Page 7 of Just Not That Into Billionaires

Lizzie bursts into the room clutching her coat and a large white box. “I understand congratulations are in order!”

I raise up a hand. “Please,” I say. “I don’t even know what to say.”

“Don’t worry, we’re going to track down that missing Vegas husband of yours!” She sets the box on the coffee table and flings open the lid. It’s full of frosted cookies in the shapes of double bells. “Happy wedding! And impending divorce! Woo-hoo!”

Antonio, our resident hot Italian model, strolls in with a six-pack of beer and an eight-pack under his shirt. “Off the market,” he says sadly, adding something in Italian. He claps a dramatic hand to his chest. “My heart breaks,stellina!”

“Only a million girls left for you to serial-date,” I say. “Whatever will you do?”

Mia grabs a cookie. “The good thing about Hot Pink Barbies is that it’s the kind of alcoholic drink that goes perfectly with cookies. You have to appreciate that in a drink.”

“Agree!” Tabitha grins. “I appreciate it very much.”

Lizzie sets up her laptop at the kitchen table. “Okay, I brought all my stuff for a background check. You got his social for me?”

I slide the paperwork over to her and take a chair at the other side of the table.

Kelsey comes over and sits next to me. “Don’t worry, we’re going to figure this out. You’re gonna go on your tour.”

“I don’t know what I’ll do if I can’t,” I say.

“Well, if you don’t go, at least your knee will be happy,” Kelsey says.

I give her a dirty look. “The knee is happy now. The knee is eager to tour.”

“Yeah, sure,” Kelsey says. “On the bright side, you got an unexpected day off!”

Kelsey’s a dancer, too—she’s in the big production ofAnything Goeswith Mia. She knows how brutal a dancer’s schedule can be—hours of classes and rehearsals, back-to-back. She knows what a knee injury can mean, but nothing is going to get in the way of my international tour. Unless we can’t get this divorce paperwork pulled together in time, but I don’t let myself think that.

Noelle is telling everybody what I said about Benny and his nerdy ways. I fill in with some additional Benny details. His glowering glare when I’d laugh with the other cast members. His sullen attitude at the morning meetings. The different types of extreme annoyance he would exhibit. “There was DEFCON level, nuclear level, quantum level, platinum level, though that’s not the order of extreme-ness.”

“You had names for his levels of annoyance?” Tabitha asks. “Hardcore!”

“We need a picture! Was he cute?” Kelsey asks.

“I can’t say.”

“How can you not say?”

“Because he was so…” SoBenny, I want to say. “He was just this perfect grump, glaring out at the world through those big glasses. He didn’t give you a chance to decide if he was cute, you know? Even the way he spoke—no niceties, just so abrupt and rude. And he moved with zero grace.”

“Clumsy?” Antonio asks.

“No, more like, weirdly efficient and without grace. He typed hard and freakishly fast, and you’d look at the computer screen and it was all these crazy lines of code, like something from another planet. When he adjusted his little robotic things, his fingers would just fly, all knuckles and hard angles.”

I look down at my drink, remembering the way he moved through the world, all gangly intensity. But then he’d come up with such brilliance. People saw him as this nerd, but I knew his abruptness grew out of one-pointed intention, a singular passion that excluded everybody.

I could relate. Fixating on something to the exclusion of all else is the way I’d lived my life since the tender age of five. It’s how you have to be to rise to the top of the ultra-competitive ballet world.

So I spent a lot of time wondering what it would be like to be friends with him, wondering what it would be like to be lovers with him. I couldn’t help it. Something about all of that harsh passion.

“Features vaguely symmetrical?” Mia presses. “Hair color?”

“Umm…dusty-brown hair, bedhead style, like he’d fallen asleep at his keyboard and woke up with five minutes to spare. Tawny skin that would get bronze in the desert sun. Light brown eyes. He kind of had this whole tawny, dusty-brown color scheme going except for his oversized and very severe black glasses, all the better to glare at you through.”

“Literally glaring?” Lizzie asks.

“He even hated my weird T-shirts.”

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