The Breakup Artist Read online

  The Breakup Artist

  Mia Archer

  The Breakup Artist

  By Mia Archer

  Copyright 2018 Mia Archer

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Individuals pictured on the cover are models and used for illustrative purposes only.

  First digital edition electronically published by Mia Archer, February 2018

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  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  1. On the Job

  2. A Plan Comes Together

  3. After Action

  4. Movie Date

  5. Zero Dark Theater

  6. Meet Cute

  7. Old Projection Room

  8. Lunch

  9. Bad Reputation

  10. Caught

  11. Falling

  12. Business

  13. Mall Walker

  14. Spark

  15. Bad Job

  16. The Plot Thickens

  17. Coming Out

  18. Disaster

  19. More Disaster

  20. The Slap

  21. Surprise Date

  22. Sneaking

  23. Hot Date

  24. The Inevitable Bad Stuff

  25. Showdown

  26. Overload

  27. The Fuzz

  28. Meet the Parents

  29. Apologies

  30. Penultimate Update

  31. Final Update

  32. All’s Well

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  Also by Mia Archer

  1

  On the Job

  Ashley Timmons says

  Love. Everyone wants it. Everyone wants to fall in love. Everyone wants to be in love. Love is a drug and everyone wants to get high on it.

  The funny thing about drugs is sometimes the dose that hurts you is almost the same as the dose that saves you. Sometimes love can be a bad thing.

  Love. Everyone wants it. Not everyone realizes they don’t need it. That’s where I step in.

  My name is Ashley Timmons, also known as the breakup artist.

  I tried to keep quiet about my side hustle. People get upset when they think about someone out there trying to split up couples who seem like they’re perfectly happy together.

  Like I said, there’s a fine line between helping and hurting. Which sort of describes what I do. And the money on the side doesn’t hurt, even if I’m not in it for the money no matter what the rumors say.

  There’ve been a lot of rumors about me since everything went to hell. Since the truth came out. A lot of people who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about trying to talk about me like they know me.

  Well it’s time to set the record straight. It’s time to tell the definitive version of my story so people know what really happened.

  It all started one fateful day at the mall food court on a job that wasn’t much different from any other job. Little did I know it was a job that would set in motion the chain of events that completely changed my life and forced me to write what you’re reading here.

  I looked down at the food court. At all the happy couples down there chatting away because it was a weekend and what better way to spend a weekend than by hanging out with your boyfriend or girlfriend?

  I sniffed. After all, the statistics don’t lie. Most of the people down there who thought they were living out the love of their lives were going to be broken up within a couple of months. The ones that managed to have the perfect high school sweetheart situation were going to break up when they got into colleges on opposite sides of the country.

  Heck, they didn’t even have to go to opposite sides of the country. All it really took was going to colleges on the other side of the state and that would be enough for a few months of drama followed by a messy breakup.

  There are people in this world in relationships that aren’t going to last. So what’s the harm in taking a little bit of money to hasten along the inevitable? Especially when they need to split but either don’t realize it or don’t want to do what’s necessary?

  “Ashley?” Craig’s voice came through my headset. “What are you doing staring off into nothing? Have you lost it?”

  I shook my head. Focused on the job. I was situated on the second floor of the mall food court, which was a big circle with a bunch of restaurants and places to eat on the first floor and a balcony that ran around the food court on the second floor. That made it easy to look down on the people below.

  “Sorry Craig,” I said. “Got a little distracted.”

  Distraction was bad. Distraction was the death of a good job. I planned my jobs down to every detail. Think of it like a high school version of Ocean’s Eleven where the end result is busting up a couple rather than getting lots of money from a casino.

  I eyed the targets. Thomas Bruce and Kylie Selena. They looked like the picture perfect couple. He was the captain of the football team and she was a junior who was considered to be a frontrunner for captain of the cheerleading team next year.

  They were the picture perfect couple.

  It was all a bunch of bullshit, if you ask me. You’re here reading these posts where I’m explaining myself and why I do what it is I do so I figure that’s the same as asking me, so I’m going to tell you why they were so horrible for each other.

  Where to start? I’d been surprised when I got the anonymous request to break them up. You wouldn’t figure one of the two golden couples at our school would be a good target for the infamous breakup artist, but here we were.

  Doing a little digging, helped along by some tips from that anonymous source which always made it so much easier to do my “market research,” I’d discovered that it turns out Thomas wasn’t the great boyfriend everyone thought he was.

  Like he was cutting a path through the rest of the girls on the cheerleading squad, for one, and when he was done with them it looked like he was setting his sights on the gymnastics team.

