Page 13 of Her Reborn Mate

“Lawrence? He was all right. He took me out, we had a little bit of fun. What, do you think he’s raising some red flags?”

“Not that guy. That guy was all right. The other guy,” Izzie said. “The one you were having a shouting match with.”

It sank in my heart, this realization that I hadn’t had a hallucination; if Izzie had met with him, then he must have been alive and must have come into my room for real.

“The haggard-looking guy?” I asked fearfully.

“Is that the same guy who gave you all these bruises?” Izzie asked. “I had a shotgun cocked at him.”

“No, he never beat me or anything like that. The scars that he gave me are all emotional,” I said.

“Those still count as scars, honey. Abuse doesn’t have to be just physical to count as abuse. Most men run the world through emotional and verbal abuse,” Izzie said.

There were so many customers that it was hard to understand what Izzie was saying. It was just as hard for her to understand what I was saying. We both had to speak louder than usual and strain to hear what the other person was saying. The game, in full swing, did not help. Every five seconds or so, the crowd yelled when the players got a strike or hit a home run. It was chaos inside the bar, but it was the good kind of chaos, the kind that made you forget that the world outside was a fucked up place with bloodthirsty monsters lurking around the corners and ex-mates coming back from the dead.

“I just want to forget about him,” I said. “You know, I thought he had died. Then he turns up and tries to undo all the mourning I did for him.”

“Typical men. They gaslight you into thinking that the world revolves around them. And when you finally escape their mental prison, they go and pull shit like this,” Izzie said. “I bet he was really scared to see that you were doing so well all on your own.”

“He’s not that bad. He’s just old-fashioned,” I said.

“Old-fashioned is what whipped women call their husbands who still resort to treating their wives like fuckable dishwashers and house slaves. You don’t want to call him old-fashioned. If anything, we need more woke men than before,” she said.

“Woke like Lawrence, you mean?” I asked, chuckling. I’d just handed two chubby young adults six glasses of beer. They had been all too eager to receive their imbibements. In their happiness, they had tipped me fifty dollars.

“Lawrence is a slick big-city man from what I can tell. You better be careful around him. Chances are he’s not who he says he is. Guys like him think that the world is their playground. All women are toys in that big sandbox,” Izzie said.

“Jesus, Izzie, you hate men,” I said.

“I’ve got my reasons, girl,” Izzie said.

It was much better in the bar than it was in my room. I spent the entire night serving drinks to the old-timers and the watchers of the game, most of whom left very dejected after the Red Sox lost to the Cubs. Some of them even broke a couple of glasses, in response to which Izzie took out her baseball bat and suggested that she’d break their heads if they didn’t pay for all the broken glasses.

It was good entertainment. Good enough to keep me distracted from what had just happened.

I only went up at the break of dawn, and when I crashed on my bed, I immediately fell asleep, not minding that the window was still open and the bed smelled like beer and piss.

I just wanted to sleep.

***

“You look rested,” Lawrence said, holding a rose in his hand. “Quite rested. You are radiant.”

I had slept the entire morning and had promised Izzie that I’d take the night shift.

“Thanks,” I said, blushing a bit. I had put some good effort into getting ready for this second date. Izzie had lent me some of her makeup supplies and had given me a pair of her dresses to wear other than the stolen stuff in the cabinet. I did look nice. During my sleep, my healing had kicked into overdrive. By the time evening rolled in, all of my wounds except for the bullet wound had healed. “Is that rose a callback to our first date?”

“You mean when that boy pestered us to buy a rose, and when we didn’t, he gave up and just gave it to us for free?” Lawrence laughed.

“Yeah,” I said, grinning. “Didn’t you say you’d come by on the weekend?”

“I tried to go the macho route, not call and only come on the weekend. But I was up all night thinking about you, and I couldn’t stop even when I was at work. So…I got off work early, called you, and here we are. I don’t want to be the typical alpha male.”

“Ugh, please never use that word again.”

“Alpha male?”

“Yeah. I have a lifelong aversion to that term. My ex…he was really into that stuff,” I said.