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“Ha. Right. A straight a
rrow,” I scoffed. “Not so sure that label applies anymore.”
She cocked an eyebrow at me. “Seriously? You’re going to take a kickass job instead of going back home. It’s not like you’ve gone all Britney and shaved your head during a drug bender or something.”
I kicked back the last of my wine, letting the warmth of it burn through my chest before meeting Bailey’s gaze again. “I’m not exactly staying for the job alone.”
Her fork hovered halfway to her mouth, then after a beat, my comment apparently registered. She set the bowl and fork on the glass coffee table with a clank.
“Oh. My. God. There’s a guy, isn’t there? I knew it! You’ve been acting so weird lately.” She pushed up from the floor and plopped on the other side of the couch from me, her dinner forgotten and her eyes wide. “Is it Pike? Please God, tell me it is. Because, seriously, if you’ve seen him naked, I’m going to need detailed descriptions. And possibly drawings. How comfortable are you with hidden video? Because I’d be willing to pay you for that, too.”
I snorted. “Fangirl much?”
She grabbed a pillow and swung it at me. “Yes. Talk, bitch!”
I dodged the blow with an elbow and set down my empty glass. “Calm down. Lord, wine makes you mean, you know that?”
Bailey narrowed her eyes.
“Fine. No, it’s not Pike. We’re just friends. Though,”—I gave her a conspiratorial look—“I have seen him naked, and believe me, a drawing could not possibly do him justice.”
Bailey’s mouth formed a perfect O, making her look like one of those dolls that you squeeze to make sing, only no sound came out.
“But I’m kind of in a thing with his roommate, Foster,” I finished.
She closed her eyes and held up a finger in the I-need-a-moment gesture. When she opened her eyes again, she had the expression of a girl on a mission. “Let’s put a pin in that whole, I have a ‘thing’ with some guy you’ve never mentioned to me before. And rewind back to the part where you’ve seen Pike—the drummer of frigging Darkfall—naked.”
I curled my lips inward, debating on how much I should tell her. I’d never really had a friend I talked about sex things with. Well, mostly, because I had no sex things to actually share. And my closest friends back home were raised even more conservatively than I was—nice girls don’t talk about those things aloud. But Bailey had sure done her fair share of telling me about her escapades. She didn’t have much of a filter.
And though she’d prodded me about my reasons for not dating anyone, I’d never admitted to her that I’d been a virgin. Mainly because she would’ve staged her own version of The Bachelorette: Virgin Edition to get me laid. However, tonight the need to talk to someone about all that was going on in my life was filling me like helium, leaving me ready to burst. Maybe it was time to trust Bailey as a real friend instead of holding her at arm’s length like I’d been doing with everyone since I started school.
Plus, I had been studying the binder Foster had given me. It did say a good safety net to have in place was to make a friend you could trust aware of what you were doing so you could check in with that person when you were out with someone new. Foster wasn’t exactly new, but I figured the rule could still apply.
“So, okay,” I said, gathering my courage and pretending to study a chip in my nail polish so I didn’t have to look at her. “I sort of went out with both Pike and Foster the night of graduation. Your tequila was involved. And, you know, I didn’t come home until morning.”
A soft gasp. “Ho. Lee. Shit, Cela. Both of them?”
Blood rushed to my face as I braced for the judgment. “I didn’t sleep with Pike. We just fooled around but—”
“You are my fucking hero.”
My gaze snapped upward. “What?”
“Are you kidding me? I would lose my shit being within three feet of Pike. I could barely string a sentence together when he walked in the other day. And you, Ms. All Study and No Play, managed to snag not just him but his roommate, too? And I bet the roommate’s just as hot, right? The hot ones tend to group together.”
“So hot,” I said, sagging into the couch, relieved to get the confession out. “Like I can barely look at him without wanting to jump and squeal like a twelve-year-old with Bieber fever. It’s ridiculous.”
Bailey sighed wistfully. “Just rub it in, Medina.”
I rolled my eyes. “Like you don’t have dudes lining up.”
“Dudes, Cela, frat guys who want to show me how proficient they are at keg stands. Not smoking-hot rock stars.”
“Foster isn’t a rockstar. He’s a business guy, owns a company.”
“He owns a company.” She blinked then reached for a garlic breadstick, shoving a bite of it in her mouth and chewing a little furiously. “I love you, but I’m totally kind of hating you right now. So a sexy CEO, which means he has money and is smart. Oh, how you suffer. And now you have a ‘thing’ with him? What kind of thing? Obviously enough to keep you here.”
I looked at the closed binder sitting on the bottom shelf of the coffee table. I nodded at the wine bottle. “You better pour us both another glass. This may take a while.”
