I like to think of myself as a well-adjusted adult. Someone who makes good decisions and has her head on straight. The problem with that, though, is I am the only person who thinks so, and no matter how hard I try to stay out of trouble it always seems to find me anyway. I don’t do it on purpose, I swear. Normally things have a way of working out—everything turns up Jax—that’s my motto. Angel Jax is my name, and the motto is just a way of saying everything will turn up all right. And it usually did.

Until it didn’t.

I made a poor decision, and I saw something I wasn’t supposed to see, and now a person is missing. A girl I knew from the bar I sometimes sang at is gone. Or should I say, “she ran away,” along with a whole lot of money, and the people who are looking for her think I might know something. I don’t know shit about shit, but that doesn’t matter because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Yay me.

I should probably backtrack a bit. I know my story isn’t making much sense, and if I didn’t know me, I would totally question that part about making good decisions, but in general, I have a pretty level head. I have a great job, my own apartment, great friends and neighbors, and I am completely satisfied with my love life.

Okay, some of that was a lie.

I actually have two pretty awesome jobs. I’m a musician; I play gigs in local bars and clubs. I play some original pieces but mostly cover stuff. It’s incredibly fun and fulfilling, but music doesn’t quite pay the bills, so I supplement by writing sometimes funny, always sexy romance novels under a pen name. It doesn’t make me rich, but the two jobs together allow me to live comfortably enough so I can do the things I want and not be shackled by a nine to five like most of America.

I didn’t lie about the apartment. I really do have a great one; it’s just not a typical apartment community. I live at the Washington Arms, which is a small retirement community. I’m the only person under sixty in the whole place, and the only reason I’m allowed to rent here is because Jolene Kelly is the property owner, and she likes to read my smutty books. Not a lot of people know I write under the pen name Samantha Ice, but I would for sure use that to my advantage if it meant I got a second-floor apartment in a classy part of downtown Toledo with low rent and utilities included. Plus, old people are awesome. My neighbors are amazing, if a little bit nosy, and nosy is ok when you live in the city. It’s like living amongst a friendly neighborhood watch.

Ok, the love life thing was a lie. It isn’t that I don’t date, I do. A lot. It’s just that I don’t do relationships for some reason. I would like to have a steady boyfriend, but I have the very worst luck with men. Not in finding them, per se. Dicks are swinging left and right in this town; it’s just hard to find a quality man who’s worth interrupting my life for. That’s the difficult part.

My most intimate and lasting relationship lately is with the magic bullet I keep in my nightstand drawer. It has a hair trigger, and sometimes turns on by itself if I stub my toe on the nightstand, but as long as I have fresh batteries, I’m never without a good O. Orgasms are necessary for good mental health, and if anyone doesn’t agree with that, I will question whether or not they have ever had one.

There is no shame in using a vibrator either. Whatever gets the job done. I’ve gotten used to getting mine from my friend Regina. And I don’t mean that in a gross, sharing is caring kind of way. Regina used to work for a sex toy wholesaler and I would get toys from her dirt cheap. But then she had some relationship issues, disappeared from the friend circle, and came back like six months later with a new job and a smoking hot, giant, tattooed boyfriend. I mean, good for her, her old boyfriend was a total tool, but I still miss that kickass discount. Also, I’m not jealous of her and her awesome new love life. Not at all. Bitch.

So I have a satisfying if unconventional life. But I like it, it’s mine, and I am in control of it. That’s more than I can say for most thirty-two-year-olds out there. A lot of women my age are at the stage of their life where they realize the guy they married fresh out of high school really isn’t the one, and now they are trying to figure out how to get back the last fifteen years they wasted on a douche bag. Not me, though, I found out that high school guy wasn’t who I thought he was relatively early on, so I didn’t waste any of my twenties on that turd. I barely even think about him anymore.

Hardly at all.

Except for this moment, where I find myself standing in front of the office building he owns, a building I hadn’t been inside of since it belonged to his dad. At the time, I’d been paid ten dollars an hour as a sixteen-year-old to clean in the evening with a group of my girlfriends. That was a sweet job, and Mr. Anderson was an awesome guy. He was a rich guy, so he lived in a different world from us middle-class folks, but still a good guy. He said that giving us teenagers the office cleaning job was a good investment. He didn't have to get into any lengthy contracts, and we could get job experience without having to work in fast food flipping burgers. I don’t think there is any shame in getting money any way you need to, but at sixteen, I was glad to get a paycheck and not smell like fried onions at the end of my shift.

Nevertheless that was a long time ago, and I haven’t been in that building since. Mr. Anderson has been dead now for almost a year, and there’s a new head dick in charge. It’s still an Anderson, but now it’s Gabe Anderson who wears the suits and sits at the big desk in the office on the top floor. It’s Gabe who gets the office with all the windows, which were a real bitch to clean as she recalled. I hadn’t seen Gabe in even longer than Mr. Anderson, but I kept up on what he’d been doing. Not like a jealous ex-girlfriend or anything like that. Gabe Anderson was never my boyfriend.

He was my very best friend.

Until he wasn’t.

But that’s in the past and there’s no reason to think about it now. There never would have been another reason for me to go into that building at all ever again, except for I needed some help. I had gotten involved in something completely out of my control, and if I didn’t get someone to back me up, I was going to end up in trouble.

The kind of trouble where you end up six feet underground and people say nice things about you and throw roses down on your casket. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t think I had lived long enough to amass enough friends to say nice things about me while they buried me. And I hated roses.