Normally, I avoid places like West End Tavern. They’re usually overflowing with people who are all trying too hard to have a good time. A good time shouldn’t be something you have to go to great lengths to have. It should come naturally.
But tonight, I’m itching to get my mind off Mercedes and her lack of communication, so I follow Sam up the stairs to the West End Tavern’s rooftop. The noise and music are lively, and it’s busy, but not so busy that I regret my decision to venture out.
Sam sees a couple of guys we know from the shop, so we make our way over to the bar. After ordering a couple of beers, I look to my right and see a familiar brunette down at the end of the bar.
Mercedes’s friend’s eyes find mine at the exact same time and go wide with surprise. “Miles?” Lynsey says with a smile and waves her hand at me.
I give her a nod and hold my place at the bar as she makes her way over to me. The bartender is just handing me a bottle when she reaches me.
She presses in beside me and beams up excitedly. “What are you doing here?”
“Here with my buddy,” I reply, gesturing behind me to Sam. “What about you?” I ask, fighting the urge I have not to do a sweep of the patio in search of a redhead I miss more than I’m even ready to admit.
Lynsey pokes me in the stomach and replies, “I’m here with Kate! What are the odds?”
I frown down at her. “Who’s Kate?”
Her eyes go wide, and her smile falls as she looks down for a moment. Slowly, her eyes lift to an area over my shoulder, so I turn to see what’s got her so freaked out.
At that moment, I see red.
Literally and figuratively.
My hand tightens around my beer bottle when I spot Mercedes sitting at a table with some guy. This would annoy me under normal circumstances. But that fact that I recognize this douchebag from the tire shop, Mr. Green Shirt Fucking Prick, means that I’m not just annoyed. I’m fucking pissed.
And they aren’t merely sitting across from each other like a couple of old friends who ran into each other. He’s sitting right next to her, his seat scooted over, so their legs are touching. And he’s leaning in so goddamn close he can smell her lip gloss.
Sam must pick up on my mood shift because he catches my eyes with a confused frown. I head nod to what I’m looking at, and I know he instantly recognizes the prick too.
Sam looks back at me. “Is that…?”
I nod slowly.
“And is she talking to…?”
I nod slowly again.
“What the fuck, bro?”
My jaw is tight, and a muscle is reflexively ticking away on my cheek like a madman ready to hulk out on this entire bar.
When Green Shirt Douche-canoe’s hand reaches up to touch Mercedes’s face, I’m moving across the patio in huge, hacked-off strides.
“Miles, it’s not what you think,” Lynsey’s voice chirps from behind me as I struggle to get through a pack of people. Lynsey’s hands wrap around my bicep as she tries to hold me back.
I turn and loom over her to reply, “It looks pretty crystal-fucking-clear to me.”
“He’s no one,” she states, chewing her lower lip nervously.
“Then why are you holding me back?” I snap, looking down at her hand on my arm. She smartly lets me go, and I murmur a thanks and resume my earlier pace.
I didn’t really make the conscious decision to come over here and approach them. It was an instinctual, knee-jerk response that I really couldn’t fight.
Green Shirt’s voice catches my ear just as I’m close enough to hear, “You can be a real cunt, you know that.”
Mercedes replies something snappy and wiggles her fingers in his face right before I add, “What the fuck did you call her?” I nearly growl, moving up close to stand on the other side of Mercedes.
Green Shirt looks up at me with an annoyed expression painted all over his face. “Excuse you?”
“Excuse you,” I snap back and lean down, splaying my hands out wide on the table.
“Miles,” Mercedes says, her voice strained. I can feel her eyes on me, but I can’t move my laser focus off douchebag here.
“What the fuck did you call her?” I repeat my question earlier and add, “I won’t ask again.”
Green Shirt, who’s actually in a white shirt tonight, just laughs. “This conversation has nothing to do with you, grease monkey. Why don’t you take a walk? You’ve clearly been sniffing too much gasoline.”
