it wouldn’t be fair to everyone else staying at the kennel.”

  Working there wasn’t so bad, I decided, avoiding getting tangled up in the leashes as the teacup poodle tried to finagle a walking position beside someone other than the Doberman. Not so fast, buddy. I wasn’t born yesterday. It was the “settling” that my mother had warned me against, though, which I thought about often. If she knew what I did to scrape together a living here in the city, I was sure she would demand that I return home.

  Rural upstate New York, however, didn’t feel like home to me anymore.

  I’d gone to college in a city that was roughly six times bigger than the town I’d grown up in, and I’d become accustomed to such luxuries as 24-hour grocery stores, coffee shops, malls I didn’t have to spend an hour in a car to get to, and my choice of restaurants. It was as if the world had opened itself to me while I was living in that city during college, and I knew that it would continue to impress me the higher I dared to reach.

  “You are so special,” my mother told me. “You will thrive
wherever you wind up.”

  I was already spinning stories to her toward the end of my tenure at the hotel, disappointed that I hadn’t yet “thrived,” as she promised I would.

  “I have a really promising interview tomorrow,” I fibbed to her over the phone, trying to soak in what I was realizing was going to be the last of my exposure to cable television for the foreseeable future.

  “Oh, really? Do tell.”

  “It’s a personal assistant to the CEO of a business — well, I won’t bore you with the details. But it’s a really good job, pays well, and there’s room for growth.”

  “That sounds marvelous,” my mother gushed. “I just knew you’d tear up that city.”

  It did sound marvelous, but there wasn’t a lick of it that was true. I’d been to so many interviews at that point that I knew my folly — it was so hard to get an entry-level position because seasoned workers were gobbling them up, so desperate for a job that they’d take literally anything available in their field. So of course I, with no professional experience, wasn’t going to get so much as a telemarketing position over a person who’d been in the workforce for ten years already and was looking to diversify his career.

  “We’re back!” I announced, though the riot of barking from my dogs was all the announcement we needed at the kennel. I led the dogs back to their crates, ushering them each in before unhooking their leashes and hanging them up. The teacup poodle snapped at me half-heartedly as I closed the door.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I commiserated. The pup probably missed its owners. It still had a two-week stretch of time with us. I hoped it would get over its hang-ups in the meantime.

  I grabbed a bottle of water and took a brief breather back in the grooming salon.

  “Do you think any of these dogs belong to famous people?” I asked the groomer, who was trimming a squirming corgi’s nails.

  “No way,” he sniffed, not pausing in his clipping. He was so used to all manner of reluctant customers that he could successfully trim the nails with very little struggle.

  “What do you mean, ‘no way’?” I cajoled. “New York is packed with famous people.”

  “I think I saw one the other day,” he said absentmindedly.

  “See? One of these dogs could belong to him, couldn’t it?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  He fed the corgi a treat — aha, maybe that was his secret to success — and sighed. “Celebrities have their own dog people. They wouldn’t send members of their families to places where they might be forced to mingle with regular people’s dogs. Check the files. There is not a single famous dog here.”

  “But maybe the celebrity uses a fake name to throw everyone off,” I reasoned.

  “Believe me. Celebrities wouldn’t trust their dogs to just anyone. I have a friend who knew a guy who had to get a background check just to be under consideration to be a veterinarian for a celebrity’s dog.”

  “You don’t believe that maybe just one of these dogs belongs to a celebrity?” I rubbed the corgi’s ears as the groomer unhooked its leash. “Like maybe this guy. At least a TV actor? A YouTube sensation?”

  “Maybe a minor celebrity,” the groomer allowed. “But no one I’d stop on the street for a selfie.”

  “Fair enough.” At least I wasn’t completely full of bullshit. I worried sometimes.

  Chapter 2

  Home was usually a tedious subway expedition, but I wanted to stay above ground for as long as possible as the warm afternoon light waned. I walked all day as a part of my job, but I was still in love with the city enough to want to walk in my free time — even if that free time was spent getting back to my apartment to clean up and change for my second job. If I had a third job, maybe I could even spring for an apartment with its own private shower, but I wasn’t sure there were enough hours in the day for me to do that.

  I wanted so badly to survive here. I’d given up on the “thriving” my mother had been convinced I would do. As long as I could afford rent and to occasionally feed myself, I’d be happy.

  Here I was, about to turn twenty-three years old, and the only accomplishment I could list was having gone three whole months without getting bitten at the kennel.

  What was I doing with my life?

  As the sun sank too low to compete with the tall buildings, I gave up on my walk and scuttled underground. I was going to have to hurry if I was going to make it to my waitressing gig on time.

