"Porn star?" Cam repeated, nodding sagely. "You know, I think it's my sparkly balls that bring in the viewers."
Nolan laughed so hard he almost spewed beer over all of them. "Librarian?"
It was Darryl's turn to laugh. "Oh, that's not part of the joke. Well, maybe the mild-mannered part."
Cam rolled his eyes. "Rare books and manuscripts," he explained to Nolan. "And Darryl loves to give me shit about it."
Like most of their friends, Darryl had assumed that Cam would take the LSAT and follow Darryl into the land of objections and depositions. But instead, Cam and his shiny, new degree in history had taken the GRE, then applied for graduate school, working toward a dual Masters in history and library science. Maybe not as sexy as trial work, but he loved the detail of it, not to mention the smell of the past, all leather and dust and paper. He'd finish at the end of the summer, and he'd already been accepted into a Ph.D. program on a really sweet scholarship.
"--can't picture you in a calendar guy contest."
Cam looked at his friend. "Sorry, what?"
"I mean the walking across the stage part. You I can picture," Darryl continued, obviously not realizing that Cam had lost the thread of the conversation. "Because we both know you're hot."
He swiveled to face Nolan. "Cam's my best friend--and we have a strict hands-off policy ever since I told him that I'm an equal opportunity kinda guy--but that doesn't mean I'm not allowed to comment on the quality of the merchandise. I mean, those broad shoulders? And his ridiculously tight abs? Not to mention that ass? Am I right?"
"Can't argue," Nolan said. "And I say that with a lifelong hetero record, and a tight grip on my Man Card."
"Exactly." He turned back to Cam, who was shaking his head at the ceiling as if begging help from the gods. "No question that you've got the goods. God knows you get hit on enough by customers of the female persuasion. But we both know you don't have the personality for being Mr. Pageant Guy. So what exactly made you grow those sparkly balls we've been talking about?"
"Honestly?" Cam said. "That would be your sister. She kept giving me so much grief about not entering that pretty soon everyone in the bar was asking why I didn't rip off my shirt and strut across the stage."
Darryl snorted. "Yeah, Mina can be a force of nature when she sets her mind to it. Damn hard to resist."
He had that right.
When Mina had first suggested that Cam enter, he'd let himself believe that she was imagining him the way he thought of her--shirtless and sweaty and tangled up in the sheets. Or, at the very least, the way Darryl was describing Cam--the kind of guy that women pinned up on their walls.
But that wasn't it, and Cam knew it. Mina saw him as a friend--and all she'd been doing was yanking a friend's chain. Goading him to get out there and go a little wild. But, sadly, not with her.
Once he'd realized that there was nothing personal as far as Mina was concerned, the idea of strutting shirtless across the stage really had seemed daunting. But he couldn't back out without everyone at The Fix labeling him a damn pussy.
So he'd taken the coward's way out--and pretended to be a smart ass.
"Strolled down the red carpet just as smooth as you please," Nolan explained, "and then when he got up on stage, he whipped that shirt off. And there it was, spelled out in what looked like red lipstick all across his chest."
"Comic relief," Darryl said, then sat back and clapped his hands together in a long, slow applause. "Fucking brilliant."
"Hey," Cam said, more than willing to suck up the praise rather than confess that his balls had shriveled, not sparkled. "Sometimes you gotta go for the laugh."
"Like I've been saying, big, sparkly balls." Nolan ran a hand through his hair. "And I need you and your balls to come on my show. That is just the kind of thing I can turn into radio gold. Especially since we can also send the show out live on social media. My fans will go nuts."
"The hell with that." A significant number of Austinites tuned in to Nolan Wood's morning drive-time radio show, Mornings With Wood, and Cam wasn't inclined to share his moment of lust-fueled insanity with each and every one of them.
"Where is Mina, anyway?" Cam asked, as much to change the subject as because he wanted to know. "I thought she was supposed to be running the second camera today while Brooke and Spencer work on the overflow bar."
He nodded to the far side of the room, past the maze of tables and chairs and customers, to where Brooke Hamlin and Spencer Dean--the two on-camera hosts of The Business Plan--made adjustments to the placement of a free-standing bar they'd finished constructing the previous evening. One of the show's two cameramen hovered nearby, filming. The second was off today, having flown back to LA to take care of a family emergency.
As the show's intern, Mina was going to be running that second camera. Except she wasn't there. And considering how much Mina had wanted this internship and how hard she
'd been working, Cam couldn't quite swallow the knot of worry that had settled at the base of his throat. And when he saw the way Spencer casually stroked the back of Brooke's neck in a gesture of both affection and possession, Cam's craving to see Mina increased all the more, even though he had absolutely no right to touch her in that same gentle manner.
"Darryl?" he pressed. "Do you know where she is?"
His friend just shrugged. "I'm lucky if she remembers to send me a Christmas card. We may be twins, but the last time we were attached at the hip was--let me think--never."
But Cam wasn't listening any more. Instead, he was looking out the window as the late May sun illuminated the pedestrians hurrying along the street, most of them probably heading back to work after lunch. And there, standing out like a goddess among the peasants, was Mina.