  Yeah, Thomas wasn’t the stand up guy he tried to portray himself as to the rest of the school, and it was time to take care of a relationship that had long since reached its expiration date.

  See? I told you I was very careful about my work. Love is a drug, and poor Kylie was so high on it that she couldn’t see the lie she was living for what it was. That meant it was time for Dr. Breakup Artist to step in and give her the medicine she needed even if she didn’t realize it.

  “We’re almost ready,” I said. “Are you sure you have the spoof good to go?”

  “I’m always good to go,” Craig said, his voice sounding like he was insulted that I’d ever doubt him.

  I smiled. I should’ve known better than to insult Craig’s technical ability. He was the other half of my operation. The technowizard who made it all possible. He was also my next door neighbor and we’d been BFFs for about as far back as I could remember.

  No, not BFFs like that. We weren’t going to have the “kids growing up next door falling in love” thing going.

  What we did have was a hell of a convenient business arrangement where I took care of finding clients and doing the research necessary to figure out if they were really worthy of my services, I came up with the plan once I decided someone was worthy of my services, and then Craig helped me with executing those plans because he was a wizard with the technical stuff.

  I eyed Thomas and Kylie. They looked so happy sitting down there holding each other’s hands. Like they were the perfect couple.

  I even saw a couple of girls passing by and hit
ting Kylie with some jealous looks. This town is big enough that there are a few high schools, but everyone knew who he was because he was the one who led our school to the all city championship and nearly took state this year.

  Yeah, most girls around here knew who Thomas was, most girls wanted to be with him, and old Tommy Boy down there seemed more than happy to take advantage of that fact to get with as many girls as he could before he went off to college and he wasn’t the big star anymore.

  The bastard.

  “What’s the delay?” Craig asked.

  “You’re going to need to hold on here,” I said. “You know the deal. This is…”

  “…More of an art than a science and that’s the reason you’re out there taking point,” he said in a singsong voice making fun of the line I always used when he was getting impatient.

  It was totally fair though. One of the reasons why I was the point person on these jobs was because I didn’t get impatient. If Craig had his way he’d deliver the package now and it wouldn’t do a damn bit of good because Thomas would be there to intercept.

  This had to be done perfectly.

  I needed to get Tommy boy away from the table long enough to deliver the package. That meant distracting him, because I couldn’t rely on him spontaneously removing himself by wishing hard enough. Sure the perfect moment might come along naturally, but I’d spend a lot of time stalking these two waiting for that perfect moment.

  Much better to manufacture that moment.

  The manufactured moment was swaying her way across the food court right on schedule. Her name was Tara Trent. Also known as one of the more popular and attractive girls at West Central which was the school that bordered our school district.

  Thomas would know who she was. She certainly knew who Thomas was. The real beauty of this plan was I didn’t even have to pay to get her to do this.

  No, it turns out one of Tara’s BFFs was one of the many lovers Thomas had jilted with his high school Lothario routine, and she was more than happy to help out the breakup artist when I sent her an appropriately anonymous message she’d never be able to trace back to me.

  All she had to do was walk. Strut, more like it. Like a model going down the catwalk.

  The girl was dressed to distract. I found myself getting a little distracted by her outfit which probably should’ve told me everything I needed to know about how this story was going to go, but I was so far in the closet at this point in our story that I might as well be scarfing down Turkish Delight with the White Witch.

  Short shorts. High rise because that was the fashion these days, but she’d worn a tank top that showed a generous portion of her stomach. The kind of outfit that drew the attention of every guy in the food court, and some of the girls.

  Including me, but I told myself that attention draw was because I was focused on the job.

  She sashayed right past Thomas, but she was careful to do it in a way that Kylie wouldn’t see her. At least she wouldn’t have seen her if she hadn’t seen the look in her boyfriend’s eyes and turned around to see what he was drooling over.

  Damn. Okay. Hadn’t counted on that. Of course she’d see her boyfriend’s roaming eye and wonder where it was roaming.

  Heck, maybe it would be enough for her to see him checking out another girl. I’d known girls, and guys to be fair, who would’ve blown up about that. Never mind that a wandering eye is only natural.

  Only to my surprise Kylie merely smiled at Tara and turned back to Tommy boy.

  Damn. Could she really be that oblivious? Did she really think he was that faithful? Okay. I guess it was a good thing I decided to go with the nuclear for this job, because it was going to take nothing less than the nuclear option for this girl to realize what a philandering bastard her boyfriend was.

  “Everything okay on your end?” Craig asked.