  The subway still held a special sort of poetry for me that I hoped I’d never lose. There was something special about the wind that whisked along the tunnels, the clatter of the trains on the tracks, the potpourri of people who relied on the arteries below the city to get them home. I loved to watch the people on the subway. The hipster with the beard and thick-rimmed glasses I doubted had prescription lenses in them nodding vaguely to whatever music he piped into his ears via his phone. Then there was the businessman who shuffled the papers in his briefcase throughout the entire ride as if he couldn’t get enough of that when he was actually at work. There was always the lost family of tourists, eyes wide at the mistake they’d made by venturing down into the underbelly of New York, usually helped by a kindly woman holding a paper bag of groceries, halting her day’s chores in pity for the children who pressed themselves against their parents’ sides. There was the girl who read books with provocative cover designs just to glean the reactions she got out of fellow commuters, the guy who poked sullenly at his phone for the entire ride in spite of the lack of service deep underground. It was an ever-shifting collection of people, dice loaded into a cup and rolled out for different combinations each and every time.

  It was part of the reason why the Big Apple had beguiled me. There were so many different types of people here, all for their own reasons. If they had a chance at making it, didn’t I?

  I got off on my stop, glancing at my phone for the time and taking off at a jog through the station and up the stairs to the street. My neighborhood wasn’t great. I couldn’t even describe it as up and coming. But it contained the first place I could afford in the entire city, so that was saying something. I figured as long as I stayed alert, ignored the catcalls, and tried not to dawdle along alleys, I’d be okay. There wasn’t anything I could do but be okay. The idea of looking for another apartment made my stomach turn. I was, quite frankly, surprised that my rent hadn’t gone up after my first year here. That was one way I knew the area was rotten. Nobody wanted to gouge any of its residents out of their apartments, because there weren’t any better developments in the works.

  My phone buzzed in my purse as I skipped up the steps to my apartment building. My place was a third floor walkup, so it was a good thing I kept more or less in shape from all of my dog walking. It was hell to haul a couple of bags of groceries up the three flights of stairs, so I usually didn’t. It was so easy to eat out in the city, whether I was grabbing a quick bite from a hotdog stand or ducking into my favorite place for tacos — just a couple of bucks for foil-wrapped tortillas stuffed with all manner of things that would tide me over all day long.

  I answered my phone breathlessly as I forced my sticky door open. Even if I knew who to talk to about maintenance in this dump, the sticky door wouldn’t have even been in my top five issues.

  “Hello?”

  “Gemma, did you move to New York City specifically because you thought it was far enough away to ignore your own mother?”

  I winced. If I’d only glanced at my phone’s display before answering, I would’ve sent this call to voicemail. I didn’t have time to do this with my mother right now.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You know how busy the job keeps me.” I stripped off my polo shirt and jeans, both covered with dog hair, and ran some water in the sink. God help me, but I often took quick sponge baths in my kitchen rather than venturing down the hallway to brave the common restroom all of my fellow tenants shared among themselves. I did that now, splashing soapy water benea
th my armpits, at my groin, freshening up for the bar.

  “What did they have you working on today?” my mother asked me, oblivious to me being out of breath, to the slop of water against my skin. I dashed to the closet — it wasn’t really much more than a cranny in the room that I’d separated with a tension rod and shower curtain — and shook out a black button-down shirt I’d had hanging up in there, spraying it vigorously with a bottle of fabric refresher. Today was the last time I’d be able to do that. I’d have to find the time and quarters to stuff as much stuff into a washing machine as possible. I’d dry everything by draping it around my apartment.

  “I took notes during a senior management meeting,” I said. “The company’s doing well, but my boss has asked me to travel with him for a reorganization of one of their branches abroad.”

  I relaxed and just ran my mouth. The reality I’d constructed for myself — and for my mother’s benefit, most of all — formed itself best when I just let the words fall out. It was the damnedest thing, and one I had a hard time reconciling myself with. I was an excellent liar. I was a hell of a liar. And it was through those lies that I made my mother feel good about me living alone in New York City.

  It would break her heart if she knew just how worried I was about making rent sometimes, scrounging for change in my futon even though I’d already done so, eyeing my closet and cabinets and trying to gauge what I could afford to pawn to keep a roof over my head for another month. Could I part with my hot plate? Would I miss the microwave? It would eliminate several cheap meals from my repertoire. Those were the kinds of choices I was faced with, but I preferred to keep my mother believing that my choices were the kind I made while dressed in a nice business suit at the elbow of a rich and powerful man, all of us seated around a teak conference table.

  “Abroad?” my mother squealed. “You’re going abroad? Where? Will you need a passport?”

  “I’m expecting my passport in the mail any day now,” I said, shrugging my shirt on and buttoning it while holding the phone between my cheek and my shoulder. “I had to rush order it when I found out there was the possibility I’d travel for the company, but it shouldn’t be too much longer.”