“Is that so?” he replies.
“Brother, you know I only ever speak the truth,” I reply darkly.
Daniel lets out a high-pitched laugh. “That’s true.” He turns to the girl. “Casey—”
“Connie,” she corrects. “It’s Constance, but my friends call me Connie.”
“Connie, this man right here will answer any question honestly.”
She lets out a nervous laugh, and I light up a joint, watching her.
“What’s so weird about that?” she asks, shrugging out from under Daniel’s weight as he leans on her heavily, too drunk to stand up on his own accord anymore.
He sways and stumbles back into a patio chair with another laugh. “Ask him. Ask him anything. It’s fucking hilarious.”
Connie turns to look at me, puzzled. She chews on her bottom lip in thought for a moment before finally deciding on her question. “Okay, what day is it?”
I roll my eyes. “Tuesday.”
She giggles. “I don’t get it.”
Daniel reaches for the joint in my hand, and I let him take it. “No, no, you have to ask him a real question. Watch.” He looks up at me, and I shake my head.
“Don’t do it, man. You know you never like the answers you get,” I warn.
Daniel’s smile falls, but he still asks his damn question. “Why are we really friends?”
The thing with Daniel is he’s actually a good guy—deep down, beneath the bullshit of being the perfect little criminal. Both his parents are assholes. His sister is a slut. He never graduated high school and has no plans for college. His main way of earning a living is selling drugs, arranging fights, and doing practically anything else he wants to score some quick cash.
“We’re not,” I reply, my expression blank, because I refuse to feel sorry for what I’m saying. It’s not like he doesn’t really know.
“Why did you come to this party with me then?” he says, a small frown on his face.
“You have really good weed.”
“Why else?”
“I felt bad.”
“For what?”
Reaching over, I pluck my joint from between his fingers and take a deep drag. I fucking hate playing this game with him. People always think they can handle hearing the truth until it comes down to it, and then they fall apart.
Daniel holds my gaze, a feeble attempt at showing me he doesn’t care that I burned all that money after the fight—that he doesn’t really give a shit it took him all month to scrape that kind of cash together and I just set fire to it and laughed like it was fucking nothing.
Connie laughs as she looks between us. “Okay, okay, I get it. Erm…do you think I’m pretty?” she asks flirtatiously.
I hold Daniel’s gaze for a beat longer before turning my attention back to Connie. I look her up and down. “Yeah.”
Her cheeks heat, and she grins wider. “Okay,” she says, raising an eyebrow as her courage grows. “How big are you?” she asks, surprising the hell out of me.
I raise an eyebrow back. “Six-foot-five,” I say carefully, playing her at her own game.
She laughs loudly. “No, I mean…how big are you?” Reaching over, she cups my dick over my jeans, the alcohol and weed in her system making her bold. She has no fucking clue what she’s in for.
“I knew what you meant,” I reply, and she opens her mouth and sighs.
Daniel leans back in his chair and pulls a joint from behind his ear. “I keep telling her you’re no good for her, man.” He lights it and blows out a smoke ring, though I barely hear him as Connie continues to stroke me hard beneath my jeans, her drunken gaze on mine.
