Page 36 of The Devil Wears Nada

I've got this, I’d thought.

I did not, it turns out, have this.

I don't have a single piece of it.

11

AGGIE

I keep waiting for the war to blow over. These are grown men, business partners, best friends. Surely they'll do the guy thing where they don't discuss it, pretend it never happened, and are fine again by Friday. That's how men fix things, right? By solemnly agreeing to never mention them?

I guess these three don’t operate that way. A week goes by, and the silence at Ardent Capital doesn't thaw. Instead, it hardens. Beck stops coming in before ten. Theo takes his meetings off-site. Elias, who was always a closed door, becomes a fortified safe. The whole building tiptoes around them. The woman in accounting has upgraded her buyout theory to "somebody is definitely leaving." And I sit at the front desk, the receptionist, the furniture, routing calls between three men who will not be in a room together, and I am the only person in the company who knows the fight is about a virtual woman not one of them has ever officially met.

Me. Well, not me but Diablo.

The crazy thing though is that’s not even the part that keeps me up at night, nor is it some strange guilt I’m grappling with even though I’m just trying to survive over here. If these guys can’t resolve their problems like big boys, how is that my damn fault?

Of course it’s not. But then why do I feel so shitty?

Because the war didn't stay at the office. It followed them home, into the dark, onto my screen.

The first night after the war broke out, only Beck shows up out of the three. HouseMoney, alone, tipping hard and mean, no banter, gone in twenty minutes. The second night, nobody. Not one of them, so I exit the private room so I can entertain any other Knights who might be interested. I kneel there in the red lipstick and the nine-dollar slip, live, in front of my little court of five-dollar Knights, and I make ninety dollars.

Ninety dollars.

I have gotten so used to the other number that ninety dollars feels like a slap in the face. The cold truth of it settles on me, heavy and unwanted, and it’s that my entire income, the machine that has been eating Birdie's loan alive, was dependent on three men who all wanted to be in the room with me at the same time. And now they don’t.

My whole livelihood was built on three men getting along, and there was one way for it to fall apart.

Me.

What’s really crazy is that I want to fix it. Not for them. For me. I want to march into all three of their offices and knock their stupid heads together and tell them they're burning down a twenty-year friendship and, incidentally, my only road out of debt, so get it together. I want to log on and tell my whales to grow the hell up and come home to Mama.

And I can't do any of it. I can't fix the office fight, because Agnes isn't supposed to know it exists. I can't fix the war on the screen, because Diablo isn't supposed to know they're the same three men. I am the one person alive who could end this in a single sentence, and that sentence would also end me.

So I get to sit in the middle of the wreck, hands tied behind my back, and watch it all burn down, bit by bit.

My phone buzzes on the nightstand. I know who it is before I look.

Sal.

I let it ring out. But I do the thing I've spent a week not doing. I open the loan balance and I look at the number, the real one, the one that just weeks ago started to feel beatable. But it’s still so much, so much that I was going to knock flat by the end of the month with money I no longer make.

And then, at 12:40 in the morning, in an empty room I'm one click from shutting down, there’s a single chime.

Not a tip. A message. From KindRegards.

Are you okay? And don't give me the answer you give the room. I've watched you long enough to know you're carrying something you shouldn't be carrying alone.

Then: You don't have to tell me what. But don't tell me it's nothing. Good night.

Theo. Of course it's Theo. Breaking ranks even now. The only one of the three with the nerve to reach through the wall I've thrown up, over a war I started and can't admit I know a damn thing about.

I read it four times.

I don't answer.

But God help me, I want to. And that, the wanting to reach back through the wall, the wanting to fix them, the wanting them, is the exact thing that is going to get me caught. I know it, cold and certain, and I keep wanting it anyway.