Page 33 of P.S. I Dare You

Her phone chimes twice, and she lifts a finger before reading a quick text and typing back an even quicker response.

“Sorry about that.” She peers up at me through fake lashes the color of midnight, and she’s still wearing that same dopey grin. “I can’t believe I ran into you on Houston of all places. Do you live around here now? I’m still on Lexington.”

She rolls her eyes, like she’s ashamed to live in a two-thousand-square foot classic six bought and paid for by her parents the day she graduated from NYU.

Thessaly is still talking, though I’ve tuned her out. Something about a mutual friend who thought they saw me in Paris over the summer. It’s kind of crazy, but all my mind can think about in this moment is Aerin smiling with that fucking Dr. McDreamy-looking tool. Her hand on his. Her eyes lit. Her body at ease.

God, she’s so easy to be around—even if she hates me with every fiber of her classy little being.

She isn’t like Thessaly or the other women that tend to hurl themselves at me. Those women have desperation in their eyes, insecurity in their smiles, and diffidence in their demeanors.

They just want me to like them.

Aerin doesn’t.

And I’d be lying to myself if I said that didn’t make me feel some kind of way.

“We should do coffee or something sometime,” Thessaly says, her hand swatting at my arm. It’s like she needs every excuse she can get to touch me. “What are you doing right now? You have plans?”

“Yeah, today’s not good for me.”

She pouts her Kylie Jenner lips. “Your number still the same?”

Indeed. “Yeah.”

Her pout transforms and she rises on her toes. “Great. I’ll text you and we can figure something out. It was great running into you, Calder. Glad you’re doing well.”

How would she know? I couldn’t get a word in.

Thessaly runs her hand along my arm one more time before readjusting her Birkin over her left forearm and giving me one of those cutesy girl waves complete with a shoulder shrug.

I wave back before continuing on my way.

Good lord, that was painful.

Almost as painful as seeing Aerin on a date.

“WHOA. YOU LOOK SO … different.” I squint at my phone, studying my best friend Melrose’s face on the screen. She’s in a hotel in Louisiana, filming some Guillermo del Toro movie on location, and we haven’t spoken since we bumped into each other at LAX the other week.

She drags a makeup wipe down her cheek. “I know. It takes a good twenty minutes to scrub this off every night, and then I use three different moisturizers before bed so I don’t dry out. But it’s all good. The makeup girl is going to show me how to do winged liner tomorrow.”

“Nice.”

“New York treating you well?” she asks, rubbing the wipe over her right eye.

I shrug. “For New York, sure.”

“How’s the gig?” she asks. “You always have the most interesting clients.”

By interesting, I know exactly what she means. Eccentric. Moneyed. Particular. But that’s fine. I cater to a very specific niche of clientele who refuse to go through temp agencies or hire just anyone.

“You look like you need to vent,” she says, leaning in closer to her phone. “I see your elevens.”

I massage the pad of my finger between my brows, smoothing out my “elevens.”

“Lay it on me,” she says. “I’ve got a good twenty minutes and then Sutter’s supposed to be calling.”

Sucking in a hard breath and biting away an embarrassed smile, I shrug. There’s really no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to say it. “I slept with my boss. Two nights ago. In a bar bathroom. After demanding he explain why he was being so nice to me that day.”

Melrose drops her makeup wipe.

I continue, “But to be fair, all of my interactions with him leading up to that point had been—”

“—wait, wait, wait,” Melrose says. “You slept with someone in a bar bathroom?”

“Not just someone. My boss.”

She rolls her eyes. “That’s not the part that bothers me. I’m just having a hard time picturing your Clean Freak Ass getting down and dirty in a public restroom.”

“I know. It’s disgusting.” My stomach churns just thinking about the billions of microbes I probably took home with me after that, but looking back, that was the least of my worries that night. “Anyway, I’ve never slept with a client before. I mean, technically his father is my client? I guess? But still. I report to him.”

“Honey, it’s the twenty-first century. As long as it’s consensual, who the hell cares?” She tosses her makeup wipe aside, takes a swig from a bottle of Fiji water, and then grabs another wipe. “It was consensual, right?”

“Yeah.” I sigh. “Too consensual.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The man … is an asshole. He’s hot one minute, freezing cold the next. Kind of guy who’s only ever looking out for himself, you know? And he says and does these things that confuse me. But the way he looks at me …” I let my thoughts drift for a second, my mind replaying the night we first kissed.

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