the city. Women wearing sneakers with skirts on their lunch breaks.”
Phillip chimes in. “You forgot men who wear ties that are too short for their torsos.”
Blaine grunts, typing on his phone. “Ah, good one. Totes forgot about that one.” He studies the list we compiled after I began complaining about streetsweepers—I was in a foul mood then, too.
Seems to be a common theme, but then again, my personal life is crap, so that’s not such a huge surprise.
Blaine clears his throat so he can continue reading from the list. “Meal prep posts on Instagram. Bloggers who smile with their mouths open in every photograph.” He rolls his eyes after reading that one. “People who wake up before five to work out.”
Phillip grins. “Is he missing anything?”
I grunt. “Whatever, you can’t deny those things are fucking nauseating.”
“Yeah, but not enough to bitch about them.”
“All I’m saying is that shit cannot be sustainable.” I’m in a mood, and nothing they say will break it.
“Sure it can. I wake up at four forty-five to jog.” Blaine likes to constantly rub in our faces how fit he is. How well he eats at every meal. How disciplined he is about going to bed at a reasonable time. How great the chick he’s been dating is.
The fucker meal preps.
“No one wants to hear about how amazing your life is, either,” Phillip tells him.
Wow. Aren’t we a barrel of laughs?
“You’re such an ungrateful bastard.” Blaine laughs, picking at the olive in his empty highball glass before leaning back in the big, overstuffed leather chair.
“Bastard. God I love that word.” I smirk, doing more than just chugging rest of my cocktail. It’s cold—full of ice—and sour, just how I like it. It slides down smooth…a bit too smoothly, because the alcohol keeps going straight to my head.
Damn. I should probably eat something besides condiments and cocktail snacks.
“Yeah, you do love throwing that word around for no apparent reason,” Phillip declares, telling us all what we already know.
“You also love being a bastard,” Blaine adds unnecessarily, reaching for a handful of the mixed nuts set on the decorative table in front of us. It’s no bigger than a footstool, just large enough for all our drinks and the tiny bowl of free snacks The Basement provides.
And yeah—yes. I love being a bastard.
“Bastards are the new nice guys.”
Phillip rolls his eyes harder than a twelve-year-old teenage girl arguing with her mother. “They are not.”
Snapping my fingers, I point toward my friends. “That gives me a fantastic fucking idea.”
“You swear way too much,” Phillip points out, ignoring me, determined to snub the light-bulb moment I’m having.
Blaine has no such reservations about my foul mouth or my ideas, instantly curious for more details. He’s always been a bit of a follower. “What’s your great idea?”
“The Bastard…b, b b,” I repeat the first letter of the word for encouragement. “What’s another word that goes great with the word bastard, begins with the letter b?”
“Bagel.”
I roll my eyes. “How the hell does bagel make any sense?”
“Considering I have no idea what the hell you’re even talking about, I’d say it makes total sense.”
“Bandits,” Phillip tosses in, chewing on nuts.
Bastard Bandits? The fuck? “No.”
“Baggage,” says Blaine.
“Boomerang?” says Phillip. “B words are hard.”
“No!” I exclaim, excited. “Think bigger. Like—what could we call a club?”
“What club?”
I sit forward, balancing my elbows on my knees, looking both of them dead in the eye. “Back in the day, they used to have secret societies and they would get together and smoke cigars and talk women and gamble.”
Phillip scratches his balls through his polyester slacks. “I still don’t get it.”
“We should do that.”
Phillip glances at me, then at Blaine, then back at me. “So you want to have a secret club?”
“No?” Actually, yes. Yes! It’s a great fucking idea! Maybe it’s what I need to get out of the funk I’ve been stuck in at home and at work. Maybe it’s what I need to feel some creativity—the creativity that dimmed when Kayla left me. “Yes. A secret club sounds so badass.”
“You want us to have a secret club and act like bastards?”
“I personally don’t want to act like a bastard.” Blaine pouts. “You’ve got the market cornered on that lately. I want to be one of the good guys.”
My head shakes. “That’s not what I meant. You don’t have to act like a bastard. We could meet every week and smoke cigars and shit.”
“Stogies—me likey.” Phillip nods, warming to the idea like I knew my friends would. “And