Keep Me If You Can (If You Can #3)

4. She’s Got A Great Rack

Chapter four

She’s Got A Great Rack

“Spiderwebs cling to your armour, leaving sticky trails of residue behind. The monstrous beast has been slain, and you collect the hoards of treasure left in its abhorrent lair,” Calvin said from behind the cardboard screen blocking his sheets from the rest of us. “Among the piles of discarded skeletons, you find a pouch containing magic crystals, an ancient map on a delicate scroll, and for some reason, a freshly baked pie.”

“I eat the pie,” I said immediately.

“You can’t eat the pie,” said Hope, Reid’s new girlfriend.

“I think what Himaya means is that you shouldn’t eat the pie,” Brandon said, giving Hope a pointed look.

“Borean,” I said, calling him by his character name as I gave him an exasperated look. “It’s freshly baked .”

He tilted his head and looked at Hope helplessly. “She makes a sound argument.”

“So you eat the pie, Neelu?” Calvin asked.

“Sure do.” I picked up one of the Filipino egg tarts Calvin had baked for us and popped it in my mouth.

“Alright,” Calvin said. “Roll for constitution.”

Hope let out a loud groan. “This is exactly what I was worried about.”

I picked up my dice, shook it in my hand like that would make a difference, and dropped it on the table.

“Hell yeah!” Brandon said, peering at it before I could say anything.

“Nat twenty,” Reid added. “Great roll, Nellie.”

Sydney shot me a thumbs up.

Hope glared at me.

“Damn,” Calvin said, sounding impressed. “Well, uh… I guess Neelu burps so loudly she regains three HP and the rumbling stops.”

Sydney cackled so hard she snorted and the game came to a pause as everyone burst out laughing.

Well, everyone except Hope, of course.

“Great,” she said. “You ate a disgusting pie. Now, is there anything else you can do to help us? Because I’ve yet to see why bringing her on our adventure is beneficial.”

”Ah, hush up, Himaya,” Brandon said. “Neelu may not be strong or all that smart—”

“Or particularly skilled,” added Reid.

“And she’s not especially agile,” Sydney said.

“Plus, I barely know how to play the game,” I said.

Hope looked at me, exasperated. “What, exactly, do you bring to the table, then?”

There was a pause. Brandon glanced at Sydney, who looked at Reid, who determinedly stared at the dice sitting on the table in front of him.

“I’ve got a great rack,” I suggested.

“She’s got a great rack,” repeated Brandon, his round cheeks flushing slightly as Calvin and Sydney murmured in agreement, though Reid wisely kept his mouth shut and his eyes down.

“She’s a Satyr !” Hope said.

“Are you saying Satyrs can’t have great racks?” Sydney asked.

“Yeah, actually, I am,” Hope said, glaring at her. “Because Satyrs are traditionally male and—”

“—and Calvin said I could be a female Satyr named Neelu with a great rack,” I said. “And what he says goes. Isn’t that, like, rule one? The Dungeon Master gets final say?”

“I’m so impressed you know that,” Hope said dryly. “Is it because it’s the same as the other kind of dungeons you have experience with or—”

”So while this is all happening,” Calvin said, trying to change the subject before I could tell Hope I hadn’t been to a sex dungeon yet but would gladly take her recommendations so I knew which ones to avoid. “Are you still walking forward?”

“Uh… yes,” I said.

“No,” Hope said immediately. “No, we’re not.”

“Yes, we are.”

“We’re not .”

“Except that we are ,” I said. “In fact, we’re walking forward so forwardly that I’m prancing on my little goat feet ahead of everyone, shaking my goat ass and—”

“You said you’re in the front?” Calvin said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Great. Roll a Perception check.”

And that was how I fell into a pit of lava and died, which despite her having nothing to do with it and not even saying anything to defend me at any point, Hope decided was Sydney’s fault.

“I’m so sick of her!” Sydney vented as we walked home a little while later. “Reid had the fucking audacity to say I’m antagonizing her!”

“Have I called Reid a dick to his face recently?” I asked. “Maybe I need to make a point of it again.”

“I don’t know what his fucking problem is,” she said. “I didn’t even do anything. You were the one pissing Hope off.”

I chuckled. “Yeah, that’s true. I should be the one getting yelled at.”

“You should,” she said grumpily. “You know as well as I do that she’s insecure about being with Reid because for some goddamn reason, even though we’ve been friends for years and I’m literally seeing someone else , he keeps picking girls who have a problem with him having a female roommate.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t make it my fault that Reid yelled at you instead of me.”

