Page 8 of Badd Ass

“Who’s Hajji?” I asked.

“His name is actually something like Mohammad ibn Ibrahim. Hajji is a title he earned by making the pilgrimage to Mecca, called a hajj.”

I nodded. “Ah, yeah. I’ve heard about that.”

“He works at the diner with me, back at school. He’s very intelligent, very erudite and well spoken. We are a bit of an odd couple, so to speak, as he’s well past fifty and I’m barely eighteen and we’re from totally different cultures and backgrounds, but we share a roaming sense of curiosity, and neither of us really feel as if we fit in anywhere.”

I chuckle. “You’re a fascinating person, Xavier.”

He eyed me in utter befuddlement. “Fascinating? What does that mean? How am I fascinating?”

“The things you say, the way you say them? You talk like someone out of…I don’t know, Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, rather than an eighteen-year-old punk-ass hipster.” I got up and put my mug in the sink, clapping him on the back. “I’m glad we’ve got this year together, baby brother.”

He watched me as I headed to my room. “Me too.” When I got to my door, he spoke again. “So…what are you going to do about that girl?”

I shrugged. “Track her down, see if I can figure out some way of getting her to give me the time of day.”

“Do you think the aphorism that nothing worth having comes easy applies to women, Zane?”

I stopped and glanced back at him. “I think I’m about to find out, bro.”

Chapter 3

Mara

“You did not.” This was Claire, sitting across from me in the booth of a dive bar far across town from Badd’s Bar and Grill; it was somewhere past midnight the day after I’d walked away from Zane, and I was being interrogated by my best friend.

“I totally did.”

Claire was the same height as me and we both had natural blonde hair, but the similarities ended there; she was more waifish, slender, with what she called mosquito bite titties and a boy butt, with her hair cut in a pixie bob—which she’d dyed pink since the last time I’d seen her. Whereas I’m…curvy, so to speak. I kept fit, but the gym and clean eating can only do so much. It can’t, for example, reduce the visual affect of a big D-cup on a five-five frame, nor can it lessen the pop of my booty, which has always been…generous, shall we say.

Beauty is about a hell of a lot more than cup size and jean size, and even though Claire doesn’t have a lot of extra padding, she is, hands down, the most beautiful girl I know, and I love her hard.

What I don’t like, sometimes, is her unyielding insistence on calling me on my shit. I mean, yeah, it’s part of why I love the bitch as much as I do, butgodit’s annoying when I just want to be left alone to get away with my shit.

Like now, for instance.

“Tell me again what he looked like,” she demanded. “Details, please.”

I sipped my cabernet sauvignon, and then sighed, “I already told you what he looks like, Claire.”

“I know, but I feel like it bears repeating, if you’re to be believed.”

I bobbed my head side to side. “You have a point.” Another long sip. “Fine. He’s an even six feet tall, and he has to weigh at least two hundred pounds. And honey, that shit is solid muscle. If he’s got more than eight percent body fat, then I’m my own great-aunt Lucille. His body is just…chiseled. You know that look we both like so much, right? Where he’s not, like, one of those bodybuilders who looks as if he’s trying to become one big tanned muscle. He’s got all the right muscles in all the right places. That’s Zane.”

“Arm porn?” Claire suggested.

I pretended to look aghast. “Armporn? Bitch, he’severythingporn. He’s chest porn and abs porn and thighs porn and—”

“Cock porn?”

I shuddered, and this time it wasn’t pretend. “Claire…you havenoidea.”

“I wish I did have an idea.”

“You do, you really, really do. I mean, if you actually went and slept with him I’d be forced to challenge you to a duel for breaking the girl code, but seriously, the man’s dick is…it needs its own area code. He could be a professional dick model.”

“You mean porn star?”