“Dryston!” Mercedes snaps at him and just the way she says his name seems familiar. Like this might be a person she knows more than I’d like to believe.
“You know this fuckwit, Mercedes?” I ask, sliding my eyes to her. She’s twitchy and nervous, struggling to make eye contact with me. Her chest is flushed with hives like I’ve never seen.
The guy barks out an obnoxious, pompous laugh. “Mercedes?” He looks at me with raised eyebrows. “You think her name is Mercedes?”
My brows furrow and look at Mercedes for approval. She shakes her head quickly and rushes out, “I was going to tell you everything.”
“Tell me what?” I snap, my hands turning into fists on the table. “Who the fuck is this guy?”
“He’s no one!” she states adamantly through clenched teeth, her eyes flying all over my face as she reaches up to touch my arm.
Green Shirt hoots out another obnoxious laugh and says, “No, I just lived with you for two years.”
“Lived with you?” I ask, completely confused because this fucker did not give me a gay vibe at Tire Depot. “Is this is your gay roommate that you kicked out?”
Green Shirt leans across the table and murmurs, “I didn’t fuck her like I was gay, brah.”
Rage. Undiluted rage rips through my body, and I straighten, chest heaving. Mercedes rises to grab my arm and stop me from walking around this table and ripping this dick’s fucking throat out.
“Miles, please, if you’ll just let me explain,” she rushes out, her voice shaky and garbled.
“Yeah…Katie,” Green Shirt adds, “explain to him how I was your boyfriend for two years and still basically live with you.”
“You do not live with me, Dryston!” she shouts, her own hand fisting at her side as she stomps her foot.
My face twists up in confusion as I turn my shoulders to face her. “Why is he calling you Katie?” I grind through clenched teeth that feel like they could crack any moment. “Your name is Mercedes.”
“Her name is Kate Smith, moron. Mercedes is basically the hooker name she made up to write those god-awful things she calls books.”
Now I’m done. I’m done with this douche. He’s said the last asshole thing I can handle.
I reach across the table and yank him up onto his feet by the collar of his shirt. Sidestepping, I wrench him right up to my face so hard, he has to stand on tippy toes to just reach my chin. “Call her a fucking name again, and you will regret it.”
The dude is like a limp sack of noodles in my arms, his eyes half-lidded as his lip curls up and whispers, “You can have the trashy cunt. She’s not suitable for mixed company anyway.”
My eyes fly wide, and before I know it, I rear back my arm and send my fist flying into this fucker’s pompous nose. A satisfying crack vibrates against my knuckles, and blood sprays out all over his face.
He howls in pain and crumples to the ground, his hand covering his nose. “You fucking ape!” he shouts, his voice cracking at the end. “I think you broke my nose!”
“Good,” I grind through clenched teeth as Sam wraps his arms around me and hauls me backward. My shoulders rise and fall rapidly as I suck big gulps of air and stretch and flex my fingers on the hand that made contact.
“You won’t be saying good when I fucking sue you!” Green Shirt bellows from the ground on his knees.
But his words don’t even register in my mind as I slide my gaze to the left and see Mercedes standing there with her hands over her wide open mouth. Obvious tears have sprouted in her eyes.
Are those for this douchebag?
She looks up at me and drops her hands, her chin quivering uncontrollably, and she croaks my name. “Miles.”
She moves out to touch me, and I yank back from her and shake off Sam’s grip. I pin her with a serious stare. “Don’t talk to me.”
“Miles!” she exclaims with a shout. “I need to explain.”
“Explain this?” I roar, pointing down at her idiot of an ex weeping into a cocktail napkin. “Explain why I punched a guy for a girl whose name I don’t even know?”
A sob bubbles up her throat, and I can’t even look at her anymore. I turn, powering my way through the crowd of people who have all pressed in around us. I pass Lynsey near the bar, and she looks at me like a whipped puppy, but thankfully says nothing.
