He had always been attracted to women with ambition because it required a level of confidence that he didn’t have. The laundromat he owned didn’t require much effort to keep the doors open, so he had that covered. He owned and lived in the building, so paying a few utility bills on time wasn’t difficult either. To someone like him, Inez’s color-coded spreadsheets and annotated social media calendars seemed like sorcery. Maybe he thought it would rub off. Or at least point his life in some direction that felt more like progress and less like floating into space.
Nathan spotted his car in the distance. The interior light illuminated the women lounging inside. Laura’s bare foot was bobbing outside the passenger window, and Chrissie’s blond hair was splayed across the back seat. His Camaro had been taken hostage by two drunk 7-Eleven cashiers.
Fuck. It may not have been his heart, but Inez had definitely broken something.
“I’m good.” He turned to Dillon and added a quick smile to make it more convincing. “Just picky.”
“Yeah, well, get unpicky before it stops working.” Dillon grinned, visibly relieved to switch to one of his favorite topics. “I read that on Reddit a while back. It has to do with chronology or something.”
“Chronology?”
“Yeah, like your muscles and shit. What Stan Payton studied before he started coaching that baseball team.”
“That’s not—” Nathan paused and considered the effort involved in explaining kinesiology versus chronology to his friend. “You know. You’re probably right.”
A guy in a white Tesla honked his horn when they walked in front of his car, and they flipped him off in unison. “You talk to Bobbi lately?” Dillon asked, ducking his head to focus on an empty Coke can he kicked ahead like a soccer ball.
“Yeah,” Nathan said, eager for a new topic. He blocked Dillon with the side of his foot, sending the can skidding to the right.
“Like, a lot?” The parking lot was suddenly flooded in light. Music swelled over closing credits and a chorus of engines turning over. “People around town are saying you guys have some sort of thing going on.”
People? What people? Nathan could count on one hand the number of people in Oasis Springs he’d spoken to over the past year. Even that customer with the hairless cat who used to nod on her way out the door refused to make eye contact lately. Probably because he didn’t smile as much as he used to. Being a big brown guy with ink up to his neck didn’t give him the luxury of being antisocial.
“There’s no thing.” Nathan paused at the sight of a black Mercedes parked in the distance, away from the other cars. A woman was sitting on the hood. “Why does that car look familiar?”
Dillon followed his gaze. “Everyone in this town drives a Mercedes. It’s like rednecks and their four-wheelers.” He glanced at Nathan. “Nice rims, though.”
Dillon was right, there was nothing special about a late-model S-Class in Oasis Springs. But the woman sitting on the hood gave him a vague sense of déjà vu. Her clothes matched the car—dark, sleek, and expensive—but she sat hunched over, knees to chest, periodically swiping her eyes. The whole thing looked off, like she’d gotten lost on her way to a cocktail party.
“Wait.” Dillon snapped his fingers, eyes widening with recognition. “Is that the mayor’s wife? I saw her on some top ten list the other day. Hottest DC Honeys. What’s her name? Rebecca or Sarah…”
“Rachel,” Nathan corrected hesitantly, because the idea seemed ridiculous, even though he knew Dillon was right. “Rachel Abbott.”
If Dillon read anything besides subreddit posts on a regular basis, he would have known exactly who Rachel was. Her husband’s rant about Virginia’s failed universal pre-K bill had gone viral. Nathan couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a white man in a thousand-dollar suit shout the word “fuck” that many times into a microphone. The guy was genuinely pissed off, even though the Abbotts could have opened their own chain of day cares with a fraction of that British slave trade money they pretended came from “working in textiles.” No one had judged Matt for being a trust fund kid shouting about poor people. They thought it made him a good person. Just like being married to a Black woman made him “open minded.”
Rachel had also been in that clip. The person filming had zoomed in on her face when Matt mentioned the impact of systemic racism in public schools. As Matt Abbott told the world that his wife used to be a teenage mother who couldn’t afford childcare, she’d stood silently behind him like a blank-faced beauty queen, as though someone had put a life-sized cutout onstage instead of the actual woman. Nathan remembered thinking that she was beautiful in that unrealistic way that reminded you some people were God’s favorites: flawless skin, full lips, big dark eyes.