Best Served Fake

forty-two // romantically bone down

"So, Aster tells you that Kai is, allegedly, a no-good lying traitor, and it made you realise that you want to romantically bone down with the guy?"

Cole looked understandably sceptical, perhaps questioning the sequence of events that led me to the conclusion. However, it wasn't actually any more complex than just that. Tommy let me know Kai is a piece of shit, which made me understand just how much Kai was not a piece of shit, and now I wanted to, as Cole had so inelegantly phrased it, romantically bone down so hard with the guy. Flowers and cute dates and holding hands and actual boning down, like we were goddamn Romeo and Juliet with an actual connection and 100% less suicide.

"Yes, exactly that."

Cole was installed in his customary seat again, stirring a glass of less-customary vodka lime soda that Madi had poured him earlier. I wasn't brave enough, or rude enough, to ask who was paying for his alcohol, but Madi had no such qualms. When she made up Cole's drink, she immediately asked where Cole was getting the dough for it, because the restaurant hadn't yet advanced to taking sexual favours as a payment method. Cole had merely laughed and credited his sugar mama and benefactor, which I assumed meant Lena Montez. Apparently, she was giving him an allowance. Even the almost impossible-to-embarrass Cole had the decency to look a little shamefaced that at eighteen, he was getting pocket-money from his seventeen-year-old friend. Cole had assured us it was a line of credit he intended to repay, which I didn't doubt, though I did doubt that a girl like Lena Montez cared either way whether her generosity was repaid. The dress she'd worn for Tommy's benefit would cover at least a hundred of Cole's $10 drinks.

I hadn't seen Cole for weeks now. Lena Montez and her drama with the boy who she hated seemed to have been monopolising his time. Madeleine's reception to his arrival had been frosty at first, until he'd grinned and promised he would have returned sooner if he'd known she'd be such a needy bitch about it. Then she was angry, but at least her temper was fiery, and she treated him with a little more warmth.

But his absence meant he'd missed out on weeks of the Valerie and Kai story, which he was almost single-handedly responsible for setting in motion.

"I have just a few follow-up questions," said Cole, just as Madeleine rounded the bar after serving a rowdy table of post-golf elderlies.

Madeleine snorted. "It's not all that complicated, really. Valerie realised that when she dates someone that I choose, they don't suck major dick. Or her best friends tits, if you want to be pedantic with details."

"Yes, Madi, thank you," I said dryly. "Every guy who you don't personally vet was sure to do exactly that, and my favourite thing about Kai is just he doesn't suck."

Madi sniffed. "I have very good taste."

"Okay, that doesn't answer my question," said Cole. "So, you're ready to take the plunge and enter the good ol'-fashioned world of heteronormative committed dating with your unfairly good-looking paramour."

I nodded. He was unfairly good-looking and I loved heteronormative committed dating if it meant that boy was mine.

"Is he ready for the same thing?"

That was the question. I thought so. I was almost sure. But I was too much of a wuss to do anything about it.

I thought Kai might be ready. I mean, he'd never said he was anti commitment. Everyone else just said it. But everyone else called Kai a bad boy, an incorrigible flirt, all good looks and charm without substance. But the Kai Delaney I knew was hardly a bad boy. He enjoyed drinking with his friends, telling good-looking girls they were pretty and making people love him, sure. But he also spent time with his little sister, took care of his mother despite everything she did, let some crazy girl lying prone on his front lawn pretend to date him so she could feel better about the fact that her boyfriend and best friend didn't love her quite enough to resist the urge to stick it to the other, and never looked at another girl though the whole process.