I tilted my head to the side, eyebrows tented in surprise. “It depends on whether she’s got any teethornot.”
Richie winced and reached down to cup his nuts with one hand as he drove. “Well, thanks for that, Finn. You just blew that bucket list itemforme.”
“You put ‘a blowjob from a toothless crack head’ on your bucket list? Dude,comeon.”
“I didn’t specify the number ofteeth.”
I snorted myamusement.
“Hey, it’s mybucketlist.”
“Okay, whatever. Hey, wait – are you talking about that redhead with four kids who lives across the hall?” I asked, a smirk lurking on the edges ofmylips.
Richie caught my condescending expression. “Look, you told me I needed to start thinking more positively, so, you know, all I’m saying is, for a meth addict who may or may not have teeth and who’s squeezed four humans out of her snatch, she’s nothalfbad.”
While my instinct was to laugh in his face, Richie was right – he was trying to be more optimistic, in his roundabout, offensive way, and he certainly deserved some recognitionforthat.
“There you go,” I complimented. “Way to look at the bright side of our new living situation. Next time I see the neighbor, I’ll be sure to take acloserlook.”
“Thank you,” he grinned. “That’s all I’masking.”
Richie pulled into the restaurant and made sure to park his car away from all the others. His upper-class vehicle was too good to sit side by side with the low to middle-class ones. It was the one snobby thing Richie could still control in his rapidly changing world, so I didn’t push him even though that meant a longer walk for me. I painstakingly eased my body out of the car and gingerly shuffled my way through theparkinglot.
“Could you stand up straight?” Richie scolded. “You’reembarrassingme.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t parked in a different county, I wouldn’t be in this position. I mean, was that really necessary? At some point, your Mercedes is going to have to play nice with all the otherautomobiles.”
“Don’t push it, Finn, you know this is still hardforme.”
It wasn’t like he’d been sent to a fiery hell. Richie just needed a reality check… and a paying job. Those were two things I never left home without. Everything I was and would ever be came down to me and how hard I was willing to work for it. There was that optimism again… that ‘anything is possible’ attitude. I must have been born with it because certainly nothing in my childhood had afforded me the healthy self-esteem Ienjoyed.
I watched in amusement as Richie pushed the alarm button on his car for the twelfth time. We were too far away for it to pick up thesignal.
“Do you think I should run back andcheck?”
“It’s locked.Relax.”
But he didn’t. Richie’s eyes darted in every direction, attempting to ward off danger with every cautious step. Just because we weren’t in his neck of the woods didn’t mean everyone was out to get him. I’d tried to explain that to him, but my roommate was too paranoid to care. Growing up, I never would have predicted I’d be friends with a guy like Richie. On paper he was an entitled, clueless elitist; but after years of friendship, I knew Richie was more than his exterior. I’d seen him run into a grocery store to buy food for a homeless man, and stop traffic on a busy street to help a mother duck and her ducklings get to the other side. Sure, Richie was spoiled, but he was not without hismerits.
Hunched, fevered, and groaning, I finally made it over the threshold into the restaurant and had to grip the counter to steady myself. I realized I was being a giant pussy, but at that point, I really didn’t care. I was hurting, and I wanted the world to hurtwithme.
“So what happened this time?” Richie asked, with an overly exaggerated sigh, as if he’d been actively avoiding the question because my pain was such a nuisance to him. Somehow I’d become the boy who cried wolf, and clearly I needed bigger and better injuries to impress himnowadays.
Today had just been another day at the office: car chases, fistfights, and fifty-foot falls. That was my job. If you hadn’t already guessed, I was a stuntman… and judging by injuries alone, not a very good one. My side career had started as a fluke while on set for a part in a horror movie. I was playing murder victim number four. And really, I was surprised to have made it that far. Typically I played the asshole boyfriend… and we all knew what happened to them in slasher flicks. But luck was on my side in this particular movie when the casting department unintentionally hired two jock guys. Lining us up side by side, they deemed me the less douchey of the two and slapped some glasses on my face, instantly transforming me into the nerdy best friend and effectively buying me a few more minutes of airtime before my inescapabledeath.
On the day in question, while waiting for my scene to film, I was fooling around with some of the other actors when I ran up a wall and did a flip. With my background in gymnastics and a daredevil mentality, the stunt coordinator on set honed in on my potential and convinced me to give stunt performing a try. That was four years ago, and now it was my primary line of work. It turned out that risking my life on a daily basis paid pretty damn well. Which also made giving it up all the more difficult even as the injuries continued to pile up. My body was tired, and at the rate I was going, I’d be paralyzed in no time. Every day I told myself I was going to quit and find myself a less dangerous profession, like coal mining or deep-seafishing.
“Bruised a few ribs jumping off a bridge. I hit the waterwrong.”
“A bridge?” Richie laughed. “They might as well just finish youoffnow.”
I nodded. “At least the x-ray showed no breaksthistime.”
“Ah, yes, the silver lining. This has got to be some sort of a record. What is it now, four or five trips to the ER sinceJanuary?”
“Five. With any luck, I’ll bedeadsoon.”
“What is it with you and living dangerously? I can’t even walk from the car to the restaurant without freaking out, and you’re flinging yourself off bridges,” he said, shaking his head. “After Alexis and all her jacked up crazy, I figured you’d dial it down a notch. But not you, Finn, oh no. You’re just a glutton forpunishment.”
