Page 12 of Badd Love
Inconsolable, angry, terrified—traumatized.
Someone hurt her.
Badly.
I don't truck with anyone who hurts women. I was raised to respect women, to protect them, take care of them. Not just my family, not just a woman I happen to be seeing or whatever, but all women. Shit,all peopledeserve respect and basic decency. No one should be hurt or manipulated or disrespected or used. My family has very strong feelings when it comes to men’s treatment of women. You hurt a woman in our orbit, we hurt you.
It's very fucking simple.
That's the baseline, the benchmark.
When I think about some faceless shithead doing something horrible enough to Lindsey that she has episodes like that?
I see red.
Fury boils inside me.
I want to punch someone's fucking face in—the shitstain who hurt her, in particular.
It'd be great if I could just focus my memory on the sexy parts, like when she rode me like the penny pony at the grocery store, those big juicy tits bouncing like Jell-O. And to be clear, I fucking love Jell-O.
FUCK.
I have to get some answers. I am fully aware that I may very well hate the answers once I get them, but that's still better than this total ignorance.
We clamberedout of the gray Toyota Sienna driven by Arjun H—a small, quiet Sikh man with a red turban, a fucking fantastic beard, and a wizardly ability to weave through traffic. He thanked us as he handed off our bags, doing that funny little bobble of his head that seemed to mean something I was too ignorant to understand.
Raquel slung her purse over her shoulder and gazed up at the four-story apartment building in a section of West Hollywood inhabited largely by the starry-eyed service industry and gig workers hoping for a shot at glory in the film industry.
She sighed. "Let’s get this over with."
Hamish and I followed her to the main entrance of the building—a freakishly good-looking, jacked Black guy in expensive athletic-wear held the door open for us with his brawny brown shoulder, cell phone to his ear as heuh-huh'ed his way through a conversation. He gave Raquel a friendly chin-jerk of recognition with an absent-minded smile, and then he was gone in a swirl of cologne and Central Casting charisma.
I recognized the street and the building, but only vaguely; we’d both been pretty tipsy by the time we got back here.
Hamish eyed Raquel as she stabbed the elevator call button. "Y'know him, then?"
Raquel gave him a droll side-eye. "Seen him around a few times, but I don't know him." She arched an eyebrow. "Jealous, baby?"
"Of his perfectly sculpted, hairless, Adonis physique? Nae, love, not hardly."
Raquel snorted and patted his belly. "If that's what I wanted, I would've married that. Guys like him are a dime a dozen in LA, baby. I marriedyou—a burly, hairy, red-haired Scotsman with a heart of gold and just enough padding to be the cuddliest man on the planet."
Hamish grumbled something under his breath, but it was in such a thick Scottish slang-laced brogue that I understood precisely none of it.
Raquel just snickered. "You gonna repeat that for the class, my love?"
Hamish just shook his head and mumbled something about showing her padding, which got her giggling breathily and had me wondering if I needed to wait for another elevator, or maybe just take the stairs.
The elevator opened onto a dark, low-ceilinged hallway with gray industrial carpeting on the floor and builder-grade wall sconces that were likely meant to "elevate the aesthetics” or some shit but which really just screamed "lipstick on a pig."
Raquel led us down the hallway, around the corner, and to the farthest end unit, all by itself in a strange corner-nook at the rear of the building.
There was a sheet of printer paper taped to the door, with “GO AWAY!!”in size 100 font, bolded, italicized, and underlined.
Hamish chuckled. "Well, I think we know she's here. Unless she has this up year-round?"
Raquel shook her head. "No, this is new." She sighed. "Just…let me do the talking, okay?"
