Orchids (Corey Taylor)

Chapter 5

I'm not really sure how it ended up happening, but I wound up staying in the café with Corey for an hour. We didn't even talk about anything important, we just chatted about any random thing that would happen to come to mind, but when I checked my phone I was surprised by the time.

"I hate to do this, but..." I began.

"You have to leave." He finished off with a nod of understanding.

"Yeah, I'm sorry."

"No, it's fine. It was nice talking to you though." He says getting to his feet and holding his hand out to help me up as well. "Thanks for the coffee by the way. It's actually really good."

I chuckled as I took his hand and stood, "I told you so."

I tried my best to make letting go of his hand right after seem as natural as possible, by reaching into my bag for my keys.

It didn't appear to faze him as he nodded along, "Well, hopefully, I'll see you around then, Maddie."

"Bye, Corey." I say with a wave as we step outside and we head off in opposite directions.

By the time I made it back to my apartment, I found Lea curled up on the couch munching on popcorn and watching TV. Her gaze flicked up as soon as I stepped through the doorway and she gave me a knowing sort of smile.

She turned on the lamp, exposing the fact that she had already bought us dinner, and then questioned, "Where have you been at all this time?"

"Um, I went to go get coffee."

"For an hour? That must have been a pretty good brew."

I let out a defeated sigh and confessed, "Okay, okay. I ran into Corey and he asked me if I knew where any good coffee shops were, so I showed him."

"Really?" She questioned with a delighted grin. "I'm starting to feel like it's going to be a race to see which version of you gets to be the closest to Corey first. It's beginning to look like it's going to be Maddie that's the winner."

"That's kind of sick." I point out with a laugh as I shake my head and take a seat beside her.

"In what way?"

"Well, one side of me, he sees as a sex worker and the other he sees as a just a normal girl. It makes a sad bit of sense that he'd want to be around this version of me."

Lea rolled her eyes, "But he doesn't know that you have this whole double life thing going on. On top of that, it's nearly impossible to get close to who you pretend to be as Carmen."

"That's only because it's safer that way."

"And it's really fucking smart. I get why you do what you do, but my point is, you need to remember that only a hand full of people know about it. Anyone outside of Heat's business is clueless and Corey is included in that, so he's associating with both Maddie and Carmen as two different people. Besides, would you actually want him to like Carmen better?"

"I don't care if he likes me at all. I just want to know what his intentions are."

"Most likely he wants to associate with Carmen to get her a record deal that would allow her to leave that nasty club behind. Then for Maddie, well, I guess we'll just have to wait and see what he has in store for her." She offers with a playful smirk.

I scoff as I lean over the coffee table in front of us, trying to decide what I wanted for dinner and to hopefully end the conversation. Thankfully, she got the message and wordlessly offered me a plastic fork before turning the television back up.