As I make my way through the doorway toward the stairs, my mind begins racing. You think you fucking know someone. You think maybe you’ve been wrong all along, and there are good people out there who can be honest and up front with you. Real.
But then you find out you were wrong , so fucking wrong that you have the bloody knuckles to prove it.
I pause in the stairwell and send my bloodied fist flying into the concrete wall. It does zero damage to the wall, but it takes the sting off the pain in my chest, and that’s better than nothing.
“Goddamnit,” I growl, shaking my hand, my knuckles cracking painfully into each other as I stretch my fingers out.
“Miles, wait,” Mercedes voice echoes in the dark stairwell, illuminated only by a sconce on the wall.
I’m tempted to ignore her and keep going, but I catch sight of her fumbling down the stairs in a pair of tall wedge sandals. She looks like she could fall at any second, so I stop just to get her to stop chasing me.
“What, Mercedes?” I growl, my hand clutching the metal railing so hard, it aches. “Or is it Katie?”
She stops two steps above me, her chest rising and falling rapidly. Her blue eyes are sad when she croaks, “It’s Kate. I was going to tell you.”
“When?” I ask, my voice ragged now that my adrenaline has slowed and I’m staring up at the woman I’ve bared my soul to these past several weeks. I look straight into her eyes and add, “After I fell in love with you?”
She sucks in a sharp, shaky breath and replies hurriedly, “I’m still the same person, Miles. I’m as much Mercedes as I am Kate. Mercedes is still my name, it’s just used on my books.”
“It’s your pen name?” I ask, and she nods her confirmation. “Then why fucking lie about it?”
“I don’t know!” she replies with a flick of her hands. “Because with my ex, I got used to hiding that part of me. But with you, I didn’t have to do that, not ever. Kate Smith is who I am when I’m not telling people about what I do. One of our first nights together, you told your sister about me. That’s something I’ve never experienced before, Miles.”
I shake my head in disbelief. “If I’m so open and accepting, then why hide your real name? You had so many chances to tell me. Do you know what an idiot I feel like for calling you Mercedes all this time? Every time we slept together. I feel like a fucking joke to you!”
“You’re not a joke, I am!” She steps down one step so she’s eye level with me and reaches her hands out to grab my face. “I liked you so much. All this time I liked you as more than a friend with benefits. I’m the joke because I thought I could be cool and casual Mercedes with no strings attached, but that was the biggest lie of all. I’m plain old boring Kate Smith, and I’m totally fucking falling for you, Miles.”
Her words have me yanking my face out of her embrace and dropping backward a few steps. I don’t care if she’s falling for me. I mean, look what happened tonight. She’s worse than Jocelyn. She’s going to rake me over the coals, and after going through all that shit for a second time, there will be nothing left of me.
I turn and look away from her emotional, tortured face. “I told you I don’t want drama, Kate. My ex did that to me over and over, and I’m done with that shit.” I look back and point up at the door at the top of the stairs. “I’ve never punched another guy in my life, and I just fucking broke that dick’s nose.”
“I’m sorry!” she exclaims, grabbing the railing and squeezing so hard her arm begins to tremble. “But I’m not perfect. I’m going to have drama in my life. And you can’t give me a zero-tolerance policy for drama because of your freaking baggage!”
I shake my head, refusing to hear any more. My mind is full up of bullshit tonight, and I can’t take another second. “I’m out, Kate, Mercedes, whoever you are. You can keep your drama and your lies. Keep living your life as your author name, your real name, with your boyfriend or ex-boyfriend. Gay, not gay. Whatever.”
“Miles, please—”
“No, I’m done.” I point at the area of space between us like it represents everything that’s happened since the moment she ran into me in the alley of Tire Depot. My tone is deep and final when I add, “This…is officially the end of our story.”
And then I turn my back and walk down the stairs away from the girl I thought I fucking knew but was, in fact, writing fiction the whole damn time.