Grand theft amore

Chapter 1

Working at a watch shop drove Louie Contini balls-to-the-wall crazy.

It paid the bills, but it was dull work for a skilled mechanical mind such as his own, and most of the repairs he was required to perform took hours and called for specialized equipment for manipulating small moving parts which a slimmer technician with more delicate hands would have handled with comparative speed and ease. Additionally, on top of watch repairs and band resizing, he was responsible for making sales and earned a commission on top of his hourly wage, which would have been great, if not for Louie's lifelong phobia of talking to strangers.

He winced as the bell above the door jingled to herald the arrival of a customer. 'Just treat it like LARPing and slip into your worksona,' he thought to himself. 'Remember, he's extremely neurotypical and his favorite hobbies are smalltalk and direct eye contact.' "Welcome to You Better Watch Out, how can I help–?"

When he looked up to lock eyes with the slender, blue-eyed blonde who had entered the shop, he stopped dead in his tracks.

As they said on TV: holy shit, Catboy.

It was Bailey Sharp. THE Bailey Sharp, the world-famous pop singer and three-time VMA winner for Music Video of the Year. Why would she, the Queen of a multi-million dollar music empire, be looking to buy a cheap watch?

If Louie didn't know any better, he would have thought her deep undercover for whatever reason. She had left off her signature red lipstick and wore a baggy, nondescript shirt, cargo pants, flat shoes, and a scarf over her blonde bun. The inelegant, no-name brand handbag under her arm looked like something she might have found at Bland's in the Blackwater Mall, and she had on rimless rectangular glasses. It was a clever ensemble for anyone hoping to avoid the invasive lens of the paparazzi, but come on–it was Bailey Sharp. Louie had no doubt there were at least a handful lurking around a nearby corner despite her best efforts to fly under the radar, or that in a week's time, dorky, unflattering outfits in varying shades of beige would be all the rage because someone thin and famous had been seen in a magazine wearing one.

She approached the counter in quick, anxious steps. After looking over each shoulder, she gazed seriously into his eyes and asked, quietly, in a sweet Southern drawl, "If I needed something fixed that's a little bigger'n a watch, d'ya think you could do it?"

Suddenly, he was less averse to conversation. "Sure, I can fix anything! Is it your car?" He so hoped it was her car. Not that he derived some sort of sadistic glee from the idea of a woman having car troubles; it had just been so long since he had worked on a car, and it was something he missed like a drug, or the touch of a deceased girlfriend.

She pressed her lips together to stifle a giggle, but a small smile still slipped through. "Cute and funny, I see." Nevermind that he hadn't been joking. And what? Cute? "No, it's smaller than a car."

He waited for her to elaborate on the broken object in her possession, and when she didn't, he sighed. "Well, don't keep me in suspense…"

"Oh! Right." She went rummaging in her bag until she found her prize and laid it flat across the table. "I think it's a belt?"

Well, she wasn't wrong.

But to reduce it to simply 'a belt' seemed incredibly insulting to both the artifact and its designer, as its functionality extended far past a belt's traditional role of holding up pants, for which it was no good in its current state, snapped at its center as if by force.

The 'belt' was about 28 inches long and two thick, engineered out of a ramshackle collection of scrap metal pieces, with a miniature, but functional, mechanism resembling a jet engine built into each side that was presumably meant to fall over the wearer's hip.

The jet engines weren't even the most fascinating bit.

"Where the hell did you get this?" asked Louie, turning over the mechanical masterpiece in his hands.

Bailey shrugged. "I found it in some wreckage by an intersection in the projects. You know, where they were going to build that bougie new shopping center but it just never happened? Why, is it a collector's item or something?"

Louie hadn't expected the mind behind a love song called 'I'm In Love' to be especially agile, but he found it difficult to believe she was this oblivious to the history of the object she'd been carrying in her purse. "You really didn't know this is Big Tech's original rocket belt?"

"No way!" said Bailey. "That dude could never squeeze into this ol' thing! He's gotta be close to seven hundred pounds!"

"Well, it's from before, obviously. Before Bombshell showed up and zapped him with her fat-making powers."

"Wow!" Bailey's blue eyes blew wide, and she drew an impressed gasp. "You sure do know your superhero trivia, mister! Here I thought I just found a cool accessory!"

"Yeah, well," said Louie, pulling a screwdriver and a set of pliers from under the counter, "the fight was all over Twitter."

Another battle that had made waves on social media was Louie's own clash with Big Tech, which had resulted in Bombshell's intervention, followed by a stint in her specialized bariatric prison.

Louie's descent into supervillainy had been, from the start, an ill-fated bid to win Bombshell's heart. He had been her devoted auto mechanic for as long as she'd been in the business of saving lives, and had never made a secret of being hopelessly in love with her, but she rejected his every advance, insisting a romantic entanglement with her would make him a target amongst her enemies. It had destroyed him to find out when she became involved with another mechanical mastermind with no superpowers to speak of.

Nowadays, all was forgiven, at least by Bombshell and her beau. Louie had even managed to get his weight down to a manageable 390 pounds, but no matter how much work he put into cleaning up the mess he'd made of his life, his father still refused to give him back his job at the family forklift rental and auto repair business.

But if Bailey was in the dark about all that drama, he wasn't about to enlighten her. He'd be happy if he never heard the codename 'Forklifter' again.

"Would you mind if I stepped a little deeper in the store to give my sister in Texas a call?" she asked.

"Not at all. Be my guest." Then, just to sound more empathetic, he added, "I hope she's okay."

"She's great! I just need to borrow her expertise on something."

Probably her costumes for an upcoming concert, Louie assumed. Just as famous as the pop icon, Shaydelyn Sharp was one of the high fashion world's most in-demand models, even after that whole scandal with the sleazy boyfriend and the sex tape.

The rocket belt's design was remarkably intuitive and easy to piece back together using just a few spare parts Louie already had lying around the shop. Clearly, Big Tech was a firm believer in right-to-repair. He finished before Bailey had even gotten off the phone.

From the back of the shop, he overheard her saying, "So, Shay-Shay, I was wondering if you could give me any advice on buying a gun."

A few minutes later, she bounded back up to the counter, her mouth a stunned 'o' of admiration for Louie's work. "You're done that fast? That's amazing! How much do I owe ya?"

"Just ten bucks for parts."

"Ten bucks?! You sell yourself short!" She pulled five crisp hundreds out of a front pocket of her bag, along with a stack of paperwork. "Could I also get you to sign this nondisclosure agreement saying I was never here?"

Weird, he thought to himself. But five hundred bucks would pay the FlickStream bill for a good long time. So, he signed without raising any questions.

"Thank you, thank you, thank you!" She took back the NDA and the rocket belt and shoved them back into her bag before leaning over to press a kiss to his cheek. If he flinched at the blatant disregard of his personal space bubble, it flew completely over her head. "I'm going to be such a fashionista!" she squealed, dashing out of the store.

Another strange detail Louie picked up: she lingered for an uncanny amount of time on the F in 'fashionista,' as if she'd been about to say something else, but changed her mind at the last minute. But he decided he had probably just imagined it, and even if he'd been right, and she'd had another F-word at the ready but had thought better of dropping it, it was absolutely none of his business. He was just grateful to be half a stack richer and have her out of his hair.