Dr. Stud

Apparently, we got away with it.

Not even Hannah knows. And as soon as I think that, my phone starts to buzz. Her cute little freckled face shows up on my screen, a picture from a kayaking trip we took when we were only sixteen. Her hair clings to her cheeks in wobbly, ruddy strands. She had just got her braces off and couldn't stop smiling. She was gorgeous.

“Hello?” I answer, trying to seem completely alert and not as though I've been lounging on my sofa for two days, stuck between terror, reflexive oversleeping, and the stubborn, breathless waves of lust that burn inside and refuse to leave me.

“Hello yourself,” she says curtly, her voice distant and terse. I know she's not looking at the phone. I know she probably even forgot the call was being connected as soon as she got it up to her cheek. She's quite easy to distract these days. I guess she has a lot on her mind but it is annoying.

“Yep,” I answer, slightly obnoxiously. I’m going to make her figure out why she called instead of just handing her the information. If she needs to talk to me that badly, she could at least marshall her attention long enough to form a sentence.

“Oh, yeah… hi, Bella,” she says in a softer tone as I sense her trying to pull herself together. “I was just checking in, I suppose. How are you? Everything okay?”

“Yeah, everything is fine,” I chirp avidly. I don't want her to worry. I don't want her hovering all over me anyway. She can be a real micromanager and I like to be left alone.

I hear her breath puffing out through her nose. She's irritated that I’m making her work for this conversation. Tough cookies.

“So… I thought you'd send me an email or something. Some kind of update. How was your date?”

“With Emmet?”

“Yes, with Emmet,” she huffs. “How was your date? Where did you go again? The margarita bar?”

“No, no, Japanese whiskeys.”

“Oh, yes… it’s so hard to remember what everyone is drinking these days.”

“Did you know that you can spend seventy-five dollars on a shot of whiskey?”

“Seventy-five dollars,” she repeats vaguely. “That's the cheap stuff, Bella. You could spend a lot more than that.”

I bristle, instantly put off by this. I don't know why. It shouldn't matter to me that I didn't get the absolute most expensive shot of Japanese whiskey in the entire fucking world during my fake date, right? But still. The last thing I was expecting to hear was the phrase “the cheap stuff.”

I am not cheap. Common, perhaps. Basic, maybe. But not cheap.

“Well, we were just there for a minute. I'm sure we were just getting started, but we were interrupted.”

“Interrupted? By what?”

Now she's interested.

“Oh, you don't know? Didn't your blogger do his… blogging or whatever?”

She snorts, the noise like an abbreviated, disappointed cluck. “No, Bella. He declined to file a report. You want to know why?”

“Um, he didn't do it? Get any pictures?”

“Yeah, he said you guys ran away from them. He said some bouncer wanted to beat him up. Is that what happened?”

“No, not exactly…” I reply uncomfortably, quickly reassembling the timeline in my mind. Actually, I suppose he had a point. But beating him up? Surely that’s an exaggeration. “He just looked kind of shady, like he was just snooping or something. And I guess Emmet didn't want him following us so…”

“And Dillon was there.”

That is a statement, not a question. So the blogger must've told her something, at least.

“Yeah, he was there. They spend a lot of time together, so what? I planted a big wet juicy one on Emmet, in full view of that guy’s camera. He should've been able to give you the goods.”

“You're missing the point,” she sighs, clearly aggravated with me. “I don't necessarily care about the pictures. There will be a million pictures. I want the story. You have a mission, and terrifying some dude who lives in his mother's basement is the opposite of that mission, you understand?”

I roll my eyes silently.