“No, but then you’re flirting and—”

“I did not flirt with Reid,” I interrupted.

“Yeah, but you were flirting with everyone else there,” she said.

“And that matters why?” I said. “Please explain to me why me acting the same way I’ve always acted with Calvin and Brandon affects how Hope acts towards you .”

Sydney’s throat flexed as she swallowed, but she didn’t say anything.

“I’m waiting,” I said. “Because seriously, Syd. I was trying to help. I agreed to come to this solely because I wanted to be there since no one else seems to call her out for how she treats you.”

She blinked rapidly a few times. I felt bad, despite not being in the wrong, because I knew a second later, her eyelashes would be wet.

“Don’t you dare cry,” I said. “You did your makeup way too nice today to ruin it with tears over Hope ?.”

She let out a watery laugh. “I’m sorry.”

“How can you be sorry for crying when you’re not crying? Seems suspicious to me.”

She laughed again, her strawberry blonde hair swaying as she shook her head, then took a deep breath and let it out.

“I’m sorry I’m taking this out on you,” she said. “You’re right. And smart.”

“Don’t forget my great rack.”

“You’re right and smart and have a rack that would make angels weep.”

“Explains why you’re crying.”

Sydney let out an unattractive snort of laughter, but before either of us could say anything else, the Spongebob Square Pants theme song started blaring from my pocket, which sent both of us into another fit of giggles.

“You have got to change that,” she said. “It’s obnoxious.”

“Counterpoint: it puts me in a good enough mood that I don’t want to throw my phone into the canal instead of answering when I see who it is.”

It probably sounded like a joke, but it wasn’t. It was an exaggeration, maybe, but the flat tone I said it in made Sydney frown in concern. Not looking at her, I sighed, then tapped the screen and used the slight burst of happiness from the sound of my ring tone to sound as cheerful as I could.

“Hi, Dad,” I said.

“ Ma fille ange ,” my dad responded. “How is your second week of classes going?”

“Fine,” I said. “How’s… life?”

“Excellent,” he said, sounding disconcertingly convincing. “I need you to share with me what your schedule looks like for the next few weekends.”

“Booked solid,” I said.

“All of them?” he asked.

“For the foreseeable future.”

“ Ma fille ange , I am not asking much,” he’d said. “I am asking—”

“—that I make a two-hour drive, spend a couple of hours getting ready for some social gathering, attend the gathering so I can make Pia Martelle laugh like I’m some kind of court jester, spend the night in Montreal, then make the two-hour drive back to Ottawa after having brunch with you and Kimberlee because you never let me leave without having at least one extra outing,” I blurted. “I don’t have time .”

There was a heavy beat of silence and I tensed, preparing myself for my dad to snap at me for talking back to him and possibly threaten to stop paying my rent again.

“So not next weekend, then,” he said. “The one after, perhaps?”

I said no. He pushed back again and I pushed forward, and between all the pushing, by the time I hung up the phone, Sydney and I were nearly back at our apartment building.

“Like, is he purposely not getting it?” I grumbled as we turned down our street. “Or is he playing stupid because he thinks there’s some competitive advantage to pretending he’s surprised every time I tell him I don’t have time to go to Montreal?”

“Maybe he’s hoping you’ll change your mind,” Sydney said.

I scoffed. “Not a chance.”

“Really? None at all?”

I turned to stare at her incredulously. “Uh… yeah. Zero chance. Why would you—”

She held up her hands defensively. “I just thought since you and JP are talking again—”

“I’m not changing my mind for JP Marchand, of all people,” I said, rolling my eyes. “His dick isn’t worth having to see my dad.”

“Nell.” She gave me a semi-patronizing look. “I know you’d rather tie up another sophomore douchebag and steal his cat than admit you like anything about JP, but you’ve straight-up said he’s given you some of the best sex of your life.”

That was true. JP was so infuriatingly good in bed that I couldn’t even convince myself to pretend he wasn’t, and that was saying something considering how delusional I could be. “So maybe you should realize it’s less of a testament to the quality of his dick and more to how much I can’t stand my dad.”

“Even if I believed that, it’s not like you’d have to. JP doesn’t live next door anymore.”

I glared at her. “So maybe then you should realize that I don’t like him.”

Sydney’s lips pressed together, a laugh hidden behind them. “You text him an awful lot for someone you don’t like.”

“I do not!”

“If I opened your phone right now, you’re saying his chat wouldn’t be right under mine as most recent?”

“It’s not,” I said. “I texted Brandon when my lecture was done to say we were on our way over.”

