Page 116 of The Bad Girl

“I did not! I said the seams are really putting in some work! But it was a jest. I literally just gave her a complement, and this.” I gesture towards Allison.

“Holy Jesus!” Nadine snaps, her face contorting in anger.

“Fine! You may not have called me pregnant, but you certainly implied I was fat!” Allison cries.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Nadine pulls her sobbing friend into an embrace.

“It was a jest! Don’t pregnant people love showing off their bumps?”

“What’s going on in here?”

Now, it’s not Nadine glaring at me—it’s Tom.

Jesus fucking Christ, you already got the girl, do you really want to take my balls too?

“My apologies. I made a comment about Allison’s—”

“He called me fat!”

The look of rage that flashes across Tom’s face has me thanking the years I’ve trained in martial arts, but judging by his guns, my guess is he’s trained equally as hard.

“Again, my apologies. It was a miscommunication I regret, and deeply so.”

Thankfully, a mousy assistant barges past Tom into the room.

“We’re ready for group shots,” she says.

“We’ll be out in a minute,” I say.

“Oh, dear,” the assistant says, looking at Allison’s now smeared makeup.

“Let’s just take a break, give Allison some time to get her makeup reapplied,”for the fifth time,“and reconvene in thirty minutes,” I suggest.

“Okay,” the assistant says, eyes trained on a sobbing Allison, “but it won’t leave us much time for the final shots.”