AllFreeNovel
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Most of them come down to this: I’ll never work again.
“You look like you’re in the middle of being spit roasted.” Perky tilts her head. “Like the naked guy on top of you is fitting it in before getting up on his knees. What kind of lube did he use?”
“How would I know? We. Did. Not. Have. Sex.” My voice goes lower with each word until I’m basically an echo from the Earth’s core.
I’ve resorted to vocal fry as an emotional defense strategy.
Perky frowns. She’s deeply disappointed.
“Why is Will Lotham wearing a suit for a porn scene? Is this CEO porn? I love the hot CEO stuff. So dominant,” Fiona sighs. A slight blush pinks her cheeks and it hits me.
She’s aroused.
“You two are supposed to be my friends! Not get turned on by pictures of me with a naked Beastman and our high school quarterback!”
And what the hell is spit roasting? Are they calling me a pig?
Fiona and Perky share a look that immediately taps into fourteen years of petty slights that line up in a perfect queue inside my ninth grade self. “We are your friends!” Perky assures me, patting my hand sympathetically.
“And we can be turned on by your porn,” Fiona mutters.
“Stop calling it my porn!”
“What was it like, being that close to Will?” Perky asks, eyes all star-crossed and gooey. “Does he smell as good as he did in high school?”
“I wouldn’t know. You’re the one who stole his jockstrap from his locker in ninth and huffed it every night before bed,” I say, giving her my best mean-girls, dagger-filled look. No way will I admit to smelling him yesterday.
“Did not!”
“Oh, please. We all know you did,” Fiona adds. “If social media had been a thing back then, you’d have been busted. And shamed. And ruined. Your reputation would have been demolished by the giant memory bank that is Google.”
“Oh. Gee. How awful,” Perky deadpans, giving Fiona a killer look. “Given that already happened, I’m not too worried.”
Fiona just laughs in that way you can mock a friend who remembers your Sailor Moon phase, complete with underwear you made using fabric pens.
With every word they say, a piece of me dies. “Oh, God,” I groan. “I am ruined.”
“Huh?” Fiona turns to me. “What do you mean?”
“This did happen in the era of social media! Spatula posted those pictures and sold them to some scammy porn-industry gossip site! I am in the great memory bank! The memory bank that never, ever dies!”
“Not a memory bank,” Fiona says, avoiding eye contact. “More like a spank bank.”
“Success is fleeting,” Perky says with a nod, noshing on a piece of gluten-free brownie. “But porn is forever.”
“That is not helping.”
She shoves the remains of her brownie at me. “Here.”
“It’s gluten free.” I wrinkle my nose.
“So?”
“Yuck.”
“You are so picky, Mal.”
“I get to be picky when I’m traumatized. That should be a universal human right. Someone needs to add it to the Geneva Convention.” I huff. “Along with the right to masturbate.”
