Ambrosia

I don’t remember getting home. After the last twenty-four hours, I’m lucky I can remember my name. I think it’s been twenty-four hours.

Life is a little hazy.

There’s fading light outside my apartment window. It must be dusk. I say that, but I’m not actually sure I saw light earlier either. I probably did, because none of the lamps are on in my apartment, and I don’t think we’ve been sitting in the dark for hours.

Willow, Parker, Eloise, and I are doing a real-life experiment testing hangover cures. Above me, Hogzilla is once again demonstrating that she’s better at relationships than I am.

She’s probably also better at avoiding getting arrested.

Fucking Chase Jett.

Yes, fucking Chase Jett is, once again, the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.

I pour a round of organic, fair trade, responsibly-harvested mango orange guava juice from Whole Foods—take that, Dickhead—into mason jars and pass them around. We all lift our glasses. “To the Dick List,” we say in unison.

Hogzilla’s bedsprings give an ominously long, loud creak, and I say a prayer that whoever she’s humping tonight isn’t the size of a house. I don’t want Hogzilla and her boy toy—boy toys?—to come crashing through the ceiling.

Oh, hardy har. Come crashing. Interpret that as you may.

Speaking of men the size of houses, my brothers, annoying overgrown ape-men that they are, were my unlikely heroes last night. I don’t know what they told the manager or the cops after Zeus ordered me back into my clothes, and I frankly don’t care. I will never say another bad thing about them as long as I live. They got me out of another trip to the slammer and offered to pay for all the damages.

And because they’re my brothers and they can’t help themselves, they also bought every last bottle of alcohol in the bar, tipped the bartender some obscene amount of money, rented a limo, and got me and my friends shit-faced while we toured the city.

My memories of this weekend pretty much consist of Before The Question and The Aftermath.

Before he dropped his little gotcha question?

Four orgasms. Enough said. Maybe I would’ve said more had The Question not happened, but it did, and I’ll always have my four orgasms to remember.

The Aftermath is really hazy. And not because of the alcohol.

I don’t want to talk about it.

Let’s just say I’ve come to realize I did something even more stupid than letting him have free reign to my vagina without a condom again. This is what distance and perspective have given me.

“Where is the Dick List?” Eloise says. “I need to add someone.”

I grab my phone to open the list, only wincing a little at the name taunting me from the top.

Walking hasn’t exactly been a stroll in the park today, and I don’t regret that nearly as much as I want to.

He gave me four fucking orgasms, okay? It’s like being sorry my hoo-ha got high. Would I do it again? No. But knowledge is power, people. I now have the four-orgasm knowledge.

“Name?” I ask Eloise.

She blushes.

Eloise blushes.

“Just give me the fucking phone and don’t ask any questions,” she says.

I gasp. “You’re putting one of my brothers on the list.”

“I said no questions.” She swings her finger around the room. “Circle of trust. We don’t judge the Dick List.”

“Can anyone ever fall off the list?” Willow asks.

Parker hits her with my stuffed elephant that I won at Coney Island three years ago. “Not the time,” she hisses.

“I’m not talking about him,” she replies. “But sometimes good people make mistakes.”

“For the last time, we are not taking your landlord off the list.”

“He can stay. He told me I was taking a tone about my fridge being broken last week.” For a woman with royal relatives, Willow puts up with a lot of shit. “I’m planning a wedding. I have liberty to take as many tones as I want with as many people as I want. Plus, the fridge is broken.”

For Willow, this is the same as renting a horse and carriage solely to ride around standing up and flipping off all of Central Park.

Parker doesn’t care that she’s having a meltdown though. “Then who?”

Willow goes pink. “It was a hypothetical question.”

Eloise is taking entirely too long to put a single name on the list, and I need that list, because I want to know who else on the list Willow might be thinking about taking off it. We use first names only in case the list ever ends up in the wrong hands—a precaution I’m exceptionally grateful for after this last week—but we all know who most of the guys are.

“Did one of my exes make a pass at you?” Parker demands.

“Never mind,” Willow says. “Once a dick, always a dick. My head hurts. Are we trying coffee yet?”

I steal the phone back from Eloise and find both of my brothers on the list. “Are you kidding me?” I squeak. “Both of them.

“Circle of trust.” Eloise scowls at me. “And for all you know, I met two other guys with the same names as your brothers last night.”

“She’s mad that Ares wouldn’t sleep with her, and Zeus wouldn’t be used to make Ares jealous,” Parker tells me.

“You can’t put my brothers on the Dick List for that,” I tell Eloise. “It’s my fault. I know too many stories that could ruin their reputations, and they know I’ll use them if I have to.”

“I heard Zeus telling Ares that Chase has a lot of work to do if he’s ever going to win you over,” Willow says.

For the innocent one in the group, she’s quite devious. “You did not,” I say.

She shrugs and heads for the coffee pot. “They love you. They love him. They think if you love each other, they get the best of everything.”

I open my mouth to argue, but she has a valid point.

The twins lost their best friend after the Bratwurst Wagon incident. I was sure they were better off without him, I never stopped to consider what it would mean to them if the two of us could get along.

I still let their names stay on the Dick List though.

Parker’s phone dings. She glances at it, and her mouth forms a perfect O. “Get out!” she says, thumbs flying over the screen.

“What? What?” We all circle around her.

“We made Page Six,” she gasps. “Our band made Page Six!”

Oh. My. God.

There we are, the four of us plus my brothers, right in the center of New York’s biggest gossip page.

“What does it say?” Willow squeals.

I groan and cover my eyes. “I don’t want to know what it says.”

“Amateur band, okay, we can take that,” Parker murmurs, “decent vocals—nice, Willow, and they don’t even mention your stepdad—crowd loved us! They say the crowd loved us!”

“They say the crowd loved the Twin Tanks Right-Stuffing it,” Eloise grumbles. “Damn yahoos can’t right stuff anything.”

Parker snorts, then all three of them go eerily quiet while they stare at the phone.

“How bad is it?” I whisper.

“Not bad,” Parker says quickly. “Really. Just gossip pages being gossip pages.”

So, basically, I can never show my face at work again. Or anywhere else in the city. Chase is new money, but he’s money. It doesn’t matter. He screwed me in an elevator, dry-humped me on a Kiss Cam, and now the whole world knows I trashed a supply closet after screwing his brains out in there too.

“It’s just conjecture that you hooked up,” Willow flits back to the coffee pot and digs my only two clean mugs out of my cabinets. “They don’t even mention the police being called.”

“It could be a lot worse,” Parker adds.

“Far worse for him than you,” Eloise assures me. “No one thinks you’re in love with him.”

I grab Parker’s phone, enlarge the font, and scroll through.

They’re right.

No mention of the cops. No mention of my temper tantrum. Not even a hint that we did the dirty deed in the back of the bar.

Just a side picture of Chase and his broody, hungry, determined eyes trained on something.

My belly drops.

Because I don’t know what I’m seeing, and I don’t want to care, but I can’t help myself.

Either they’re right, and he wants me, or they’re dead wrong, and he wants to obliterate me.

Not that there’s much difference between the two.

I can’t like Chase Jett.

I don’t know how.

And I’m afraid wanting to just might destroy me.