“Right. And you didn’t take a sneaky picture of your dice sitting in your cleavage and send it to some mystery person while Hope and Brandon were arguing about which cell door they should open first?”

Right. I’d forgotten about that.

“Look, I’m just saying, maybe a trip to Montreal wouldn’t be the worst thing,” she said.

“And it has nothing to do with hitching a ride so you can see Olivier?” I asked.

Sydney twisted her mouth to the side and didn’t say anything, which sent guilt pin-pricking along my chest and arms.

“You can borrow my car, Syd. Or get a train ticket. Or a bus ticket. Or take a freakin’ Uber.”

“You can’t Uber to Montreal from here,” she said, laughing.

“You totally can,” I said. “I hooked up with a guy in my second year who somehow put in Montreal instead of Montreal Road when he got an Uber to bring his grandma back to her retirement home and didn’t find out until she called a few hours later to ask how she was supposed to get back.”

“He did not!”

“Totally did. With tip and surcharge and stuff, I think he said it was over a grand for both trips.”

“He sent her back in an Uber, too?!”

“How else would she get back?”

She gave me an incredulous look. “What other options did you just suggest to me?”

“Oh yeah.”

There was still a smile on my face when Sydney and I hugged goodbye and went to our respective apartments, but it faded once I walked in and remembered I’d left my internship applications spread over the coffee table to force myself to work on them once I got home. Dropping my backpack in the kitchen, I stripped out of my jeans and left them on the armchair in the living room before flopping to the floor, staring dully at the work in front of me.

There were two for me to apply for. The first was the FAI internship that I’d been rejected for the previous year because I’d pissed off Shitstain Humprey, who ended up being the nephew of Shithead Humprey, the head of the FAI Internship program.

The second was the CCFS Labs internship. If the FAI internship was competitive, CCFS Labs was like the Olympics. Applying was more like taking an exam than it was filling out an application. And considering they almost never accepted anyone with anything less than a Masters, I had a better chance of working as a go-go dancer on an Antarctic cruise ship than I did of getting accepted to CCFS Labs.

But I’d promised Ben I would at least apply for it when he wrote me my reference letter.

The problem was that it was eating even more of my precious time.

This was the most difficult semester of school I’d ever had, even though we were only three weeks in. Between my projects, applications, and general inability to properly manage my time, I hadn’t even had time to go out and get laid like I usually did. I couldn’t think of a point in my entire university experience that I’d gone a month without getting laid, except maybe last year when I’d had strep throat right before winter break.

But in fairness, I’d come back and immediately gone to a party, hooked up with a girl in the bathroom, and then went out to the garage to get myself another beer and ended up bent over the hood of a parked car hooking up with a guy I’d met earlier that night.

I had no stories like that from this semester. No, this semester, I had a week’s worth of furtive tit pics taken in campus bathrooms and semi-staged photos of my ass in the full-length mirror in my bedroom and on one particularly horny night, a short clip of my fingers tracing my pussy lips. Or, more accurately, I had the results of those things: pictures in return, and on that same horny night, a video of a hand wrapped around a thick, throbbing cock, stroking it teasingly as pre-cum leaked from the tip.

The bastard hadn’t even left the sound on, either.

But regardless of what Sydney thought, none of that meant I liked JP.

I liked that he was easy. I didn’t mean it like he was easy to talk into having sex—which he was, but that wasn’t the point—but things with him were easy. We’d hooked up before. I didn’t have to figure out what he wanted, what he liked, what would make him buy in to what I wanted.

And I liked that he was fast. Not in the premature ejaculation kind of way, but in the way that I could get what I needed from him and move on. Like, I could get naked, throw my clothes in the washing machine, send JP a picture of my ass and ask for a picture of his dick and a couple of messages telling me what he wanted to do to me, and get off on my trusty vibrator before my load of laundry was even done.

Yeah, it wasn’t quite the same as having a dick inside me or a pair of breasts to play with while I sat on someone’s face, but it was also helping me do my laundry more regularly.

So really, it was a time management strategy.

Which was important. I had cases to study and applications to fill out, like the ones currently spread out on the coffee table demanding my attention.

So I picked up my headphones, put them on, and proceeded to put my face down on the coffee table and listen to the latest episode of the new podcast I’d gotten into.

Normally, I was a true crime girl. But when I’d found the Why Am I Like This podcast, I knew I not only had to listen to every single episode that existed, but also convince everyone in my life to listen to it, too.

Not because it was useful or anything.

Because it was fucking hilarious .

