Chapter Seven
The follow-up phone call Saturday morning with Kiki went just about as expected. It was a tradition they’d had since Everly had opened the Black Heart Art Gallery and Kiki had been catering events for an IOU and a ton of referrals to the rich art lovers who needed someone for their cocktail parties. Usually it was the nitty-gritty debriefing of what happened and what could be done better next time, because Kiki not only ran an amazing catering service and gave the best unfiltered feedback, but her waitstaff always brought back the best unfiltered reactions from patrons about who liked what so Everly could follow up later in the week. However, this morning’s call had gotten sidetracked when Everly had mentioned that she’d sorta accidentally kissed Tyler. Twice.
“What do you mean you accidentally kissed him?” Kiki asked, her voice coming through extra loud on the speaker of Everly’s cell and bouncing around the sun-drenched walls of her practically barren kitchen. “Twice!”
“Settle,” Everly said, trying her best to squash the laughter in her voice or she’d just encourage her outrageous bestie. “My coffee is still brewing and you just woke up a dog six buildings away.”
“Oh yeah, like your first make-out session since you broke up with Dickless McGee wasn’t going to get a reaction,” Kiki said.
That had been eight months ago, and it sure hadn’t been the love affair of her life—it had lasted all of two months—but she still felt the need to stick up for him, if only because things had gone so, so wrong in a nightmares-of-social-media kind of way.
“His name is Warren Stannic and he has a dick,” she said as she watched the glorious black brew stream from the machine and into her cup like a modern-day miracle.
Kiki snorted. “Yeah, just not much of one.”
She grabbed the French vanilla creamer out of the fridge and poured it into her cup, turning the liquid to a nice nut-brown color. “I never should have shown you that dick pic.”
“You didn’t exactly show me,” Kiki shot back, her words coming in fast enough that if she wasn’t already on her second Diet Coke of the day, she was about to pop it open at any second. “The moron sent it in a group text to you, me, and ten of our closest artsy-fartsy friends.”
That had been bad. The art community in Harbor City wasn’t tiny, but gossip sure spread like it was—add to that the fact that Warren was an art critic who had made plenty of enemies by royally roasting more than a few artists and galleries, and it was the kind of schadenfreude that a lot of people were going to revel in. She’d been about to break up with him when the picture went out, and then she’d felt so embarrassed for him that she’d waited another week before she’d ended things. Even with the delay, it had been awkward.
“Anyway, stop trying to distract me with sad cocks and explain what you mean by accidentally kissing your smoking-hot downstairs neighbor who also just happens to be loaded enough to own your building and a few others,” Kiki said with a groan. “I swear to God, if I would have known those little tidbits last night while he was trying to eye fuck you, I would have shoved you to the side and hauled him away like I was a cavewoman and he was the first box of chocolate-covered cherries ever invented.”
More power to her. It wasn’t like Everly wanted the cocky bastard. “You can have him.”
“Uh-huh.” Kiki didn’t bother disguising the sarcasm. “That sounded totally convincing. So about the accidental kisses, what did you do, trip in those obnoxious shoes of yours and land ever so conveniently with your tongue in his mouth?”
“It just happened. Once in the parking garage when I threatened to run him over and once last night in the gallery when we were standing too close and arguing. And then I thought it was going to happen again in his kitchen, but I got the hell out of there before anything could.”
“Sounds like it’s a little too late for that,” Kiki said. “My vote is you jump him and ride what I really hope is a big cock all the way to Orgasmville.”
Her girlie bits liked that idea—a lot. “That is not going to happen.”
“Why not?”
Lots of reasons, chief among them the little voice in the back of her head that always reminded her exactly where she was from and that people like Tyler—who’d buried their working-class roots under six miles of voice lessons and money—wanted only one thing when they trolled for a Riverside girl. Temporary fun. She’d seen the results of that firsthand with what had happened with her mother. Hell, she was the result of it. She might not be looking for forever, but that didn’t mean she was willing to be someone’s version of slumming it. All of that was a little heavy before she was at least three cups of coffee into her day, though, so she went with the obvious reasons.
“He owns the building and he’s Mr. 2B.”
“Yeah,” Kiki said. “Mr. To Be Your Train to Happy Town.”
Everly almost spewed coffee across her rarely used stove. “I’m beginning to think you’re the one who needs to get laid.”
“That may be, but you’re right there with me, sister.”
That, unfortunately, was way truer than Everly wanted it to be, considering she was about to spend the afternoon with Mr. 2B—without going on any trips to Orgasmville, Happy Town, or Climaxopolis.