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“Nope,” Ryan said. “It’s an acronym.”
It took me a moment to put it together while looking around the table. Braden across from me, with Ryan next to him. Andy at the end of my seat, with Dorian wedged in next to me.
Brad.
Ryan.
Andy.
Dorian.
BRAD.
“Oh shit,” I said. “Oh shit!”
“It’s not quite what you think,” Braden hastily said.
“Braden, Ryan, Andy, Dorian,” I said, pointing to each of them in time. “You lure girls in for a date, and then what? Try to have an orgy?”
“No!” Braden said, at the same time Ryan said, “Not exactly.”
“Four guys, one profile,” I said. “Help me understand what I’m missing here. Because right now it looks really fucking creepy.”
“We should tell her,” Braden said to Ryan. The latter shook his head.
“It’ll be weird with someone from the show.”
“I don’t think so,” Andy chimed in with a thoughtful look on his face. “If anything, it will make a lot of logistical sense.”
Braden ignored the rest of Ryan’s protests and turned to me. “Being a guy on Tinder is tough. It’s mostly rejections.”
“So you have been on Tinder?” I cut in. “Mostly rejections, huh?”
Next to me, Dorian quietly said, “He’s telling the truth, if you would let him finish.”
I nodded and glued my lips together.
“These guys are on Tinder a lot,” Braden said. “I mentioned earlier my friends used it a lot. Remember? Well, they get mostly rejections. All guys do. Part of it is that they all want very different things from the app. So rather than going at it alone, they decided to pool their efforts. And they recruited me for part of it.”
I had a million questions already, but the immediate one that leaped from my lips was, “What do you mean, you all want very different things?”
Dorian twisted in the booth to face me. He was still wearing the same black pants and tight black shirt he’d wore during rehearsal, and his long blond hair was pulled back into a man-bun. Unlike most guys, he pulled it off.
“I just want a close female friend,” he explained. “Someone to talk to, hang out with, just be around with no strings attached. I was best friends with my sister until she moved to Tokyo. I miss that.”
On the other side of Dorian, Andy leaned forward and ran a hand through his wavy blond hair. “I want, well, that is to say I would be interested in, something more serious. A real relationship, if we find a woman who wants the same thing.”
Ryan laughed and shook his head. “Unlike these two, I’m DTF—down to fuck. No questions asked, no answers needed.” He looked at his friends and put his hands up. “What? Fuck me for using the app for what it’s meant for?”
I looked between the three of them. “And you were hoping to find one girl that meets each of these individual criteria? Someone to share?”
“Easier than four separate ones,” Ryan said. “That’s just math.”
I turned my eyes to Braden. He’d been conspicuously silent during the entire thing. “What do you want?” I asked him.
I already knew the answer because he’d told me. He wanted to get to know someone the old fashioned way. To go on dates, learn about them, figure out what made them tick. I stared into his crystal blue eyes and waited for him to repeat it…
Ryan jerked his thumb and answered for him. “Braden here wants an actress to pretend to be his girlfriend. To convince his parents he’s not gay.”
