Beneath The Skin(45)

“Ew,” grunts Sam.

“Imagery,” agrees Dmitri with a wince.

“Just quit lying to yourself,” Chloe tells me, her eyes burning me with their darkness. “You’re not a ‘lover’, Brant. You’re not a boyfriend. You are just a plain, straight-up slut. Sex is your game, not love. Just a basic, shallow, dumb, animal hunger for getting off … and that’s it.”

I swallow hard, staring down at the foot-long sub I haven’t even taken a single bite of yet. I want to disagree with her and argue about how serious I am, about this new girl in my life Nell, about how wrong she is … but can’t for the life of me come up with a single argument.

Then the gods of lady luck ask: How can we make this moment for Brant just a little bit worse?

Their answer comes in the form of an excited shout. “Brant!”

I look up to find a girl with chin-length auburn hair waltzing up to our table, her eyes bright and her lips pouty. This might be bad timing, but the first thing I recognize about her—before even her face—is her big tits accentuated exquisitely by that skintight tan shirt she has on. They bounce in the most hypnotizing way as she approaches, and it’s those dancing knockers that I peel my eyes away from to meet her face.

“You didn’t answer my text, sweetie! Oh, hi,” she absently says to the rest of the table, then returns her eyes to me. “Are you up for it? Maybe six or seven tonight, sweetie? Or eight, if you got things? Or nine? I’m flexible.”

If my time with her behind that privacy screen in the art class was any indication, I know exactly how flexible she is.

“I got a, uh … a Theatre thing,” I tell her, feeling my skin crawl. “I can’t. Sorry. I …”

“Oh? I can come! You know my dance classes are in that building too, right? School of Theatre: Acting, Dancing, Excellence,” she sings, reciting the name just so I can enjoy the sound of her grating, overly-chipper voice.

Chloe smirks. “It’s Theatre, Dancing, Excellence,” she mumbles to herself with a roll of her eyes.

The dancer either doesn’t hear her or outright ignores her. “So I’ll come too, then! You obviously need a date. What time? Seven?”

“It’s tomorrow,” I say. “Listen … C-Candace …” I had to fish around in my brain for her name. I still haven’t read the text she sent me last night. “I was sorta just planning to go with my roommate here since he’s friends with an actor in the show.”

“Playwright,” Dmitri hisses unhelpfully across the table.

“Playwright of the show,” I amend.

“That’s okay!” she says cheerily. “I can just tag along. Really, I haven’t actually taken the time to see a show at the theater in, like, months.”

Chloe sighs dramatically, exasperated on all our behalf. “Since the message is clearly flying over your head,” she states loudly, “Brant here is trying to gently let you down. He’s lost interest and has moved on. There’s some girl at the art school he’s all obsessed with for now until he’s tired of her, too. We are all sitting here patiently waiting for your attempts at manipulating Brant into another date to die out. And really, it’s for the best.”

I shoot Dmitri a look. You told Chloe? my eyes seem to say. The guilty look on Dmitri’s face is my answer.

For only a moment, Candace the dancer appears to have been punched deep in her gut. Then, just as fast, she recovers and offers me a tight smile. “Come to think of it, I think I have a rehearsal tonight for my recital in two weeks.” She saves herself yet another scrap of dignity by giving me a cheery sigh—as if all this news didn’t just smash up her heart like a bag of wasted fast food tossed out the car window—then waltzes away just as fast as she’d come.

“You really know how to set it straight,” I mutter at Chloe without looking at her.

She doesn’t respond, poking at her salad. I glance at Dmitri across the table, who only offers an apologetic shrug, his eyes appearing like two innocent black beads behind his glasses. Sam has her mouth full of cheeseburger and staring up at something on the ceiling, which appears to have caught all of her interest.

“I got class soon,” I lie, gently swiping my uneaten sub into my backpack and slinging it over a shoulder. “See you later.” Though I’m not sure who exactly I’m addressing.

I hear Dmitri say my name, but I pretend not to hear it, leaving them to enjoy their lunch in peace without the apparent disturbance of the all-evil, heart-annihilating pussy destroyer Brant in their presence.