Madison

Noah's gone, flown to a different continent without so much as a text saying, “bye,” and it's back to the regularly scheduled business of Club Sugar Daddy. Brecka falls into a situation with billionaire casino magnate Lane Darnelle, and somehow she ends up being kidnapped by some piece of shit trying to extort Lane for a metric fuckton of money. Maybe even all his money. They even somehow get hold of Brecka's mom.

When we formed this club, we didn't think about all the baggage that would come with getting involved with billionaires. Sometimes, I wonder if we're really as smart as we think we are.

But everything shakes out all right in the end, and one day we're at a pool party at the palace. That's what I call it. Lane and Brecka call it the cabin because it's out in the country. Lots of guard gates. A private lake and some mountains behind it. The lake's for boating and fishing, and the pool's for swimming.

“How many rooms are in this place?” Ashlee asks, and Brecka laughs in a way that tells me she doesn't even know.

“Have you even seen them all?” I ask.

“I don't know,” she says. “Some of them, why would I even want to see them? They're staff offices and stuff.”

Considering we went to a public high school in Clark County, we're awfully blasé about calling a place with “staff offices” a fucking cabin.

“Seems like a lot of stress.” I wave in the general direction of the palace.

Brecka's wearing a micro-bikini to sprawl on a pink inflatable with a skinny neck and beaked face sticking off the front. A blow-up flamingo. I've got a bright yellow duck with a red bill. It matches my yellow bikini, which isn't quite as micro. I know it's stupid because I'll never see him again, but I have this fantasy in my head that I'm dating Noah Hammond, and I've got to hold back something just for him. My curves, my body... it's all a secret just for him.

Like I said, I know it's stupid and I know I'll never see him again. It's just something to daydream about until I figure out where I'm really going with my life.

“What stress?” Brecka asks. “Lane does everything for me. He has an entire staff at my beck and call.”

“Yeah but... that stuff about kidnapping your mom. That was pretty severe.”

“That was scary, but Lane had everything under control all along. I never knew he was some big time code-breaker before he got money, but I guess a lot of the guys from that generation were into software.”

“Bill Gates,” Callista says. Blonde and tan, sprawled on a float toy in the shape of a candy-pink unicorn, she's the very picture of a girl born to lay out beside rich men's pools.

“Hey!” Brecka's head spins so fast her whole floatie spins around in the water. “Bill Gates is Lane's Daddy's generation. Maybe even his Grandpa's generation.”

“She knew that would get a rise out of you.” Emily lounges on a silver float, the better to match the silver tips at the end of her teeny, tiny braids.

We float a little more and then get out of the pool to touch up each other's sunscreen.

“Aren't you worried about other guys from his past coming after Lane?” I'm still thinking about that business with Brecka's mom. A man can change his future, but he can't change his past, and I gather Lane was a bit shady back in the day.

“Nah. That whole crowd is too busy running down some kind of government bad guy in Beijing.”

“Do you ever think about that dude back home?” Ashlee wraps her straight black hair in a towel, the better to bare her shoulders so I can dab them with coconut-scented lotion.

“What dude?”

“The football player. The one whose manager got you run out of Biloxi because you were distracting him from the game.”

Brecka has a nice golden tan, but I swear I can see some pink coming into her cheeks.

“Oh yeah. That guy. I kinda forgot all about him.”

“He ended up winning the Heisman, just like you said he would. It was all over the news. Seems like a hard guy to forget.”

“Yeah, OK, but um. I've been a little bit distracted around here lately.”

Hmm. I have an idea Brecka never had any relationship with that football player. In fact, I'm starting to get an idea Lane might have been her first.

Is it possible that two out of five founding members of Club Sugar Daddy were actually virgin fakers who weren't half as sophisticated as we pretended to be?

Double hmm.

“You haven't been texting that Noah Hammond, have you?” Ashlee asks.

“Who, me?”

“Who else fucked Noah Hammond around here?”

“No, I haven't texted him.” I couldn't. We'd been too preoccupied with other matters to think about exchanging contact information. Besides, it's up to the famous person to get in touch with the nonfamous person. The other way around, it doesn't work. They have an ugly name for that.

Stalking.

As much as I ache to see him again, I'm not going to become just another rock star stalker. I have too much self-respect for that.

Your move, Noah.

But, God, how it hurts that he hasn't texted me back. Maybe he can't find my phone number. Maybe...

But my phone number isn't exactly secret information. They scanned my driver's license, for fuck's  sake. They know exactly who I am and where to find me. They've got a name and an address. All they need to do is open a fucking Vegas phone book.

Noah's a smart guy. He could figure it out.

If he fucking wanted to.

But I was just the girl of the night. An evening's entertainment, soon forgotten.

“We need to be talking about minimum net worth,” Emily says. “I've raised the issue before, and we keep blowing it off. We need to make a decision.”

“I've set an example here.” Brecka gestured at the surroundings. “A billion dollars is the goal. You can see what it gets.”

“Maybe not everybody lands a billionaire. Let's be reasonable. How many billionaires do you think there are in America?” The frown on Callista's face suggests she's been giving it a lot of thought. “And a lot of them are already married off.”

“Ten million though, that isn't enough.” Emily looks at me, and I know damn well what she's saying.

Noah Hammond. That's the best estimate we've got of his net worth. Seems to me a guy could raise a family on it, but the whole point of Club Sugar Daddy is we're supposed to be shooting for the sky.

“A hundred million should be the rock bottom,” Emily says. “I've been thinking about this a lot, and that's pretty much what separates the men from the boys. A hundred million. Any less than that, and it's kinda fragile. You could always lose it. But once you've got that much, no matter what happens, seems like you always bounce back.”

“Some people say eighty million is where you reach the point you can never lose the money,” Callista says. “But one hundred million, that's a nice round number. And it allows for inflation.”

I knew Noah was just for the night, just for fun. I knew he wasn't for the club or for my future. So why do I suddenly feel so defensive? “I don't need a hundred million dollars to feel secure,” I say.

“It isn't about feeling secure,” Brecka says. “It's so much more than feeling secure. It's the freedom to do whatever you want to do and to give your children whatever they need to make it to the top. I want more for my babies than what I had, don't you?”

Every damn person on the planet wants that. I can only nod. Everybody nods.

“A hundred million. I think that's a good compromise number from Emily. Not shooting too low but not aiming for something that might be out of reach. Do-able, so we're all gonna do it. Correct?”

There's a little murmur of voices.

“So that's the proposed new rule. A hundred million net worth bottom line is what the dude needs to qualify. Agreed?” Brecka looks from face to face. “I'm the president of this club, but it's still a democracy. We all need to vote. I can't just boss you around and tell you what to do.” She waves yet again in the direction of the cabin.

No, fuck calling it the “cabin.” Call it what it is.

She waves dramatically in the direction of the palace.

“I can set an example, and I feel like I have set an example, but it's up to you guys whether the club continues to follow my example. So let's vote. All in favor of only dating dudes with a minimum net worth of a hundred million dollars say, ‘Aye.’”

“Aye.” Emily says it fast and breathless. She hasn't got a moment's doubt.

Callista and Ashlee follow up almost as fast.

“Aye,” they say together. A little duet.

There's a silence, and everybody's looking my way.

I can't be the only holdout.

“Aye,” I say. “Of course. Aye. A billion is a stretch but a hundred million is a perfectly reasonable compromise. Aye.”