big phallic-thro-dick?” Candace asked after another long stretch of nobody knowing what to say.
Aubrey, Bridget, and I all turned to look at our friend with the same “what the fuck” face. We stared and she stared back.
Suddenly we were all bursting out laughing, gasping for breath, clutching our sides, flopping over, sucking in shuddering gulps of air, sighing, locking eyes with one another and laughing all over again.
After that things were better. We went back to our champagne, to our make-up, to our gossip. I showed them pictures of potential suitors of increasing age till I was flipping around pictures of ninety-year-olds.
“There, there you go,” Bridget said, emphatically pointing at one Reginald Hurst IV. “That’s the one you want right there.”
Aubrey was drunkenly hiccupping as she took out my wonky curls.
“He definitely has the shapeliest liver spots so far,” she said, cooling her red cheeks with her mug.
Candace snatched my phone and clutched it to her heart before launching into what I could only guess was a Portuguese declaration of ever-lasting love. I wrestled my phone back from her.
“He’s mine, Candace,” I said with a wry wink.
Aubrey arranged my hair around my shoulders, though perhaps “arrange” isn’t the right word because the end result was all messy and uneven and stiff from far too much hair spray. My eye make-up still didn’t really match from eye to eye and Candace hadn’t quite removed all of the errant streak of red lipstick from my cheek, but my three friends nonetheless beamed at the final look in the mirror. I beamed right back.
“Thank you, guys,” I said, blushing beneath my blush. “I really mean it.”
Bridget dismissed me with a quick wave of her hand.
“Of course, Delaney. You don’t even have to say it.”
Candace reached over to squeeze my hand. “We weren’t going to let you go to that fancy ball unprepared,” she said. “Besides, French makeup is so boring.”
“And obviously there isn’t much to say thank you for here,” Aubrey added, lightly touching my very… unique hairdo.
I smiled at her in the mirror. Then Candace. Then Bridget.
I hadn’t meant “thank you” for the make-up, for the hair styling.
But I suspect they knew that just as well.
It was the things that didn’t need to be said that meant the most between friends.
Ronan
I had to admit it was rather refreshing, being on the right side of the bars in a police station. There were little cups of bad instant coffee you could sip on—pinkie raised or not, it was your choice since you weren’t wearing handcuffs and you could do what you wanted. A television in the corner played old French dramas in black and white. And there was the whole bit about requiring nothing more than pushing open the grimy front door in order to leave. Perhaps this was why most of society actively avoided run-ins with the law. Who knew?
I sipped my third coffee, this one with the delightful flavour of burnt plastic and hazelnut. Kane buried his face in his hands and groaned next to me on one of the hard metal chairs in the lobby.
“This is the last time I’m doing this,” he muttered under his breath. “The last fucking time.”
“I do believe I’ve heard that before,” Shay said as he leafed through a weeks-old French newspaper from where he leaned against the bulletin board posted with mug shots and most wanted announcements. “Ronan, does what Kane just said sound familiar at all to you?”
Kane cursed irritably when I lounged my elbow against his hunched shoulders.
“Hmm,” I said as I drummed my fingers against his head until he smacked me away. “Hmm…”
“I mean it this time,” Kane said, leaning back, dragging his fingers through his hair and letting his head fall back to stare up at the ceiling. “I really mean it this time.”
Shay turned the page of the newspaper and scoffed. “Heard that before, too.”
Our little boys’ day out on the Paris town before the Le Ball later that night had been abruptly ruined by a 5 a.m. wakeup call from the local police station. Kane’s younger brother, Aedan, who had secured himself an invitation to the ball through his usual slimy scheming, had also secured himself a trip in the back of a cop car after getting wasted with some French prostitutes in a rented villa and destroying some priceless art with a late-night water balloon (filled with vodka, of course) contest.
Shay and I came along with Kane to keep him company while he bailed Aedan out in