Page 36 of Goode to Be Bad
She leaned into his side and pressed her lips to his ear. Whispered something that mollified him—and more, judging by the way he shifted awkwardly.
He was odd, and serious, and earnest, but clearly totally in love with Harlow, and she with him.
I extended my hand. “You must Xavier Badd.”
He was puzzled. “We have not met. How do you know my name?”
I gestured at Harlow. “It’s a well-known fact that Harlow is engaged to Xavier Badd, a robotics genius, Silicon Valley start-up darling, and inventor of fascinating devices which I’ve always wanted, but have never been able to afford.”
Harlow laughed, nuzzled him. “What she means is, you’re becoming famous yourself, baby.”
“Famous because of my connection to you is not famous for me,” he said. “But I suppose that is a natural risk of being romantically entangled with a woman of your elevated social status.”
I laughed. “You’re funny.”
He didn’t laugh with me. “I was not joking.”
“I…um. Oh.”
He blinked, frowned. “I am not comfortable in such large gatherings, so my social capacity is somewhat hampered. My apologies.” He turned to Harlow. “Please excuse me, my love. I need some space.”
She just nodded, kissed him with quick familiarity. “Go up to the break room and tinker. I know you brought a gadget with you.”
He nodded. “I have my briefcase. I’ll just catch my bearings and return when I’m able.”
I watched this exchange with curiosity. When Xavier had vanished into the crowd and up a flight of steps, Harlow smiled at us. “He’s on the autism spectrum. It makes big parties like this hard for him.” She smiled proudly. “He’s done a lot of research into ASD, and we have a charity foundation which we do a lot of work for, funding research and promoting awareness. He does a lot of speaking engagements on the subject in schools near where we live down in LA.”
“So is that why he talks like…”
“Like an eighty-year-old Ivy League professor, stuck in the body of a superhot twenty-three-year-old? Yeah. If you were to ask him something he knows a lot about—which is just about everything—you’d hear him go into real lecture mode. He’s literally one of the smartest people on the planet.” She gestured after him. “When I say go tinker, he’s going to pull some gizmo out of his briefcase that a billion-dollar robotics lab couldn’t conceive of in a hundred years, which he invented for fun while doing, like, quantum physics or something.”
I felt a little dizzy. “Wow. So robotics genius isn’t just an online magazine tagline.”
“Oh no,” Harlow said. “It doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the genius of that man. He can quote all ofThe IliadandThe Odyssey…in the original Greek. He can quote Marcus Aurelius…in Latin. His most recent language project is teaching himself both Old and Middle English, at the same time. It’s a side hobby for him, learning obscure or dead languages. He says after he’s literarily fluent in Old and Middle English he’s going to teach himself Sanskrit because he heard it’s challenging.”
I laughed. “How do you keep up with him?” I asked.
Harlow just cackled. “Intellectually? You don’t. You just try to not get carried away in the flash flood of his intellect. It makes daily conversation interesting, that’s for sure.”
I saw a quartet of dazzling beauties behind Myles: a pair of male twins and a pair of female twins, one with a toddler on her hip; the men were, like all the Badd men I’d seen so far, tall, lean, and muscular and devastatingly handsome; the women, again, were in a class all their own in terms of sophistication and beauty. The women made me feel frumpy and slutty, and the men made me feel weak in the knees and guiltily turned on.
The circle Myles and I were part of—Lucian, Joss, and Harlow—expanded to include the twins. The men: same height and build as Lucian and Xavier, both had the grizzly bear-brown hair as the rest of the family. Both sported tattoos and piercings, wore ripped jeans and Sharpie-decorated Chuck Taylors and concert T-shirts.
The women were a combination of Blake Lively and Marilyn Monroe, slender and elegant and sophisticated. Both were dressed like they could have stepped out of aVanity Fairfashion ad—sleek and daring and revealing without being overtly sexual, highlighting their bodies without displaying.
Harlow saw me eying the female twins. “Don’t worry, I feel the same way around them.”
I blinked at her. “Sorry, what?”
She indicated the two blond women. “Them. They’re so freaking perfect they make you feel…tawdry. Right?”
I boggled. “But you’re…”
She arched an eyebrow. “An absolutely ordinary woman with self-esteem issues, especially as regards to the width of my hips.” She smoothed her hands over her hips, which were almost as generous as mine, and then gestured at the twins, whose hips were quite a bit more slender. “They don’t mean to be perfect, they just can’t help it.”
I laughed and realized one of the twins was staring at me.
I waved. “Hi?”