“No,” she said.
The beast calmed down.
Evie looked at me. “Have you?”
I shrugged, as if this whole conversation didn’t affect me. Jesus, I was losing my mind. “No.”
Her eyebrows went up. “Really? I mean—I’m surprised.”
I’d said I was considering it in the diner, but the fact was it hadn’t even crossed my mind. I’d just been trying to shock her. “Why are you surprised?”
Now, finally, she looked slightly embarrassed. “Because I heard rumors about you.”
“Yeah? They’re probably wrong.”
She worried her lip again. She was polite, and she didn’t like to gossip. “I heard you come from family money,” she admitted finally.
“Okay,” I said grudgingly. “True.”
“And you don’t have a job and you party all the time.”
“Also true.”
“And you get a lot of women.”
“Define ‘a lot.’”
She shook her head. “Okay, I admit I didn’t actually hear that last one. It was an educated guess.”
“Where are you hearing this shit?” I asked. There was no way she was talking to Gina. The two of them didn’t inhabit the same planet. I didn’t blame her because right now I didn’t want to inhabit Gina’s planet, either.
She took another sip of her milkshake. “I heard it from Josh,” she said.
The beast woke up again and growled. Fucking Bank Boy. She was talking to him? She was mad at him, but she hadn’t answered the question when I’d asked if she was in love with him. Maybe she wasn’t over him. Maybe she was hoping she’d get him back.
Why the fuck did I care?
“He knows a hell of a lot about me,” I said, “but he doesn’t know a fucking thing.”
I must have sounded dangerous, because she put down her drink and stared at me. “He hates you,” she said.
That didn’t surprise me. Most people hated me, including my own parents. “Yeah? Why?”
“Because you punched him. You embarrassed him. You made him feel this big.” She held her thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “He called me up. He told me to stay away from you. He thinks you’re going to take advantage of me. He said you’d come on to me and take advantage of my hurt feelings—like I can’t control myself. It was idiotic. I’ve never seen him so mad.”
“Yeah?” I said again. She’d lost that hollowed-out expression she’d had in the diner, when she’d said she wasn’t skinny or good-looking enough to deserve him. When she talked about how mad Bank Boy was, her brown eyes were lit up with pleasure.
So there was one favor I could do for her. Everyone has a special talent. Mine was pissing people off.
“Let’s make him mad, then,” I said to her. “I mean, really mad.”
“Nooo,” she said, drawing the word out as she looked at me warily. “We already said we aren’t doing that.”
That made me smile. “Evie,” I said, “you don’t get it. We don’t have to fuck. Bank Boy already thinks we’re doing it, or almost. We just have to make it look like he’s right.”
“And how do we do that?” she asked, her voice a little strangled.
I thought it over. I already had a few invites on my phone. “What are you doing tonight?”