Page 33 of The Love Scam
“Rake—”
“This, knowing I’m in for one of his nine-hour lectures on growing up and taking responsibility. Who’d have thought that Italy could make me love cherry tomatoes? And my twin?”
“Rake, yesterday morning you earned just under a hundred bucks.”
“Yep. And I’ll be sore tomorrow. Hell, I’m sore now. Mostly from the throwing up, though.” He let out a satisfied sigh, then stretched. “Your family—”
“Friends. I don’t have any family.”
“Bullshit, I’ve seen how you interact. You’ve known each other for years, defend each other when not bickering, and you get up to all sorts of criminal mischief together. Literal definition of a family.”
She laughed. “It’s really not, but I kind of love how your mind works sometimes.”
“Anyway, Sofia and Elena and Teresa liked to hang the finished baskets on me like I was a tree and the baskets were my weird fruit. Exhausting! Lillith restrained herself because she is a charming child of uncommon dignity. Anyway, no need to thank me.”
“A new iPhone,” Delaney went on, “will run you about six hundred bucks. Minimum.”
“Oh,” he managed. “Shit.” He’d never really thought aboutit before. He’d always upgraded when the new one came out. The old one went… somewhere…
(iPhone purgatory?)
and the new one was his lifeline until the next generation hit stores. It was almost automatic, and the price had always been irrelevant. Maybe a burner was an option—those were still a thing, right? “That’s… shit.”
“Yeah.”
He sighed and sipped some pale broth. “So, hit me.”
“Sorry?”
“Please. You know you want to.”
She gave him a small smile. “I actually don’t.”
“Do too! So go ahead, rip into the stupid rich guy who takes his money for granted and has no idea what minimum wage is or the cost of a new phone or how not to fall in the canal.”
“There’s no point.” She’d finished hercaprese—yay, room service!—and was sipping a heavily sugared and creamed cup of coffee. “You just did it for me. You were way harder on yourself than I would’ve been. Piling it on is meanandredundant.”
He had to smile. “Blake always said that. Said if I could laugh at myself, no one else could laugh at me.” He paused, thinking. “I might have taken that one too much to heart.”
“Yeah, maybe. Listen, we could probably get you a cheap used one on eBay for about two hundred.”
“Yes! The lady takes pity on me at last.”
“I think you mean ‘again.’”
“Whatever.”
“You know you’re Lillith’s hero, right?” Delaney asked out of roughly nowhere.
“She should get out and meet more people.” He finishedthe last cracker, chased it with sparkling water, looked up, saw her frown. “Oh. You were being serious. Sorry, I suck at picking up on that sometimes.”
“Hadn’t noticed” was her dry reply. “She does, though.”
“Well. She’s great. Glad I could help. DNA test back yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Okay, well, regardless of the results, I need a phone. If I’m her dad—poor kid!—I’ll have to start figuring stuff out, not least of which is figuring out where we go from here. And not just geographically. If I’m not, I still have to track my dough and get back home.”
