Page 76 of The Billionaire's Wake-up-call Girl

“I’m boning up on my mobster talk,” Mia says.

I roll my eyes.

“There’s a smile,” she says.

“That wasn’t a smile. I want you to start thinking about where you’ll sleep while I deal with them.”

“What do you mean, deal with them? What does that mean?” she asks with a horrified expression. “Lizzie…”

“Notthat,” I say. “I only whore to strange men on the phone.”

“Mr. Drummond should pay. He’s the one who got you fired. Make him help you.”

Sasha’s words run through my mind.He’s disgusted…. “I’m the last person he’d help. He’s not who I thought he was. And I’m serious. You need to crash somewhere Saturday night.” The money is due on Sunday morning.

“I’m not leaving you. If you stay, I stay. Also, I totally have to see the kind of cookies you frost for it. They’ll be epic.”

“You’re not staying. If something happened to you, I’d die.”

“Goes both ways, sister. We’re in this together.” She gets up and heads to the refrigerator. It means everything that she wants to stay. It really does.

She holds up two beers: Sixpoint Crisp, our house fave. “Want?”

“You are the best friend ever.”

She tosses one over the small island that’s supposed to imply that the kitchen isn’t the same room as the living room. “So does this mean I have to take it down?”

“What?”

She points her bottle at the wall next to the conundrum window. A new cross-stitch in a wooden frame hangs here.

I go over. There, between two beautiful and elaborately embroidered flowers, is a meticulously stitched saying:Sex with me is a dirty, savage affair. Utterly uncivilized.

“Oh my god! You have finally gone insane.”

She takes it off the nail. “It’s stupid.”

“No!” I grab it out of her hand and hang it back up. “It’s funny. At least he gave us a laugh.”

She pops the top off her beer.

Back on the couch, I Googledo loan sharks really kill you? I get the same answers I got when I Googled it ten times before. Sometimes they do kill you, but sometimes they just hurt you. Sometimes they make you act as a drug mule. One guy on one of the threads said they carved up his arm.

I’m trying to decide between having my arm carved up and being a drug mule when Mia starts telling me about her most recent date. “He smelled like a body spray factory and made an assholey actress joke,” she says. “Next.”

“Like what?”

She sighs. “How many actresses does it take to screw in a light bulb? One to screw it in and ninety-nine to stand there and say, ‘it should be me up there!’” She swigs her beer. “Soooo funny. Fuck off.”

“Fuck off,” I agree. Mia has been going to lots of auditions and not landing parts. “What an asshole.”

We drink beer in silence, noodling on our phones. Then I just drink beer and watch Mia noodle on her phone, feeling intensely lucky for having a friend like her.

I’ve lived with her for seven years, since the age of twenty. Not living with her for eighteen months is going to be hard.

I miss her already.

I’ve already interviewed and ruled out a few subletter prospects. One woman seemed like a party animal. Another had a Kid Rock tattoo.

---