Page 46 of Cinderella Screwed Me Over
“You’re on.” The legs of my chair scraped the floor as I stood. “Would now be a good time to communicate to you that I’m rather good at pool?”
“I personally prefer to show,” Karl said. “Sometimes nonverbal communication can berathereffective.”
“Hmm. Maybe you aren’t so bad at the jokes after all.”
…
Karl and I were pretty evenly matched and had each done our fair share of smack talking during our game of pool. As he aimed a nearly impossible shot at his last striped ball, I mentally chanted for him to scratch.
“Oh man!” a guy from the next table over yelled. “Eat that!”
The group of guys playing pool next to us had gotten louder and louder. They were now sloppy drunk, hollering and laughing at everything. I tried to ignore them, but one of them kept “accidently rubbing up against me” as he walked by, thinking he was funny and clever, I’m sure.
Karl’s ball bounced next to the pocket but didn’t go in.
Looking for my best shot, I leaned across the table. For the third time, the guy rubbed up against me, and this time, he’d gotten even more suggestive about it.
I whipped around and shoved him. “Look, buddy, that’s enough.”
The man stepped up to me, pointing a finger in my face. “Don’t you dare shove me, woman!”
I threw my hands up. “What are you going to do, hit me? Will that make you feel cool in front of your friends?”
Karl stepped between the guy and me. “I think you better back off, sir.”
“Oh, listen to you, mister hoity-toity. You better keep your woman in line before I have to put her in line for you.”
“How about you just go back to your game of pool,” Karl said, his voice calm, “and we’ll go back to ours?”
The guy’s friends had surrounded us, and they egged their friend on, shouting insults at Karl. “Kick his ass,” one of them said.
“We’re not going to fight,” Karl said. “We’re just going to settle this like—”
The guy swung. I tried to shout a warning, but it was too late—his fist hit Karl’s face with a loudsmack. Karl stumbled back, into the pool table. I quickly moved to steady him, a mix of disbelief and anger pumping through my veins.
“What do you think about that, hoity-toity?” the guy said.
Karl had a dazed look on his face, as though he wasn’t entirely sure what had happened. “That was such a cheap shot,” I said. “If I were you, I wouldn’t be bragging about it.”
Stephanie, Anthony, and Finn showed up at the same time a large guy—the bouncer, I presumed—made an appearance. He stepped between us and the other group and told us to break it up.
“I think we better go,” Stephanie said, tugging on my arm.
“I think that would be a good idea,” the bouncer said, like we’d been the ones causing all the trouble.
Not wanting things to get any worse, I fought back the urge to yell at the bouncer and all the other idiots, and let Stephanie pull me away.
As our group headed outside, the other group continued hurling insults at us.
“Well, that was fun,” Karl said, flinching as he patted the red mark next to his eye.
I took his chin in my hand and tilted his head toward the streetlight so I could get a closer look. “You’re going to need to ice it. How bad will it be for you to show up at the office tomorrow with a black eye?”
“It’ll probably scare my clients. I suppose I could claim basketball injury or something. I hate lying, though. My office is supposed to be a place of honesty.”
“Then just claim you got it playing pool.” I stepped back, looking at the guy I couldn’t stand at the beginning of the night. Somehow, I’d ended up getting him into a fight—because he’d stuck up for me. “Thanks for…stepping in back there. I thought I’d just humiliate him and he’d back off. Sometimes my temper gets me into trouble.”
“No,” Karl said, like he was shocked. Then one corner of his mouth twisted up. “I probably shouldn’t say this, since I’m all about peacefully working things out, but I guess you’ve gotta get punched once in your life. It’s kind of a rite of passage for a guy.”
