Rich Groom (The Dirty Thirty Pledge 1)

I instinctively look around to make sure that she’s not here.

“Listen, Angler,” Glenn says, using an old nickname, “we’ve been doing all the recon for you. You should stick around after your birthday because there’s a list of ladies a mile long that are just waiting to fuck a hot city boy like you. And then a few months later, they’re going to fuck me for my own dirty thirty after I remind them that I know you.”

He pulls a sheet of paper out of his back pocket and slides it across the bar. There aren’t thirty names on the list, but it’s close. “What the hell is this?”

“Those, my friend, are sure things.”

He walks away to serve some people around the other side of the bar, and I shake my head a little. Wallace nudges my shoulder. “Hey man, you’re not married. You made it, and it’s perfect. It’s everything that we ever wanted.” His smile isn’t completely sincere, and I wonder how on board with this he is after all.

At least he’s not shouting at the top of his lungs about fucking a different woman every night. “Things change, Wallace. You still want this?”

He rolls his eyes and shrugs. “Sure. Why not. Lord knows I’ve got no prospects to get married before I turn thirty. But I doubt I’ll get to thirty women. I’m not like you guys. By the time you get through all the women in this town, there won’t be that many left for one-night stands.”

I take a sip of my beer to calm the twisting in my stomach. I let this go a long time ago. I like sex as much as the next guy, but this seems exhausting and unnecessary. “So how are you, Wallace? Other than this.” I gesture to the list and hope that I can get him talking on a different subject.

“I’m pretty good,” he says. “Can’t complain. I’m hanging in there. I find ways to keep busy, and ways to keep Glenn out of trouble.” Wallace went on a bit of a different path than Glenn and me. He went into the military instead of college, but in spite of it, we remained close. There are all kinds of rumors about what he went through over there, but he’s never told me the details. I’m not about to bring it up now.

“Good to hear.”

“Been trying to date here and there,” he says, nodding to Glenn. “Thanks to this idiot’s insistence. Trying to see if I can find the one, you know?”

“But none of them were,” Glenn cuts in loudly. “And even if one was, there’s no way you would have gotten to get her to marry you before your birthday. So the pledge would remain intact.”

I give him a look.

“What?” he says, holding his hands up defensively. “Those were the rules. You both agreed.”

“I was seventeen and would have been happy if I got to fuck literally anything,” I say, pouring on the sarcasm. “Now that we’re all actually twenty-nine, I think that it’s okay if we admit that we don’t exactly have a reason to do this.”

Glenn grins maniacally. “Actually, we do.” He gestures to his other bartender to take over. “Come with me.”

I glance at Wallace, who’s intentionally not meeting my eyes. So I get up and follow Glenn, and I can feel Wallace behind me as we go into a back office. “Okay, Angler,” he says, again using the embarrassing nickname I had in high school because I was always trying to reel in girls. I hate that nickname. “This is the reason you have to do it.”

He’s shuffling papers around in a filing cabinet, and I have a bad feeling about this. Especially when I look at Wallace and his eyes are on the floor. What the fuck is going on here?

Glenn comes up with the papers he wants and he hands them to me. I glance at them, and my whole body goes cold, and then hot. It’s the pledge itself. We spelled out all the rules and expectations and then we all signed it, like the nerds we were.

I look at him. “And?”

He crosses his arms and smiles smugly. “And it’s a contract. You signed it. We all signed it.”

“We were minors.”

Wallace sighs behind me. “Doesn’t matter. Still enforceable.” I can tell from his tone that he’s already had this conversation and isn’t exactly comfortable having it again.

I shake my head, trying to figure out the picture that’s being painted here. I lift my hands. “What are you trying to say, Glenn?”

“You signed the contract for the dirty thirty pledge. So you have to do it.”

I start to laugh. “So you’re going to sue me if I don’t?”

“Absolutely yes, I am.”

“You’re shitting me. What the hell is going on? We talk all the time, and you never gave me any warning that this was coming.”