Page 96 of How to Bang a Billionaire

Well. I decided I might as well get up and be useful.

Enjoy my day. The anticipation of Caspian later.

First thing, though, was to arrange dinner. I ran down Caspian’s lists of contacts, found someone who did sushi, and bunglingly arranged for “whatever was best” (which the man on the phone called omakase) to be sent round later. I wasn’t entirely sure why I’d gone for sushi other than that it seemed light and sophisticated and the type of thing that could, theoretically, be eaten from someone else’s fingers in a titillating fashion.

Then I pulled on my luckiest pants, grabbed the copy of Milieu I’d picked up the other day, and settled down at my laptop.

I could do this. I could totally do this.

A couple of hours later, I was the proud father of eight hundred words on my Ellery-mediated introduction to the underground clubbing scene. I’d called it “Dance Where No One Is Watching” and I thought it was…quite good? Maybe?

I wasn’t ready to loft it into the void just yet, so I emailed it to Nik instead, along with a !!!-heavy accounting of last night’s adventures. Within seconds, the reply came back: omg we know did you lose your phone?

My phone? Shit. It was still in the sitting room.

I found it with a bare blip of battery left and what looked like a “you made a racist joke, then took a long haul flight” number of notifications.

Turned out I was all over Instagram. Because @i_hate_ellery had something like 253k followers and had tagged @ardybaby a lot. As had a bunch of other people because apparently @ardybaby got around. Thankfully, I looked pretty adorable in an off-my-face kind of way.

I also had a long chain of Kik messages from Nik, charting a journey of bewilderment from “how’s it going?” to “REMEMBER TO DRINK LOTS OF WATER BEFORE YOU GO TO BED” via various pit stops at “are you okay?” “are you dead?” “wow, you’re having a night” and “who’s that girl?”

That girl, according to her feed, was currently sitting at the top of a rusty metal staircase that curled up the concrete, copper-pipe-strewn husk of a condemned building. In one hand she was holding a martini, in the other a sign that read IF U DON’T KNOW UR NOT INVITED.

Another text from Nik: you’re internet famous.

Only a little bit, I sent back modestly.

Though I had accumulated rather a lot of new followers. Despite my last post being my toenails when I’d done them up like ladybirds.

Oh well. At least nobody would be under any illusions about what they were getting.

What are you up to? I asked Nik. And received an impenetrable response about biomimetic materials.

What about you?

I didn’t say Waiting around for a billionaire to rock up and fuck me hard and nasty. But I was tempted.

Speaking of, I probably just had time for a nap and a self-delicious-making session before Caspian arrived.

The sushi showed up just before seven. All iced and packed up and completely exquisite. I hovered around like a 1950s housewife as an endless parade of brightly colored morsels were arranged on the dining room table. Enough to feed the five thousand some exceptionally extravagant fish.

They did try to tell me what everything was but the words whizzed by so fast—unagi, hamachi, amaebi, ikura, masago—that none of it really went in. Which left me to preside over a feast I had no clue about.

But hopefully it wouldn’t matter.

What would matter would be that I’d tried. And that we’d be sharing something.

I did nibble on a…pale, rice-balanced filament thingy while I was waiting. And, oh my God, it was delicious. Intense, but also weirdly delicate. Boom and then gone. Like a mouth orgasm.

I’d been to a Yo! Sushi in Oxford, where the food galloped past you on conveyor belts, the plates color-coded by price. I’d only ever dared try the green and blue dishes for fear of racking up an enormous fish bill, which meant I probably hadn’t got the best from my visit. But this was so totally not like that it was almost incomprehensible. The sheer difference wealth could make to the way you experienced something, even if that experience was commonly accessible, was frankly crazytown.

It took reserves of self-discipline I didn’t know I possessed to hold back a nomming frenzy. Some date it would be if Caspian turned up and I was all like “I made you some sushi but I eated it.”

I checked the time. Seven fifteen.

Caspian would be here any minute. Should have been here already. Maybe he’d got caught up at work? Or in traffic? There had to be some things even billionaires couldn’t control.

Maybe one last…wossname…while I waited?

---