Read Hating Olivia: A Love Story for Free Online

He used to sleep with you, too, I presume.”
    My attempt at generosity of spirit. More silence.
    “Come on. You can tell me.”
    “Well, okay … if you really have to know.”
    “Well, all right then.”
    She took a deep breath.
    “He’s got a gun. And he’s threatening to come over here and blow us both away. Me for betraying him, you for coming between us.”
    Oh. Nice.
    “Do you think he’d actually do it?”
    “I hope not. But you never know. Edward can be pretty violent.”
    “How violent?”
    “At my other place he busted down the front door in the middle of the night to make sure I wasn’t cheating on him. And he threw a fit once that was loud enough to make the neighbors call the cops. And he took a swing at me that missed and shattered all the crystal in the cupboard. And—well, things like that.”
    “Things like that … I see.”
    Recent odd occurrences in my life suddenly began to make sense. Such as that a certain car with a tinted windshield—a Mercedes or some similar expensive model—had tailed me out of the parking lot of the Purple Turtle once or twice. That on the rare occasions when I checked in at the roach palace I got telephone calls from someone who refused to speak but would only listen while breathing hard at the other end. And the typewritten anonymous letter that arrived in the mail and warned me to “mind my own business or suffer the consequences…. “
    Later, when I showed it to Livy, she admitted that it might have come from Edward but not to worry. She suspected that eventually the storm would blow over. In the meantime, we’d just have to wait it out.
    “You love me, don’t you?”
    “Hell, yes. And I won’t let anything happen to you, either.” “I didn’t think so.”
    “He comes over here, I’ll deal with him.”
    “Thanks, Max … I need somebody to look out for me.”
    She dissolved into tears. But I had to admit that some part of me felt sorry for Edward. Here I was screwing the daylights out of his girlfriend—ex-girlfriend—while he sat at home and stewed about it, pictured the sordid details in his mind’s eye. No wonder he was teetering on the brink of committing mayhem. There was nothing worse than being on the outside looking in. I knew the feeling well.
    If Livy could do it to him, did it mean she could do it to me someday, too?
    No. Because I was different. Sure, I was a whole different ball game from everybody else, anybody she ever had before me. Me, I was special. Nobody had what I had. She didn’t really love Edward. It was me she loved.
    Why, all I had to do was think of how she fucked me … right?
    I braced myself for the worst, but Edward never showed up to kill either one of us. The threatening calls stopped, too, and I didn’t receive any more ominous letters in the mail. The boy had come to his senses, just like Livy predicted. Still, I thought it was rather strange that he’d given up the ship after all that bluster and bravado. But hey—I wasn’t complaining. When things go your way, there’s no point in trying to figure out why. This was a gift horse, and I wasn’t about to look in its mouth.

9.
    Tutoring the foreigners sure beat hell out of breaking my ass on the loading platform. I didn’t have to jackass a thing, never got dirty, and the hourly rate was a lot more respectable. All I had to do with the aliens was sit and talk. I was good at talking. Maybe I was better at talking than anything else. The downside was instead of packages, now I was dealing with people. You never knew what people were going to do next.
    For instance, Mister V. Kishan Rao failed to show up at the appointed time for his eighth session. He never called to give me a reason why, and since he’d refused to divulge his number, I couldn’t call him. A piddling fifty-six tax-free dollars and it was over. I never heard from the man again….
    As far as the Japs were concerned, something similar happened not long afterward. Again I was blindsided,