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“You’re supposed to keep the door closed.”
“I did. But it turned out it hadn’t finished exploding when I thought it had.” Harry waved at the mess in the sink, which appeared to be where he’d dumped his disastrous attempt to reheat his leftovers.
Ambrose winced. The dishes stacked in the drainer beside the sink were also no longer clean. Neither was Harry. He was splattered with orange sauce. Looking around, Ambrose wondered what a ‘Where Are They Now?’ TV crew would think about his living conditions, if they were here to see it. Not that he’d ever be on those shows in his own right—in order to become a has-been, he’d have to make it first.
He shook off the depressing thought. He was young. He had time. He had talent. Just look at his performance on Saturday night. That family had been convinced that he was a total oxygen thief, and even the waiter had looked like he wanted to clock him one. He’d been kind of cute actually, under all those layers of disapproval, and Ambrose found himself thinking about the guy—his long legs, lean body and the dimples that had appeared when he’d smiled.
Not that he’d smiled much once Ambrose had started doing his thing.
“My fucking masala,” Harry said mournfully, his shoulders slumping. “Mate, I really need to be an escort like you. That masala was the fanciest thing I’d had in weeks, and now it’s dead.” He jutted his bottom lip out, like a toddler. “I want to eat nice food. You’ve had restaurant food three times this week!”
“It’s not escorting,” Ambrose said, although he supposed it actually was. Just, it was intentionally bad escorting.
He’d fallen into it in his first year at university, when some creep wouldn’t leave a girl in his class alone, and she’d announced loudly that she had a boyfriend. The guy had sneered, and demanded to know who it was, so Ambrose had swaggered up, put his arm around the girl, given the guy a death stare and said, “It’s me, dickhead.”
The girl—Emma—had bought him a packet of salt and vinegar chips for lunch, and that, Ambrose supposed, had been his first paid gig. He and Emma were still mates, too, which was an added bonus. It had actually been Emma who’d volunteered him as Fake Emergency Boyfriend for a few more of her friends—there were way too many creepy guys in the world—then, a few months in, she’d come to him and said, “My friend Therese needs you for a date.”
Ambrose had wrinkled his brow. “Isn’t she dating that guy with glasses?”
“Yes,” Emma had said. “But her parents hate him. And…” Her eyes had glinted with evil. “And we thought that maybe if they hated someone else a little bit more, they’d appreciate that Paul is actually a good guy.”
Ambrose had gone to dinner with Therese and her parents and channelled every shitty loser his mum had ever dated—and there were a lot of them to channel. He’d come across as rude, arrogant, self-absorbed and an utter arsewipe. Ambrose had had to stop himself apologising for his own behaviour half a dozen times throughout the night, but he’d managed to pull it off—those acting lessons had come in handy—and by the end of the night her parents had absolutely hated him. It had been kind of fun, and from Therese’s viewpoint, wildly successful. He’d been happy to do it for the free meal, but she’d been so stoked with his performance that she’d paid him a hundred and fifty bucks, cash, and called the next day to ask if she could recommend him to her friends.
And so Bad Boyfriend, Inc was born. Not that it was an official Inc, because that implied taxes and a declared income and shit that Ambrose had no interest in, but Therese was a graphic arts student and had made up business cards and everything, and she said the Inc made it look cooler. And Ambrose wouldn’t have dared argue cool with a girl with green hair and a nose stud. She’d beat him every time.
And wow, was there ever demand for his services. Ambrose only took on clients via personal recommendation, and he wasn’t cheap, charging anywhere between a hundred bucks for a mildly obnoxious coffee date to four hundred for dinner and a tantrum, but on a busy week he booked around three disaster dates—which cut down on groceries as well, so double win. Plus, he got to eat at some really nice places, for as long as he could before they threw him out.
This week he’d dated John, Lucy then Kelly. He was tired as hell, but his stomach thanked him for it.
He grabbed the dishcloth from the sink and helped Harry dab at the masala that had exploded down his front, while he thought of the seafood platter from Saturday night at Bayside. God, it had been nice. Lobster, prawns and Moreton Bay bugs. All stuff that he never got to eat on a university student’s budget. The meal had been so nice that Ambrose had almost regretted leaving so much of it on the floor at the end of the night, though to be fair he’d actually meant the tablecloth trick to work. He’d practised it for days beforehand, to the applause and cheers of his housemates, but maybe the table in the restaurant had been too big, or the wrong size or something, or maybe it was the bottle of champagne he’d drunk, because, wow. What a mess! And the poor cute waiter had looked like he’d wanted to murder Ambrose, which was a completely understandable response.
“I did the tablecloth trick on Saturday night,” he said as he dabbed at Harry’s shirt.
“Oh, yeah?” Harry raised his eyebrows. “How’d it go?”
“The restaurant looked like this kitchen does now,” Ambrose said, and Harry winced. “I’m probably lucky they didn’t call the police.”
Harry tilted his head on a thoughtful angle. “Is yours the sort of job where instead of putting money in a super fund, you put it in a bail fund?”
Ambrose wrinkled his nose. “God, I hope not. Do you think I need a bail fund?”
“I think that the time to think about needing a bail fund is right now. Before you’re arrested, not after.” Harry slapped him on the shoulder and grinned brightly. “I mean, if you get arrested, I expect you to call me, but unless the cops are willing to take, like, no more than thirty bucks and whatever change I find down the back of the couch, you’re going to be sitting in a cell for a long time.”
“It’s not illegal to be a dickhead,” Ambrose said.
“It is if you cause a public disturbance,” Harry said. “I started off studying law, remember?”
“I remember you went to one introductory law lecture, then panicked when you realised how much reading was involved, so you changed to a Bachelor of Education instead.”
Harry hummed. “My point is, I’m the closest thing in this house to a legal expert, and you absolutely can get arrested for being a dickhead. It’s called offensive conduct. And you can imagine the headlines in the Herald—‘Logie-nominated actress’s son in public debacle’. Your mum would love it.”
She probably would, was the thing, especially if it meant her name was back in the papers. “Maybe I won’t do the tablecloth trick again,” Ambrose mused.
Harry grinned, his cheeks dimpling. He was stupidly cute. Ambrose had always thought so. He was also ambiguous when it came to his sexuality, or maybe he was just shy. In all the years Ambrose had known him, Harry hadn’t had a girlfriend or a boyfriend, or even a one-night stand as far as Ambrose could tell. Ambrose had once tried to drunkenly kiss him at a New Year’s Eve party, and Harry had just laughed it off like he couldn’t possibly have meant it.
And, okay, it turned out it would have been stupid as hell if they’d gone through with it, because he and Harry were like brothers, but in Ambrose’s defence he’d been completely maggoted that night—which actually wasn’t much of a defence at all. The point was, he and Harry together would have been a disaster, so it was best that nothing had happened between them.
Not much happened between Ambrose and anyone, actually—a side effect of his side gig. It was kind of difficult to explain that your job was going on dates but that it didn’t mean anything because you were only there to be a wanker for hire, because it sounded like utter bullshit. He’d tried explaining it to a guy he wanted to date exactly once, and it had gone down like a brick and tile glider. So Ambrose made do with fantasies about cute guys and the internal reassurance that it wasn’t forever, just until he got a decent acting job. Then he’d have people falling all over themselves to date him. He just had to make it as an actor first, right? Easy-peasy.
