Page 21 of How to Blow It with a Billionaire

“You didn’t RSVP.”

“I haven’t had time.” Also RSVPing scared the crap out of me. What if I did it wrong and everybody was secretly laughing at me?

“If you don’t RSVP they won’t let you in.”

“Ellery, what time is it?”

No reply.

I sighed into the bed. “I’ll RSVP today. I promise.”

There was a long silence. I was starting to regret my sleep-based strategy because it meant I was essentially stuck facedown with nothing to do until Ellery got bored, passed out, or we both died of old age.

“It’s lame.”

If Hazel had been here, she’d have thrown back not as lame as your use of ableist language, just like she did when I was in my teens. The words sounded so familiar in my head it was almost as if she was there to say them. I thought better of trying them out on Ellery, though. “What is?”

“The party.”

That was a pretty low-key way of describing what was likely to be the poshest do of my life. A party was when you went to someone’s house with a bottle of £4.99 wine and ended up sitting on the floor because the living room was too small for the twelve people who’d turned up. A masquerade ball was…something else. “It sounds, uh, amazing.”

“It’s Trudy’s thing.”

I de-pillowed and turned, settling the bits of me that needed it as carefully as possible. “Trudy?”

She muttered something.

“Huh?

“My mother.” Her already husky voice had acquired that weed-hoarse edge so she sounded like Lauren Bacall in a bad mood.

“Um, you call your mother Trudy?”

She glanced up, her strange blue-green eyes sparking. “Textbook, aren’t I?”

“I’m not your counselor.”

She unfolded her legs and climbed off the bed, boot buckles jingling. Took the final drag of her joint and then vanished with the roach. Truthfully, I was relieved she didn’t just toss it onto the carpet or something.

As soon as she was out of sight, I shot out of bed, pulled on a pair of boxers and the biggest T-shirt I had—which I’d got at a John Grant concert, and the only size they’d had left was apparently elephantine. It said callipygian on it, with the definition underneath. Nik had bought it for me. Since it definitely applied.

I was trying to bring order to my hair, which had assumed its usual sleeping position of every-fucking-where when Ellery came back. She lingered in the doorway, toeing at the wall in a not-quite-kicking it way.

“I didn’t know where you’d gone,” she said finally.

I blinked. “Uh, home? I mean, back to Kinlochbervie, where my family live.”

“Did he hurt you? Is that why you had to leave?”

“Well…kind of.”

Her hands clenched into fists and now she did kick the wall, making me flinch. “Then you should have stayed away. He hurt his last boyfriend too. He hurts everyone. So they leave.”

Oh God. I had no hope of untangling that: layers of perception and interpretation and implication about people I hardly knew in a situation I only partially understood. “I left because we had an argument and I thought he didn’t want me here. But it was a moderately-sized misunderstanding and we’ve sorted it out now.”

She glared at me. “I had to ring him.”

“Ring who?”