Page 76 of How to Bang a Billionaire

Nik was still glued to the screen when I slunk back. “Ardy, this menu is totally whack.”

“Order the whole damn thing if you like.”

“Don’t tempt me.” He glanced up. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

He held out an arm and I snuck in gratefully beside him. Tried to distract myself with the familiar warmth of his body. And the menu, which was, indeed, whack. “I don’t think I know what any of this is.”

“We could roll a dice.”

“Nerd.”

“Or pick for each other.”

Sensing a prime opportunity to troll my beloved friend, I perked up and went for it. “Let’s do that. You’re having Rice & Flesh to start.”

His eager little face went through several variations of perturbation, distress, and apprehension. “Well, fine. You can have the Savory Porridge. Which is frog legs, garlic, parsley, and fennel. Mmmmmmm. Sounds delicious.”

I’m pretty sure my own little face turned gray. “Yay,” I said weakly. “I love fennel.”

Sadly the mains and desserts offered a lot less opportunity for mischief, though we did our best. I tormented Nik by ordering him a dish just called Braised Celery, which made him get me the most expensive beef thing on the menu—bone in rib, apparently—on the expectation he could share it with me when the braised celery turned out to be a bust. Because, as Nik put it, fucking celery, man. For pudding, we went with Sambocade, which was apparently a kind of goat milk cheesecake, and an apple tart, the description of which contained absolutely no references to apples.

While I phoned through the order, Nik opened a bottle of champagne. He’d chosen one of the less-extravagant-looking bottles—just dark green glass, foil that seemed to hover somewhere between gold and silver, and an austere label reading CHAMPAGNE KRUG CLOS DU MESNIL 1988—so hopefully it wasn’t too expensive.

All that time I’d spent thinking champagne was meh? Turned out I was wrong. Very very wrong.

“This,” said Nik, “is like…if there was a unicorn made out of vanilla and sparkles, and it was running through a field of primroses on a spring morning to meet its best unicorn friend for honey cakes…like…if that was champagne.”

I nodded. “Or like…if you had a pear, right, that had lived a life of absolute virtue and had reached a higher state of pear…and if that pear was nestled into the bosom of a nymph, with flowers in her hair, bathing in a crystalline spring in the Elysium fields.”

“Yeah. Just like that.”

“It’s…it’s really good, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

We contemplated this for a while.

“You don’t think,” I asked, “it was special or anything, do you?”

“Nah—1988 isn’t that old.”

“It’s older than me.”

“Yeah, but you’re not mature. Or champagne.”

I pressed a hand to my heart. “If I was, I’d like to be this champagne.”

“If you were, I would drink you.”

“I’d probably let you.”

Sometime between opening the bottle and finishing the bottle and embarking on another one, we had decided to lie on the rug to better appreciate the beauty of the universe.

Which was when dinner arrived. It was super super weird to be served in your home like it was a restaurant, except it was hard to imagine One Hyde Park being anyone’s home really, and we were tipsy, which helped with the embarrassment factor.

The food went by in a blur of faint weirdness. They’d brought us this complementary starter, which was an orange and some burned toast, except the orange was actually pate and Nik exploded it with a knife when he tried to slice into it like you would a piece of fruit. The Rice & Flesh turned out to be saffron risotto with cow bits on top—although it was delicious—and my savory porridge was the worst thing in the world. Probably it tasted okay once you got over the fact that it was bright green and the frog legs croquettes had the bones sticking up like they were flipping you off.

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