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“Well actually, I kissed him. And after a few seconds, he kissed me back. Only, my brother walked in on us.”
“Oh no.” She groans, then jumps up to her feet, "Wait, don’t utter another word until I obtain more liquid refreshments to lend a suitable rosy glow to the proceedings.”
Penny blinks. "Do you always talk like a nerd?"
Mira tosses her hair over her shoulder. “Don't you mean, a smutty nerd? People always assume I'm studious because I’m never without my Kindle. If they only took a peek inside the device…" She snickers, then walks over to the minibar in the corner and pulls out a selection of bottles.
She walks over to the bed, drops them in the center, then chooses one and holds it out to me. "You need more alcohol to lubricate your proceedings, which, girl, sound straight out of a romance novel."
"Do you think of anything besides smut?" Penny arches an eyebrow.
Mira snickers. “Is there anything more important than smut?”
Penny reaches over, grabs a bottle of whiskey, twists open the cap and takes a sip. “Not that I don’t love spicy books, but now, I worry my expectations are so high that I’ll never find a real-life boyfriend to live up to the ideal set by my book-boyfriends. Which basically means, I’m going to be single forever.”
Mira snickers. "All the more reason to immerse myself in book-boyfriends and never let them go. Though I concede that Solene here seems to have a real-life age-gap romance in progress considering she was snogged at fourteen by a man almost twice her age”
“Technically, Declan is only eight years older, and the age of consent in Italy is fourteen,” I point out.
“Still classifies as age-gap in my books.” Mira screws off the top of a bottle of vodka and holds it up. "What are we toasting to?"
Penny holds up her own—whiskey—and takes a deep breath. "To tales of the smutty kind."
"To the sisterhood of smut." Penny leans over to clink her bottle with Mira’s.
"To not giving alphaholes the power to break your heart." I tap my bottle with theirs, then tilt it to my lips and chug down the liquor. The liquor burns its way down my throat, then hits my stomach, radiating warmth toward my extremities.
"Uh, perhaps you should slow down?" Penny murmurs.
"Nah, where’s the fun in that?" The words come out slurred, but I don’t give a shit. I need to forget the man I thought was my soul mate but who, clearly, isn’t. “So, where was I?” I hiccup, then glance down at my bottle of tequila. “Oh, yeah. So, my brother’s men beat him up. Which is how he got the scar on his forehead—”
“Which is hardly visible anymore,” Penny scoffs.
“Not when you’re blown up on a cinema screen.”
Both of them wince.
“Yeah—” I hunch my shoulders. “It changed his career trajectory. Made it more challenging for him to get leading man roles in Hollywood.”
“He seems to have done well for himself, anyway,” Penny points out.
“Well, that’s what I thought. That’s what I thought he thought. I thought he’d forgiven me. Turns out, it was a pretense. He only pretended to forgive and to care about me to get revenge.”
“This is bullshit. You were a kid. You can’t be held responsible for what your brother did.” Penny scowls.
“I agree. Not that it doesn’t lend a certain romanticism to what happened, but surely, he can see you’re not to blame for what happened?"
"Except, he does. It’s why he made me fall for him, and then dumped me. So, he could break my heart in return.” My nose tickles. A pressure builds behind my eyes. I sniff, then hiccup again.
“Here, babe, have some water.” Penny walks around the bed, snatches up a bottle of water from the nightstand and offers it to me.
I hand the tequila to her and take a sip of the water. “Of course, all this drama has to happen now, when my career is faltering.”
"What are you talking about?" She rolls her eyes. "You just came off an extremely popular tour—"
"The last leg of which they had to cancel because the last ten cities on the tour didn’t have enough ticket sales." Yep, not even my five million followers were enough to ensure enough attendance toward the end of the tour.
"Probably because you took too much on. Fifty cities in five months is a lot for anyone," Mira reminds me.
