The pants were a little tight (“A little?” Sandy exclaimed when I came out of my room. “Baby doll, your bubble butt looks like it’s about to pop.”), but I liked the way they pulled against my thighs, and my ass looked good.
Not that I was trying to impress anyone, of course. I wasn’t going to this dinner to try to land a sugar daddy (especially a Republican sugar daddy), and since Jeremy had made his feelings—or lack thereof—explicitly clear (to someone else while I was eavesdropping), there was no reason for me to worry about such things.
I still looked fucking hot.
And I felt a twist of savage satisfaction, when Jeremy arrived in the slut machine, to see his jaw drop as I walked (read: slinked) toward the Jeep. If there was a roll to my hips and a look of feigned disinterest on my face, that was nobody’s business but my own.
“You look….” Jeremy shook his head. “You look amazing.”
“Thanks,” I said, as if I heard that all the time. “You don’t look so bad yourself.”
He didn’t. Apparently Jeremy hadn’t gotten the color pop memo from Flavius, as his suit was black with a matching tie and a white button-down shirt. I wondered if the others were going to be dressed similarly, and I felt a low bite of unease in my stomach. I was out of my depth here as a tourist again with only Jeremy to navigate. It had all the ingredients for a disaster, but at least I’d go down looking good.
“You ready?” he asked as I fastened my seat belt.
“I’m always ready,” I said airily, sounding more confident than I actually felt.
I could feel him staring at me.
I ignored him.
“You seem different.”
I flashed my teeth at him in a razor-sharp smile. “I’m about to go take money from the rich. I’m on the hunt. I’m Shark Corey.”
“Right,” he said slowly. “That’s not—you know what? Doesn’t matter.”
He pulled away from the curb.
THE CATALINA Foothills consist of mostly cookie-cutter houses that get bigger the farther back you go. The area was certainly outside of anything I could ever dream of affording. I’d been to Catalina Foothills High School a couple of times years before, the parking lot filled with expensive cars that teenagers drove. The quad—for reasons no one could really explain—had been constructed of imported Italian tile, and I’d always wondered what life would have been like had I been born into money. To have a new Lexus gifted to me on my sixt
eenth birthday, to be able to afford expensive clothes rather than thrift store finds. Fifteen-year-old me had been jealous, coveting the things I didn’t have.
But I’d outgrown that. Mostly. I knew a black guy who’d gone to the high school there, and he’d said he was one of three black kids out of his entire graduating class. It wasn’t bad, he told me, but it’d made him uncomfortable. He hadn’t come from money, but the high school was one of the best in the state, the curriculum more geared toward college prep than anything else, and his parents had bought in the zip code to allow him to attend. Last I heard, he was at Yale.
Jeremy drove into a neighborhood I’d never been to. The houses were set back on hills, their driveways long, the yards actually having grass instead of rocks.
Outwardly, I was affable, sitting back in my seat, hand out the window, hot air rushing through my fingers.
Inwardly, I was panicking the closer we got. I felt like a fraud. It was like the leather bar all over again. I didn’t know why I kept allowing myself to be put in these positions.
It wasn’t helping that Jeremy had recently rediscovered his love affair with John Mayer. The fact that I was being serenaded about my body being a wonderland was almost enough to make me scream. I wanted to beat someone with a guitar.
“They’re good guys,” Jeremy was saying. “Well… most of them are. Stephen and Adam are, anyway. I probably won’t know everyone very well, but I can’t imagine anyone is going to be an asshole.”
“They agreed to hear us out,” I said lightly. “That’s a good start.”
Jeremy glanced at me. “I suppose they did. I just… I’m not like them, you know? I don’t have the backgrounds they do.”
“Are you trying to convince me or yourself?”
He scowled. “They can be a bit much sometimes. I guess I’m trying to tell you not to let that color your judgment of me.”
“Nah,” I said. “You do that well enough on your own.”
“Shark Corey is an ass,” he mumbled.
I laughed at him. “You have no idea.” I sobered a little. “I promise I’ll be on my best behavior in front of your friends.”