Page 10 of How to Bang a Billionaire

Nik winced. “Do you really want to meet important alumni looking like that?”

“It’s not that bad.” My hair was having a small rebellion of its own. I’d quiffed six ways to Sunday but the whole thing had fallen sideways like a drunk on Saturday night. But fuck it. Caspian Hart wasn’t coming anyway. Not because of a single conversation.

He’d probably forgotten about me the moment he’d put the phone down. And I wasn’t going to be…sad or disappointed or messed up about it. Nope. Not even a little bit. The amount of time I’d spent Googling him probably counted as immersion therapy anyway.

He wasn’t all that. Okay, he was fairly—well, very—good-looking, but he wasn’t…photogenic really. He never smiled. Always the same flat stare, as though he regarded the camera as an enemy, his body caught at a moment of artificial stillness: a tiger about to spring away through the long grass.

“I’m telling you,” Nik was saying, “it is that bad.”

I waved a hand, implying that he could—if he so chose—talk to it, and picked up the bow tie he’d laid out for me. Turning up the collar of Nik’s dress shirt and slipping the silk around my neck, I abruptly remembered I had no idea how to tie the thing. The last time I’d had to do this had been matriculation and it hadn’t gone well. Maybe because I’d still been drunk from the night before. Or maybe because bow ties were bullshit.

I messed with the ends, crossing them over each other and moving them about randomly, as if this would miraculously make a bow appear under my chin.

Nik sighed. “You don’t know how to do that, do you?”

I shook my head.

“Come here.”

I went there and Nik stood up, pushing my hands out of the way. And then, just like that, his confidence seemed to desert him. We’d always been fairly snuggly, but this was different somehow: my eyes turned up to Nik’s, him frowning down at me, a piece of black fabric twisted between his fingers, so close to my throat that it felt like a promise or a threat. “Shit,” he muttered, “it’s hard to do it backwards.”

There were about sixty-four million jokes I could have made. Instead I closed my eyes. Tilted my chin to make it easier for him. “I trust you.”

He fiddled, the touch almost aggressively impersonal. “Left end lower than right, bring it over, make a loop, up and through…fuck.” A knock on the door and Nik jerked away from me, the ungainly knot he had created unraveling instantly. “Um, yeah?” he called out.

Weird Owen stuck his head in, gingerish curls flopping haphazardly. “Message from the Lodge. You’ve got a visitor.”

Nik looked startled. “Me?”

“Nuh-uh”—he pointed at me—“that one.”

It couldn’t be…could it? “Who?” I asked, like a disingenuous fuckwit.

“Hard somebody? No. Hart. He’s waiting for you.”

“Oh my God.”

Reality hit me. A cartoon anvil dropped from a balcony. Dong. Little tweety birds flying round my head. Caspian Hart. Not just a name on a list, a picture on a screen, a voice on the phone. He was here. He had come. To see me. And he was waiting.

Oh fuck.

Oh shit.

Oh fuck shit fuck.

I’d thought “suddenly nerveless fingers” was something that only happened to people in novels but one minute I was holding a fallen-apart bow tie and the next it was on the floor. As I bent to pick it up, I realized my hands were sweating. What a totally fabulous impression I was going to make.

“I…uh…I guess I’d better be going.”

“Yeah, man.” The way Nik matched my casual tone ruthlessly revealed it as the lie it was. “Might be a good idea.”

Deep breath. “Right. Well. I’m going.”

I had to squoodge past Weird Owen, who had no sense of personal space and was right in the doorway.

“Hey, Arden?” Nik’s voice followed me into the corridor. I turned and he gave me a two-fingered salute. “Be careful.”

It was our cheesy…joke, routine, whatever. I couldn’t remember when we’d started but it was a thing. The more banal the activity (“I need to go to the loo”), the funnier it got. Right now, even though I wasn’t exactly going off to fight aliens or sacrifice my life in service to my country, it was hard not to take it a bit seriously.