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By the time it was a little past 1AM, I was flat out drunk.
I hadn’t planned on being hammered, but after the phone call with Mom, I’d sucked down two straight concoctions that Adriana had thrown together, both of which were more tequila than anything else. Then, for refusing to let Harry do a body shot off my stomach, I faced a penalty improvised by Adriana — two shots and a dance solo on the bar top, for which she played old school Destiny’s Child. To turn the punishment around on her, I proceeded to dance like a circus clown, doing a silly, borderline creepy little jig while flailing my arms about. Harry called it the hands down sexiest thing he’d ever witnessed.
By 2AM, despite the fact that none of us could walk in straight lines, we were on the rooftop of the bar next door. The city lights were a colorful blur of lines in my vision, probably because my head kept swaying from side to side.
And I was somehow shoeless, my Converse sneakers nowhere in sight. The case was the same with Adriana, who was nestled beside me as I sat against the side of the roof, both of us watching as Harry and Marco engaged in some sort of bootleg sumo wrestling match, one of the line cooks serving as referee.
“So stupid,” Adriana giggled. “Boys are dumb.”
“Agreed.”
She sighed and frowned. “So, are you going to tell me what that last fight was about? What Ben asked you to do?”
I’d updated her on everything at this point except for that. With a bit of a groan, I rolled my neck and opened my eyes to look up into the black of the sky. “He planned a vacation for us and another couple. Dane from his firm and Dane’s girlfriend, Tory. He’s one of Ben’s closest friends and they were the couple that we always sat with at dinners and parties. I got along with his girlfriend because I was the only other girlfriend Dane let her hang out with and we always just laughed at how stupid the guys would get. They were so insanely competitive with each other. I swear they actually hated and wanted to kill each other sometimes, especially when they bet on sports, which was always. I couldn’t even watch baseball anymore because Ben ruined it for me by turning into a psychopath if he lost money. Especially if he lost and Dane won.”
Adriana rolled her eyes. “How much do people even bet and win on these things?”
“There was a boxing match once that Dane put fifty thousand dollars on.”
She shot up. “What the hell? I could buy like, three cars with that! Or pay like, two years worth of rent and utilities!”
“Yup. He won two hundred grand from that bet.”
“I’m going to throw myself off of this roof right now.”
“And he gave Ben weeks of shit for being too much of a ‘pussy’ to put money on that one, so Ben’s response to that was dropping more than forty grand on a hundred-and-three inch LCD for the screening room, since he and Dane watched games in there.”
“I’m sorry — screening room? His own private screening room? You never told me about this.”
“Yeah… he used to call it the ‘movie theater’ until he thought that ‘screening room’ was more sophisticated because some big guy from work called it that. If I ever slipped and said ‘movie theater’ in front of guests he’d give me such a death look.”
“Jesus Christ, how did he sit in that screening room with such a massive stick up his ass?”
“He’s spent most of his life with that thing, I figure he’s gotten used to it.”
“Ha!” Adriana snorted, though she covered her mouth when she noticed that I wasn’t laughing. It was still hard to while on the topic. “I’m sorry, please continue. What happened with the trip?
“I was all packed and Ben was all packed but literally the night before we were set to leave, he told me he wasn’t going. But that I should still go. That I had to still go. And I said no but that wasn’t acceptable, so ten hours before my flight, I had to prepare myself to go on a weeklong vacation with this couple and be a third wheel, which I already thought was bad. But then Ben told me that Tory wasn’t going either. She didn’t even know about the trip.”
Adriana stopped braiding her hair. “Wait. Just you and the guy? How would Ben of all people be cool with that?”
I stared at nothing. “I think it was his way of… proving ownership.”
“What… in the actual fuck?”
I closed my eyes. “Sometimes I wonder if even Ben was amazed by how completely docile he got me. I stayed in his apartment all day, I raised his dog, I learned to cook the things he liked. I gave him massages whenever he wanted, sex, blowjobs whenever he wanted. I let him tell me how to wear my hair, my clothes, how to speak to him. I think… I know the thing with Dane was him wanting to show off how well he’d… trained me.”
Through the corner of my eye, I could see Adriana’s fists balling up. “What the hell kind of person is he? And this Dane guy? They don’t even sound human to me.”
“They’re not. At this point, they feed on other people’s admiration for them. Men, specifically. They live to be envied and they are because on the surface, they look like they live a perfect life. They’re young, rich and powerful, but since that whole group is young, rich and powerful, they feel the need to compete with each other. Who has the best real estate, who can get into the better parties. And whose girlfriend or fiance is the most obedient, apparently.”
Adriana was covering her face at this point, her words muffled through her fingers. “That is way too screwed up.”
“There’s more. I overheard a conversation they had once…” I rubbed my skin as I flashed back to a feeling of dirtiness. “It was Ben kind of bragging about me and Dane about Tory. But not in a good way. More so one-upping each other about how good they had it with us. Ben told Dane that I stayed in the house all day to wait for him and that if I fell asleep, he’d call me forty-five minutes before coming home so I had time to wake up and cook him something. And Dane responded to that with the fact that Tory did the same, and not only that, she actually obliged when he asked her to have sex with another girl for him. That girl being his most recent ex.”
Adriana clawed at her hair. “I have no words. I can’t even react anymore.”
