By the time we hit the top of the ride, and climb off toward the exit, I’m sure my face is crimson.
“Did you see the way that employee was smiling at us?!” I whisper, and Micah glances back to wave. I slap his hand down, and he laughs at me.
“Nobody saw anything, Chuck, calm down.”
“We were very discreet,” Tobias teases, pinching my ass through my dress.
“Very discreet,” Micah repeats, and then does the same. I slap them both away, blinking into the warm darkness of an LA evening as we step outside and find the others waiting for us. One look at the twins’ faces, and Spencer’s mouth drops open in shock.
“You didn’t?!” he chokes out, but the twins are grinning like maniacs, and I’m blushing like crazy.
“Look,” Micah says, removing the condom from his pocket and pointing to the knot he’s tied at the end. “Keeps all the cum in. Isn’t that what you said, Spencer?” He tosses it into the trash before Spencer rushes him, and they end up in a tussle that’s not entirely real, but not entirely fake either.
“Well, well,” Church says, pulling his phone from his pocket, the flickering lamps nearby turning that honeyed hair into a burnished gold. “I better make some calls, so we can be certain none of this leaks out.”
“None of it will leak out,” Tobias says, removing his own condom from his pocket. “I tied the knot tight.”
I groan and put my face in my hands, but I’m not entirely unhappy.
Actually … I’m sure of it now.
This really is the best day of my life, hands down.
Too bad things that go up must come down …My mother’s apartment is not in the best part of LA. In fact, it’s not even really in the okay part of it. No, it’s sort of in the worst of the worst.
“Fuck, I knew being poor was hard, but this is … next level.” Spencer looks around at the squat, little houses with bars on their windows, and then redirects his attention to the two story apartment building in front of us. The air is hot and dry, and the sky is gray with smog. A frown curves my lips down as the twins gaze at me with sympathy.
“Poor Chuck,” they coo, clasping hands and looking up at the second story where my mother’s door stands half open, her bubbling laughter drifting out and down to where we’re standing. The only decorations she has are a dirty welcome mat, and a dead cactus. Like, I get we’re in LA, but how much effort does it take to keep a cactus alive for fuck’s sake?! “This is the true face of poverty.”
“Seriously, if you guys don’t stop making poor people jokes, I’m going to kick each one of you in the balls.”
“Good for you,” Ranger says, but even he doesn’t look convinced, his sapphire eyes tracking the movement of a pedestrian with a shopping cart. True, my family didn’t have a lot of money growing up, but we did okay. Where my mother lives now is nothing like the apartments I grew up in. And even then, there’s nothing wrong with being poor.
I need to educate these rich dickheads.
“Shall we?” Church asks, indicating the staircase with his long fingers.
We just checked out of the Disneyland hotel this morning, and I almost cried at having to say goodbye to the fairy tale suite. It was truly magical, the whole thing was. Even the threesome with the twins. I get choked up, and force myself to move up the stairs, so I don’t spend too much time obsessing over it. That night, I crawled in that luxurious bathtub while Spencer relaxed on our bed, and I let a bath bomb fizz over my fingers while I obsessed. At first he seemed a little freaked-out. Like, he kept touching me and asking all these questions, and I decided it was best to just be honest. He got a play-by-play of the whole scenario, and then sat cross-legged on the bed, quietly fuming for a while.
“Was it better with them than it was with me?” he’d asked, and I shook my head no. It wasn’t better. It wasn’t worse either. It was … the same, in the best way possible. Since I didn’t exactly know how to answer that question, I distracted him by curling up against his side in my towel, smelling like lemongrass from my bath, and we fell asleep together.
The third night in the hotel, I had Ranger and Church stay over, so I could avoid dating politics. And well, now here we are, standing outside my mother’s apartment while my heart races, and I try to figure out how I’m supposed to survive two weeks here.
“Let’s go,” I say as I put my hand on the sunbaked railing and walk up the pebble-coated steps to her front door, knocking briefly before letting myself in. Mom is sitting on a small balcony opposite the door, just around the corner where we couldn’t see her from outside. She has a cigarette in one hand, her cell in the other, and she’s smiling at me, gesturing me in. Her brows go up when she sees the entourage I’ve brought with me.