  “Totally fine,” I said. “Just had a little hiccup, but I think we’re still on track.”

  “Gotcha,” Craig said.

  I laughed. Just a little laugh. “I almost thought we weren’t going to need you on that one. Tara nearly took care of it without your tech wizardry.”

  Craig sniffed to let me know exactly what he thought of that. In his opinion there was nothing that couldn’t be solved with a little tech wizardry.

  I figured the less he knew about the jobs I pulled off through pure social engineering the better. It added to some of my mystique if I was able to pull a job off without resorting to tech stuff, even if in this day and age most of the jobs came down to that eventually.

  “So are we…”

  “Would you hold your horses and let me work damn it?” I hissed.

  “Fine,” Craig said.

  I knew I was going to have to make that up to him. He was an artist, even if the canvas he used was bits and bytes, and like all artists he could be sullen if he thought I was insulting his work.

  I’d worry about that later. Right now I watched and waited and prayed that Thomas would fall for the bait.

  And I think I’m going to leave this post at that. You gotta leave your audience begging for more, right? Check back on my next update for the 411 on how the Tommy boy job went down, and get an insight firsthand on how the breakup artist worked her magic!

  2

  A Plan Comes Together

  Ashley Timmons says

  A few clarifications after my last post since there were a lot of people who got all pissy about what it is I do.

  One: I don’t care what you’ve heard about Thomas Bruce. I don’t care that he showed up in the comments on my last post to talk about what a great guy he is and how I’m totally making up lies about him.

  He isn’t a great guy. All you girls who decided to defend his honor because you’re hoping you’ll be the next notch on his bedpost? Gag. You could do so much better than that guy. Have some respect for yourselves.

  And Tommy boy? You don’t mind if I call you Tommy boy, right? You seemed to love it so much in the comments, after all. XOXO ;) I don’t care how mad you get, because all the girls who showed up with stories about you loving and leaving, way more comments than the girls defending you because they think you look good playing your sportsball, are the real truth.

  Besides, my research never lies.

  Two: Attack me all you want for what I did. I get it. There are people who are going to think I’m a horrible person even if I think I was performing a valuable public service. The fact that you all think I’m a horrible person is sort of why I’m doing this in the first place.

  But do you really want to shoot the messenger? Everyone wants to know this story, and if you’re leaving comments telling me how you can’t wait to hear the rest of it in one sentence and then telling me what a terrible person I am in the next sentence it makes me not want to continue writing my story.

  So which is it? Love my story or hate me? Maybe both? Well keep your angry comments to yourselves until I’m done. Reserve judgment until I’ve told you the whole story.

  Fine. That’s off my chest. Now it’s time to get on with the story proper. When last we left our daring hero (that’s me) she was sitting on the top level of the mall food court looking down on Thomas Bruce and Kylie Selena: high school power couple.

  I was about to fix that.

  “I don’t think he’s going for the bait,” I muttered.

  “What was that?” Craig asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  This was the one part of the plan I didn’t have a contingency for. The whole plan hinged on Thomas being so distracted by Maddie and her unique assets that he got up and left the table without thinking about grabbing his phone.

  Only he was staying rooted to the spot. Sure his head kept turning in Maddie’s direction, but he wasn’t following her like the good little boy thinking with the wrong head that I thought he was.

  It was enough to make me wonder if my research was bad. Maybe he was faithful and I’d been duped by someone who was trying to break these two up for their own
nefarious purposes.

  There were people who tried to do that. Tried to employ me for all the wrong reasons. It was part of the reason why I did so much research into a couple before I decided whether or not their relationship needed to end.

  I had to be sure I was doing a job for the right reasons. I had to be sure I was bringing good into the world by doing what I did and not just throwing around some unnecessary drama.

  I was about to give up, call the whole thing off, when it happened. Thomas obviously made some excuse and then he was up and moving across the food court. Off towards the hall Maddie had disappeared down.

  I breathed a sigh of relief. I pulled out my phone and opened AnonIMous. A handy little app that let me talk to people without those people knowing who I was. Someone would have to steal my phone to realize I was the breakup artist, and even then they’d have to figure out my phone password. It was set to wipe after five unsuccessful attempts to get in with a bad password.

  Even if they did manage to unlock my phone they’d have to figure out the password to get into the encrypted part of my phone that held my AnonIMous conversations.

  Hey, I’d figured early on that it paid to be very crazy about all this security stuff considering what I did. I think how things eventually turned out and the fact that I’m writing this post here today is proof enough that I was absolutely right.