Mister Moneybags(5)
The truth was, I’d stupidly left my phone at Caroline’s last night. I wasn’t going to tell Bianca that my phone was at the apartment of my long-time, casual fuck buddy.
“I’ll meet you out front,” I said.
“How will you know when I’m finished?”
“I’ll just wait for you.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. I can browse some of the magazines in the stand out there. Maybe I’ll see what Bianca George has to say in the latest issue of Finance Times.” I winked.
“Okay.” She smiled. “See you soon.”
When the elevator closed, my heart was pumping. I immediately made my way to the front desk of this random company and flirted with the receptionist just so she would let me borrow her phone.
I used it to ring my secretary.
“Hi, Josephine. As you know, there’s a Bianca George from Finance Times coming to interview me this morning. I need you to keep her waiting initially for about forty-five minutes. When the time is up, then and only then, please inform her that I will no longer be able to make today’s interview. Let her know I’ll be in touch via email to reschedule.”
“Why have her wait at all? I don’t understand.”
“You don’t need to understand, okay? You just need to do it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Despite the fact that I’d left my personal cell at Caroline’s, I had a business phone I kept in my office.
“Can you also have someone run my phone down to the twenty-sixth floor right away? I’ll be waiting outside of the elevator. It’s charging on my desk.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
Needing to make the most of those forty-five minutes, I first had to find me a fucking bike. What good was a bike messenger without one?
“One more thing, Josephine. Can you please Google the nearest Manhattan bike shop located closest to our building?”
She gave me the name of a place about ten minutes away. My driver wasn’t in range, so after my phone was delivered, I cabbed it over there and purchased a bike that the salesperson swore would befit a bike messenger, except I doubted a messenger would need the tandem version I’d purchased. I’d figure out how to explain that to her when the time came.
Wearing my newly purchased helmet, I anxiously waited outside my building. When I saw her emerge, she looked downright pissed.
“What happened?”
“The asshole stood me up.”
“He didn’t give a reason?”
“Nope. They made me wait only to tell me he had to cancel. He’s supposedly going to reschedule, but I don’t buy it.”
Handing her the second helmet I’d bought, I said, “You know what? Fuck him.”
And I do mean that literally and figuratively.
“You’re right. Fuck him.”
“Do you have to be back to work?”
“No, I’m blowing off the rest of the day after this crap,” she said.
I nudged my head. “Get on the back.”
She examined the bike. “Why do you drive a double-seated one?”
“I have multiple bikes. This is for when I need a helper. Luck just had it that my normal bike blew a tire, so I happened to be using this one today. Seems like fate to me. Because today you’re my helper, Bianca George. Now put that helmet on.”
She positioned herself on the back, and we began to pedal away in unison.
I spoke behind my shoulder. “First stop, Cronuts.”
She spoke through the wind, “What’s the second stop?”
“Wherever the day takes us, Georgy Girl.”
“Did you see that?”
“What?” I was having difficulty focusing on anything but the erect nipples peeking out of her thin shirt, if I was being honest.
“Those two guys,” Bianca pointed to two suits sitting on a park bench along the paved walkway about forty feet from where we were sitting on the grass. It was the first time I’d stepped foot on the Great Lawn in Central Park since I was a kid. Although I had a spectacular view of it from my apartment, on most days I didn’t find the time to look out at it.
“What about them?”
She lifted her chin in the direction of an old lady who was several feet on the walk past the two men. “That lady almost tripped and fell on her face.”
“And it’s their fault?”
“The one on the left has his legs stretched so far out, there’s barely room to pass. That walk is only about three feet wide, and his legs are taking up thirty inches of it.”
“He’s tall. I doubt it was his intention to trip an old lady.”
“Maybe not. But that’s the trouble with that type of guy. He doesn’t have common courtesy for the people around him. He’s only aware of things that have a direct impact on him. I bet if a woman with tight yoga pants and a big rack walked by, he would’ve moved his legs because he was interested in the view.”