Page 2 of Left on Read
“Shit!”
The tools I’d left in there were gone.
I slammed the trunk closed with enough force the back of the car bounced.
The building we lived in was in a decent enough area, but petty theft was becoming an issue everywhere, and break-ins weren’t uncommon.
Leaving anything of worth in your car was basically asking someone to steal it.
“So stupid,” I muttered. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” I repeated with each step I took to get to the driver’s seat.
When I was in the car, I cranked the engine and connected my phone to Bluetooth. I needed to listen to some music to help calm the noise in my head so I didn’t show up to work in a rage. I scrolled through my playlists and tapped on the latest one Noah shared with me. Some heavy metal should do it.
The heavy beat and melodic tune of the first song came on. I pulled in a deep breath and forced my shoulders to relax.
Okay. Time to calm the fuck down and get my ass to work. I’d deal with this later.
The muffled sounds of sex punctuated the music coming through my earphones. They were supposed to be noise canceling, but Zane and Noah were so into each other they tended to forget the walls in our apartment were paper thin and did nothing to block out their fun.
Turing up the volume on my phone, I rolled onto my side so my back was to our shared wall. I wanted that. Not the loud sex. That would be a nice bonus, but what I craved wasn’t exactly physical.
It was the little things I saw in my coupled-up friends that made me realize just how alone I was. The long looks and secret smiles. The casual touches and the way they took care of each other. How they’d found their person while I was perpetually single.
Focusing on my screen, I continued scrolling through the listings on one of the local buy and sell sites I’d been stalking for the past week, hoping to find some tools to replace the ones that had been stolen.
“Damn it.” I exited out of the app and dropped my phone on my bed.
This was pointless. The buy and sell apps had hundreds of listings, but either people undervalued what they were selling and it was gone before I could contact them, or they overvalued them, and it wasn’t worth trying to haggle the price down to something reasonable.
I’d even checked the pawn shops and consignment stores, but they were just as much of a bust as the apps. I might as well buy brand-new stuff with their prices.
How else could I get cheap tools? I needed to fix this before Zane put two and two together and figured out that I’d messed up again. He’d told me to put the tools in our apartment storage locker when I got home from work, but I’d gotten distracted and forgotten.
I bit my lip. Who would want to sell quality tools at a deep discount? Someone who either didn’t know their value or just wanted to get rid of them and didn’t care about money.
That ruled out stores and most of the people on the buy and sell sites.
Maybe I had to think outside the box and find a different type of seller.
What about a jilted ex?
Grinning, I sat up and quickly downloaded one of the many dating apps I’d deleted after a string of particularly bad dates.
I signed up for a new account and filled in the info for my profile. Instead of putting a picture of myself as my avatar, I made a basic text post on a colorful gradient background, then repeated the text in my bio.
Looking for a woman who’s willing to sell her ex’s tools for cheap.
When the profile was live, I swiped right on every bio that popped up on my screen. I wasn’t looking for a date; I was playing the odds. Hopefully one of the women I matched with had an asshole ex who’d left his tools behind.
“What’s with the face?” Nick asked, plopping down next to me on the bench.
“What face? I don’t have a face.”
Nick snickered, his blue eyes open and full of affection.
“Shut up.” I bumped his shoulder with mine good-naturedly. “I just meant this is my normal face.”
“Nope. I know what happy River looks like, and this isn’t him. Try again.”