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“You ever hire her?” He points at me with his chin.
I can’t see Jack’s face, but I hear the frown in his voice. “Elsie is a physicist.”
Austin laughs. It blends seamlessly with the chatter in the background, because people are still eating. Drinking. Arguing. While my professional life falls apart. “Dude, no way. Elsie here is, like, an escort.”
Anger bleeds into my panic and I stiffen. “This is incorrect,” I hiss. “Not that there would be anything wrong with it, but Faux is a fake-dating app, which you’d know if you read the terms and conditions you agreed to when you signed up. But you’re too busy whacking balls around with a crowbar to learn basic literacyorhow to treat your fellow humans with respect. Step away from me, or—”
“At least I’m not some kind of hooker who doesn’t even bother to fuck her clients—”
“Hey.” Jack’s palm closes around my arm and pulls me back into him, like I’m an unruly child who might walk into traffic. His voice is low and menacing, and I feel it reverberate through my own skin. “Austin. You heard her. She asked you to step away.”
Austin lets out an ugly laugh. “This ismyhouse.”
“Then go to your room and play with your Transformers figurines. Leave her alone.”
“Jack, Ipaidher to go out with me. You don’t understand—”
“I understand what I’m seeing, so listen to me, asshole.” Jack’s tone is chilling. Terrifyingly calm. Austin pales and takes a small step back, and I almost feel sorry for him. “You’re harassing a woman who asked you to get out of her personal space while she’s at a work function. Because she rejected you.”
“But Ipaidher to—”
“I don’tcare. She asked you to leave. Get the fuck out of my sight.”
Austin doesn’twantto leave. It’s clear in his flared nostrils, in his twitching jaw while he stares at the place above my shoulders where Jack has taken up residence. But he doesn’t stand a chance: after a few frustrated seconds he mutters “Fuck this” and finally,finallytakes a step back.
My heart starts beating again.
“And one more thing,” Jack adds.
Austin swallows. “What?”
“If you sayanythingabout this, toanyone, including your mother, I’m going to make sure you regret it for a long,longtime. Understood?”
Austin presses his lips together and nods once, tight. Then he disappears into the crowd, into another room, and—
I free my arms and turn around, meaning to... I don’t know. Thank Jack? Explain myself? Play off what just happened as a fever dream?
Problem is, he’s staring down at me. Watching me with sharp, inflexible eyes that miss nothing, and—
He sees everything. Every molecule I am built of—he could list it, describe it, reproduce it in a lab. He sees the rebar structure in me, and I... I see nothing. I understand nothing.
I still have no idea what he wants me to be.
“Jack,” I say. A barely there whisper, but he can hear me. He can heareverything. “Jack. I... I just...” I shake my head. And then I can’t stand to be seen anymore, so I take a step back and weave my way through the room, looking for Monica to make my excuses.
10
INERTIA
In hindsight,” Cece muses while nibbling pensively on a piece of gouda, “we should have seen this coming. Boston’s population is seven hundred thousand. Say half are men, and half of that twenty-one to forty—Faux’s target demo. Now, Faux’s not cheap, and the masses are getting poorer while Jeff Bezos ruthlessly profits off my desperate need for one-day shipping of dill-pickle lip balm. So maybe only a fourth of the dudes can afford to hire us. And of that fourth, half is either in a happily committed relationship or... has morals. Now, consider that we’ve been doing this for about four years, fake-girlfriending an average of two clients a month. If we crunch the numbers...” She looks at me expectantly. I consider pretending I’m not a human calculator, then give up.
“Ninety-six men.” I sigh. “And their family and friends. In a pool of twenty-one thousand.”
Cece holds a carrot to Hedgie, who takes a delicate nibble. “Whichmakes the probability of us coming across someone we met through Faux in our private lives...? Time to nerd out, nerd queen.”
“Bayesian probability? Or frequentist?”
Cece’s grin is my favorite of hers, with the tongue sticking out of her teeth. “Doesn’t matter. The point is, it’s possible that in our quixotic quest to make enough money to pay our taxes—something Jeff Dill Pickle Bezos isnotasked to do, by the way—we...”
