Page 39 of You're so Bad

I’m losing my mind. Or maybe I’ve already lost it, and this is the leftover mush I’ve been left with.

I avert my eyes, taking notice of the glass of water on the side table, along with that ashtray I was expecting. I lift my eyebrows and point to it.

“Wouldn’t Mrs. Ruiz object to that?”

“I’m counting on Drew giving me at least twenty-four hours warning if they get a hair in their ass about coming back,” he says, putting Bean in a cloth-sided crate and setting it on the bed. She yowls her disapproval, then retreats to the back to curl up sulkily in the corner.

I’ve never related so much to an animal.

“Why don’t you want to tell me how you met Colton?”

I sigh. “Because you’re going to make fun of me. And youknowhis name’s Colter.”

“Now I have to know how you met,” he says, his eyes bright as he picks up Bean’s crate.

“I met his mom at a craft show.”

He whistles. “Sounds like a lot of bad shit go down at those. Maybe you should rethink your career.”

I have to smile, but I keep going. “Anyway, she and I got talking. She runs a craft shop in town, the one Colter manages, and she said she was interested in stocking some of my monster mugs. Then she told me a bit about her ‘single son’ and asked if she could give him my number.”

He gives me a wide-eyed look. “And you gave it to her? What if he was a mutant?”

“She showed his picture to me,” I say, but my voice is defensive.

“But why’d he call you?”

“I took a photo with her,” I say, fighting the impulse to look away. Itissort of embarrassing, to be honest. It makes me sound like I was desperate, but the truth is that I really liked his mother. I wanted to please her, and not just to make a sale.

Truth be told, Ididn’tmake a sale. A few months after we met, Colter told me it wasn’t the right season for my mugs—they were more of a fall item. Later, they had too much stock. No room. Eventually, he’d asked me not to talk to his mother about it anymore because he didn’t want me to put her on the spot. It took me a while to realize the truth—he was stringing me along. So was his mother. They needed to sell things that were more mainstream and universally pleasing.

Like pompoms.

After Colter and his mom made an order of five hundred pompoms, Bianca took me out for drinks and said, “Now, don’t say I told you so, but Mrs. Rogers was never seriously interested in your monster mugs. She and Colt think they’re a bit too niche for a store like that.”

That went down just before Colter and I broke up. By then, Queen Bee Pompoms were a big deal anyway, so it made sense, I guess. A sound business decision. Still, it made me feel like she’d sliced me open.

The messed-up thing is that I felt more betrayed by Mrs. Rogers than I did by Colter. It seemed like it had all been a lie from the beginning, breadcrumbs to draw me in. She’d never really appreciated or loved me. She’d never seen me as anything other than a nice girl, maybe a little troubled, who makes crafts.

It made me hate her a little, or at least hate the story of how Colter and I had met. Because there’s a part of me that still wants to be drawn into one of Mrs. Rogers’s hugs, which always smell like fresh-baked cookies.

A sigh escapes me. A defeated sigh, which makes me pissed at myself.

“Our story is going to be much better than that,” Leonard says as he leaves the room with the cat.

“Wait, what?” I try to catch up, but let’s be real, his legs are several inches longer than mine. “I thought we were going with the gym thing.”

“Nah, it’s too boring. We should give them something to remember. Something that blowsmy mommy matchmade usout of the water.”

“I don’t like this,” I say as I follow him down the stairs.

He turns to me at the foot of them, a grin on his face. I’m still a couple of stairs above him, putting our heads level with each other. “You sure, Tiger? Because I’m having fun.”

I realize, with something like surprise, that I am too.

ChapterTwelve

Leonard

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