Page 1 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
1
CINDY
There are exactly two good reasons to drive an hour into the middle of the Mojave Desert with four other strippers, a cooler full of gas-station wine, and a bag of marshmallows nobody’s going to roast right.
The first reason is that it’s free, and free is my favorite price for anything.
The second reason is Crystal, who planned this whole thing and would for sure cry if nobody came.
So here I am.
We stopped for supplies on the way out, which is how the cooler ended up full of a wine called Chardonn-Yay, four dollars a bottle, named by someone who hates both wine and words. It’s also how the man working the register learned Crystal’s entire life story in the time it took me to pee and pick out jerky.
By the time I got back she knew about his custody weekends, he knew about her bunion surgery, and he’d thrown in a free bag of ice for the road. Crystal cannot buy gum without making a friend. I used to think it was the sweetest thing about her. I still do. It just also means that somewhere out there is a gas station guy who knows all five of our names, our jobs, and our opinions on his ex-wife.
We’ve got a fire going that’s more smoke than flame, because Joss insisted she knew how to build one and then built one that mostly just hates us. The city glow died somewhere back around the last exit, so now it’s just black sky over about a billion stars, the kind you forget exist when you live under a thousand miles of neon. Out here the dark has a weight to it. It presses in on all sides like the desert’s deciding whether to keep us.
I’m three plastic cups of Chardonn-Yay deep and feeling great about it.
“Okay, okay,” Crystal says, waving her cup around so hard she sloshes wine on her own knee. She doesn’t notice. “But would you rather, would you rather date a guy who’s super hot but he talks during movies, or a guy who’s like a six but he’s got money and he’s quiet?”
“The quiet one,” I say. “Obviously.”
“You didn’t even think about it.”
“I don’t have to. Talking during movies is a felony.”
“He’s not talking the whole movie,” Crystal protests, like this specific man exists and she’s met him. “He just asks questions. Who’s that guy? Why’d she do that? Is he dead?”
“That’s worse. You’re describing a man who needs a babysitter, not a girlfriend.”
“I’d date him,” Lacey says, solemn, from inside her sleeping bag, which she’s been zipped into since sundown because she brought an air mattress with no pump. We took turns trying to blow it up by mouth for twenty minutes. Joss got dizzy. The mattress stayed a sad vinyl puddle, so now Lacey lives in the bag like a larva with opinions.
“You’d date a traffic cone.”
“If it asked about my day,” she says, dreamy, and the worst part is she means it.
Crystal cackles, this big open-mouthed laugh that fills up the whole desert, and I love her so much in that second it’s stupid. She’s twenty-four and somehow younger than that, a girl who trusts everybody, gets her heart stomped flat about once a month, bounces back like a beach ball every single time. She’s wearing a crop top in fifty-degree weather because she said the jacket “ruined the vibe.” Now she’s got goosebumps all up her arms, and she will not put on the jacket. I made the jacket happen. I packed it. It’s right there.
“Cindy thinks she’s too smart for love,” says Stevie from across the fire, poking at the embers with a stick.
“I think I’m too broke for love,” I say. “Different thing.”
“Same energy though.”
“A little same energy,” I admit, and they all laugh.
Stevie’s phone has been glowing in her lap for the better part of an hour, the same unsent text to the same ex she swore off on New Year’s. We’ve all watched her type it, delete it, type it again.Finally Joss leans over and plucks the phone out of her hands like she’s disarming a bomb.
“Hey.”
“This is an intervention,” Joss says. “What does it say?”
“It says hey.”
“It’s four hundred words long, Stevie.”
“It’s a long hey.”
