Page 27 of Make Me Sin (Bad Habit 2)
“I’m sorry sweetie, but he’s a white Republican police officer, who grew up in Alabama and still sees his fraternity brothers from college twice a year for hunting trips in the bayou. You know there’s a pointy white hood somewhere in a locked trunk in his garage.”
“I’m hanging up on you now.”
“Okay, I give! He’s a lovely person who rescues cats stuck in trees and helps old ladies cross the street when he’s not too busy teaching the disadvantaged youth of the inner city how to read. Satisfied?”
“Sometimes I think you’re a bigger snob than my mother, Grace.”
“Thank you!”
“It wasn’t a compliment.”
She snorts. “That’s what you think.”
I grit my teeth. “If you were really my best friend, you’d be giving me a lecture on how rude and unforgiveable it is to call the man who cares so much for me another man’s name while he’s getting down to business.”
“Wait—getting down to business? You mean he wasn’t even inside you yet?”
“You know, the things you find important are really baffling to me. That’s not the point!”
“Was his dick, or was his dick not, inside you at the time of the incident in question?”
I don’t dignify that with an answer. She knows it already anyway.
“Well there you go!” she crows.
“There I go what?”
She exhales in exasperation. “You weren’t even having sex, Chloe! It doesn’t count!”
“Really? Try telling that to my boyfriend, who broke my favorite vase on his way out the door to go burn down A.J.’s house.”
There’s a long, cavernous silence. Then Grace tentatively asks, “You’re telling me that you called Eric . . . A.J.?”
“That’s what I’m telling you.”
“The same A.J. that you absolutely detest?”
I close my eyes. This is so embarrassing. “The very same.”
“The same A.J. that you wasted a perfectly good glass of champagne on when you threw it in his face, not two weeks ago, after calling him a certain smelly body part?”
“Grace.”
“The same A.J. who dates sluts named Heavenly?”
“Actually she’s a prostitute,” I correct. “He pays her. And all the rest of his girlfriends, near as I can tell.”
Grace begins to chuckle. It’s a low, throaty laugh that would make a phone sex operator green with envy. When she’s through enjoying the depth of my humiliation, she says cryptically, “Chloe Anne Carmichael, there’s hope for you yet.”
I throw an arm over my face. “I don’t even want to know what that means.”
“It means it’s time for a meeting of the sisterhood of the traveling panties. Lula’s, half an hour. I’ll call Kat.”
She hangs up. I know, from past experience, if I call her back she won’t answer. And if I don’t show at the appointed time, they’ll come and get me.
I drag myself from the couch to go get dressed.
“Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry. That must’ve been terrible for you.” Kat looks at me with big, sympathetic eyes and squeezes my hand.
