Page 54 of The Art of Almost Losing It
“Instead of giving me shit, can you help me figure out how to get her to accept the bribe?”
Finn shrugs.
“Girls like that want the fantasy, right? LikeBeauty and the Beast.” He pokes me. “So give her the beast. And make sure she knows that you’re never turning into a handsome prince.”
“Stepbro didn’t wantto get in on this?” Ryan asks me when I walk into the restaurant.
“I don’t know.” I shrug.
Like I’m willingly going to talk to him.
I sit down to cheers from Sean and Max.
“G-dogg!”
“Free food!”
“Didn’t Mom and Dad give you money for food?” Ryan sighs.
“We want to buy video games with it.”
Our parents never gave me money when I was their age, but I keep my mouth shut.
I shouldn’t have come. I don’t know why I did. But I was so lost in thought about how to show Dani that she really wantsnothing to do with me that I was on autopilot walking out the door.
“So we meet again… for lunch! Muahahaha!” Hannah skips over. “Ooh, bread!”
“That’s ours!” the teens wail.
“They’re on their third basket.” Ryan grabs the bread from the teens. “Graham’s paying, so he can have some bread.”
“Ooh, you didn’t already tell Graham the good news without us, did you?” Bridget sits across from me and steals the bread.
If Ryan and Claire are pregnant, I’m going to get up, walk out, and drive until I hit the Pacific Ocean.
“They haven’t told me anything,” I say, tense in my seat.
“Okay, so we have a great idea.” Ryan grins.
Not pregnant. I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. God knows what I really would have done with that news.
Get Dani pregnant.
That’s—no, that’s despicable.
Could be nice… She looks slippery and lush in the bath.
Lush?
Stupid word.
“—Party,” Bridget is saying when I rip my thoughts away from Dani in the bath, talking to me while her breasts floated in the water under the mounds of sweet-smelling bubbles.
“Yeah, sure—how much money do you need?” I murmur.
“Well,” Ryan says anxiously, “we thought it could be like a group-planning thing.”
“Then why isn’t your other half brother here?”
