Page 59 of EX

“Fuck you,” Axel manages to say.

He stumbles to the door and opens it.

His two guys are standing there and end up as shocked as Axel.

Their noses crunch up and down over the smell.

Axel finally caves and starts to vomit.

I’m just grateful he waited until he was out of the office.

I open the top drawer to the desk and take out more than a few bags of heroin and I walk it to the door.

“No need to go empty-handed either, Axel,” I say to him. “This will keep things afloat some more while we work through this.”

I slam the office door and hurry to get out of there.

It smells… well, like shit.

I’ll have the cleaning company come tomorrow and handle that. I’ll apologize to all the customers and tell them an animal got into the office and died.

They’llohhandahhand move on with their lives.

As for me, I'm a little worked up at the moment.

It’s the middle of the night.

It would take ten seconds to make a call or two and have some whore show up to service my cock.

Then again, it would take the same ten seconds to wake my Katie girl up.

Chapter 19

Kate

I can’t sleep.

Poor Chad is still hungover from dinner the night prior.

All that wine really did him in.

It means he’s been quiet, keeping to himself, and he went to sleep around nine. He took some kind of sleeping medicine too. His words—‘to knock my hungover ass out and sleep this off… oh, Kate, I’m not a college kid anymore…’

This leaves me to myself from nine o’clock on, as I stare at my phone, tempting myself todo somethingwhile secretly waitingfor anythingto happen.

By eleven I was showered and in bed next to Chad.

He’s been snoring, lost in his deep sleep.

Even now, at one in the morning, I’m wide awake and I’m looking at Chad, watching drool leak from the right corner of his mouth and down his chin.

I can leave all of this. I can do it with a sense of pride.

It’s okay to end things.

It is something that has served its purpose…

So I start to play it out in my head.