Page 95 of How to Blow It with a Billionaire

“Thanks.” I swigged—didn’t choke myself this time—and kicked her gently back.

“Is this…what you want to do? With your life or whatever?”

“Yes. I mean, ideally at some point in a less tea-making, better-paying capacity. But this is a super exciting start.”

“Cool.”

We passed the bottle back and forth for a while. Ellery, though, seemed restless, her heels catching against the cabinets below.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She shrugged. And, then, after an uncomfortably long pause, “Just thinking about shit. I was quite busy dying for a while. And then I had to not die. Now I guess I have to do something else.”

“Well. Is there anything you like?”

“I liked dying. I was into that.” Her mouth curled into a rare smile. “Good at it too.”

I reached out and ran my thumb across the bumpy, wrong-way scar on her wrist. “I’d say you were mediocre at best.”

And she threw back her head and laughed the rough, throaty laugh that reminded me so much of Caspian. Not so much the sound of it, but the way it tore itself free, like a butterfly from a cocoon. It made me want to hug the shit out of both of them.

“So how about,” I said instead, “we back-burner suicide for the time being?”

She rolled her eyes. “If you insist.”

“Is there anything else you enjoy?”

“Coke?”

“Seems to me you’d make a very successful investment banker.”

“Nahh.” She took another swallow of champagne. “My dick’s too big.”

Now it was my turn to giggle. “Speaking from experience?”

“City types are always the same. Fat bonus, tiny prick. Lawyers are even worse.”

“I’ve only slept with proto-lawyers.” My mind produced a hasty, semi-pornographic montage of everyone I’d bonked at university who I vaguely remembered as having been studying law. “They seemed fine.”

“Maybe they shrivel away over time or something.”

“Consumed from within by their own pedantry.”

“Yeah.” Ellery lifted the bottle in a toast of disdain. “Pompous wankers.”

Her contempt, which usually hummed along at a certain comfortable baseline, had spiked noticeably. “You really don’t like lawyers, huh?”

“Probably Caspian just hires the biggest twats he can find. I dunno.”

“Okay. So”—I made a valiant effort to redirect the conversation—“putting aside Class A narcotics—”

“Cocaine isn’t a narcotic. That’s a pharmacologically erroneous legal classification.”

“Thanks, Walter White.”

“I told you lawyers were bullshit.”

I wrestled my face into its most patient expression. “Is there anything else that makes you feel even a little bit like you don’t want to die?”

---