“That’s sweet of you.”
“Gives me something to do,” he says, shrugging off the compliment.
“You could use a hobby,” Juliet tells him.
“I have hobbies.”
“Beating a punching bag and your meat are not hobbies.”
“Sure, they are,” he tells her, sending me a sly grin.
It makes me blush, like I’m a girl with a crush. Which, I guess I sort of am. He must notice because his smile widens.
“How long have you two been friends? You seem like opposites. Lou is nice and sweet, and you’re a hag.”
“You’re an asshole,” she tells him, pushing his shoulder. “Luke wanted a new face for his collection in two-thousand-twenty. Lou was making waves in high-fashion but hadn’t done much avant-garde. He had a vision, though, and she was it. So, I courted the fuck out of her, and we ended up becoming fast friends,” Juliet explains.
“She didn’t give me much choice,” I say, laughing.
“She never does.”
“I get what I want,” she says, smugly.
“She was crafty enough to figure out my entire schedule on a work trip to Paris. Every event I went to, there was Juliet. By the fourth one, I was looking forward to seeing her, as she was one of the few real people in the room.”
“Even though I wear my plastic smile so well,” she says, displaying it for us both.
“That’s fucking creepy,” Grady tells her just before the first ball is called.
“Oh shit, I don’t even know how to use this thing.” I pop the top off the tube of ink, looking around at other tables to see how they dab it on their cards, then search my cards for B14. Only one card has it. I bounce in my seat with excitement. “This is fun!”
I plop it down atop the number, marking it with a messy blue circle.
“You’ve never played before?” Grady asks.
I shake my head, a few strands that have escaped my claw clip flying in my face. “There was a community center where I grew up that had it a few times a year. But I never went.”
“In Arkansas?”
“Yeah, have you ever been?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“N32,” Sam calls.
This time, I find it on three cards, and I throw my arms up in excitement.
“You’re not missing anything. It’s all Walmart and raccoon skins,” I say.
“What did you do for fun?”
“I was a bookworm. We lived within walking distance of the library, so that’s where I spent most of my free time.”
“What do your parents do for a living?”
“My dad is a mechanic, my mom is a pharmacy technician,” I say. “My childhood was as humble and blue collar as it gets.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” he says. “How did you end up modeling?”
