Page 12 of Finance Bros

Still—if I look at the vintage t-shirt idea and scale it to include other rare thrift finds, maybe…

No. No way. I get it now—it’s an impossible challenge. I’d be better off putting the money into my savings account. Not thinking about it anymore would probably help, but if I stop, I know exactly what I’ll start thinking about, and I’m not going there tonight.

Instead, I put on a song I actually like and ask ChatGPT to make me more money.

4

MALCOLM

“You’re being weird.”

Kaylin says this Friday night as I’m literally pulling off my full condom and still breathing heavy. Definitely not what a guy wants to hear after coming. “Did you not…?”

“No. I did.”

“Then what?”

“You just seem pre-occupied. That’s all I meant.”

She’s still wearing her bra, and she sits up in bed against the headboard while I get rid of the condom. When I turn back to her, she pats the mattress in front of her crisscrossed legs. “Talk to me.”

I sigh, plopping my naked ass down. She gives my arm a stroke, and I glance at her briefly. She’s a cute girl. Always has been. Petite. Curvy. Soft. Her brown hair was in a perfectly fine bun before we had sex, and now it’s mussed and crooked. Her large, dark eyes are sincere and concerned. Because we’ve been together since freshman year of high school, she’s my best friend as well as my girlfriend. She reads me with laser accuracy most of the time, so I never bother with my bad lying.

“One—I can’t think of a fucking way to make a single dollar out of a hundred dollars. Two—Ryan’s in the internship.”

“Whoa—what?”

I squeeze my eyes shut. There’s a reason I didn’t mention this earlier in the week, but ever since he and I “talked” and we’re dealing with it by not dealing with it—or he is—I realize I’ve gotta figure my end out somehow.

“OurRyan?” she asks in a way that makes me flinch.

“You know what I mean,” she adds.

She means the only Ryan we both know. She means the guy she was sort of dating before I kissed her at a party and plastered her to me like a shield. She means the stepbrother I used to have who had me dreading every family function for years until his mom divorced my dad. She also means—because she knows everything there is to know about me—the Ryan who used to be my best friend before he ruined everything by telling me he was in love with me.

Normally, I wouldn’t have told her or anyone about that day because it was so fucking embarrassing, but I’d desperately wanted to get into her pants at the time, and since she was sort of hung up on him, I had to give her a reason to look my way.

“Yeah. That Ryan.”

“How is he?”

“I don’t fucking know,” I grumble. “Still an asshole.”

Kaylin sighs, her hand slipping down my forearm to encircle my wrist. “Have you talked to him?”

“You know, I actually tried. The first day we ignored each other, but I ran into him at a deli Tuesday morning, and I made an effort. He wasn’t having it.”

“Do you think he still…”

“How could he possibly?” I have given Ryan zero reasons to love me in any capacity for the better part of a decade whilegiving him infinite reasons to hate me with his whole chest. It appears to have worked.

She studies my face, my eyes in particular. “Yeah. I guess. Do you have to work with him?”

“Not really. We huddle in the mornings and have these intern debriefs at the end of the day where we sit in the conference room for twenty minutes with our supervisor, but other than that, no.”

“So, what’s bugging you?”

I fuckingwishI could articulate the answer to that. “You tell me.”

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