“My mother is a saint , Santiago, you fucknugget!” John shouted, even though he was laughing.

“I’m not saying she’s not,” Santi replied. “I’m saying I found a giant blue tentacle dildo, probably eight or ten inches around, in her bedside drawer.”

“Bull. Fucking. Shit.”

“Your mother likes tentacles, John,” Santi said patiently. “Which explains why you look the way you do. That’s a straight-up octopus beak you have instead of a nose.”

And that was when Liam lost the game of Spit or Swallow they were playing, the sound of water spraying from his mouth echoing in my ears.

Spit or Swallow was exactly what it sounded like, so long as you didn’t think it sounded like something sex-related. One of the guys would take a mouthful of water and the others did their best to make him laugh or react in some way, thereby spitting out the water. If they didn’t, he’d swallow it.

Simple.

Hilarious.

And it had become a goal of mine to one day play it myself.

I was grinning into the hard surface of the coffee table when my phone vibrated with a notification. I considered not looking at it, but hadn’t even started laughing at myself for thinking I could ignore a notification before another one came through. Annoyed, I lifted my head and glanced at the screen as a third notification came through.

Bastard

If you have a sex, can I ask you a question?

Other than one?

And that one, of course.

I glared at my phone.

Me

What?

Bastard

Did you notice I said sex instead of sec?

I read the message, glanced at the first one again, and went back to my podcast.

“—could have been so much worse,” Liam was saying, his voice hoarse with laughter. “What if it was your dad’s ?”

“I hate you,” John said. “I fucking hate you both. So much.”

“Liar. You love us,” Santi said. “Just like your mom loves tenta—”

And my phone vibrated again.

Bastard

Is that a yes?

I ignored it, not even bothering to open the message, which nearly killed me because I hated not looking at notifications.

“—convict me,” John said. “No jury in the world.”

“It would be completely justified,” Liam said.

“Whose side are you even on?” Santi asked, cackling.

“The audience’s,” Liam said. “Because trust me, the longer this conversation goes on—”

“Oh, don’t even,” John said. “Do not even , bro.”

“Oh, he’s pulling out the ‘bros,’” Santi said, snickering.

“Bro, shut up,” John said. “Liam’s just trying to keep us all talking so I don’t tell everyone about what I found in his mom’s drawer, which was—”

“You wouldn’t dare !” Liam gasped.

“What was it?” Santi asked.

“I would absolutely dare,” John said.

“Bro, why ?!” Liam begged. “I’m not the one who found your mom’s tentacle dildo!”

“And yet I’m the one who found—”

My phone vibrated again.

And then again.

And again.

Bastard

Babe

Babe did you notice

Babe did you see what I did there

Babeeee

I let out an aggravated groan and paused the podcast.

Me

What the actual fuck do you want, JP?

Bastard

Whoa. Why are you so pissed?

Me

How do you know I’m pissed?

Bastard

You put my name in writing

Me

And you can’t figure out why?

Bastard

Maybe someone gave you decaf this morning instead of espresso?

And I just…

I don’t know why I unloaded the way I did.

It wasn’t like JP was my go-to person to talk to when I needed to. That person was Syd. Or Anne-Marie, as long as what I needed to talk about wasn’t JP. Or Ben, at least during the summer before he’d left. JP was the annoying bastard who blew up my phone with pointless texts and dicked me down when I was in Montreal.

That was it .

But for some reason, I started typing, and typing, and typing .

And for some reason, instead of deleting it all, I hit send.

Me

Maybe someone had a crappy day. Maybe someone’s dad called bugging her to go to Montreal even though she said no because he wants is her to help him impress his stupid rich clients. Maybe someone said no again and someone’s friend is sad because it means her friend can’t bum a ride from her so she can visit her slightly-more-serious-than-a-fuck-buddy, and it’s bothering her because she doesn’t like letting people down like that. Maybe now she’s trying to fill out some fucking applications and can’t focus on this boring crap because she realized she hasn’t gotten laid in forever and now she’s getting texts every five seconds from someone who STILL hasn’t told her what he wants?

The arrows showing he’d opened the message appeared right away, even though it took me a while to type it all. Not bothering to unpause the podcast, I closed my eyes and put my head back on the table until my phone vibrated again.

Bastard

Well, I can’t do much about your applications or make your dad less of a dick or help (I’m assuming) Sydney see her cop buddy

But funnily enough, I might have a solution for the other part

Me

Wow, you have a solution for telling me why you’re messaging me? Shocking.

Bastard

Oops. Typo.

I meant the other partS.

And then he sent me a winking emoji.