And the bearskin, it’s faux because I replaced the real one my dad once had with it. One night, when we were in high school,Rupert and I snuck in, grabbed the real bearskin, replaced it with this dupe, and then gave the real one a proper Viking burial out at sea. We got so knackered that we both were woken up by the ocean tide slapping us in the face.
Despite almost drowning ourselves, we felt like real vigilantes that day.
Rupert rubs his hand over the faux bear fur, paying far too much attention to where it rests just over his nipple, and says, “Gertrude Storch.”
With a loud groan, I roll my eyes. “Come on, mate.”
Rupert grins. “Did she or did she not blow you exactly seven times in one night, as legend states?”
Trading my lager out for the bottle of whiskey we stole from my dad’s cabinet, I take a swig…and I’m met with instant regret.
Fuck, that’s terrible.
The liquid burns down my esophagus, reminding me how shitty his drink of choice is, just like all the other shitty choices he’s made in his life.
“Gertrude Storch…did not,” I answer, passing the whiskey to Rupert. Then, with a smile, I say, “It was six.”
Rupert lets out a roar of a laugh that normally makes me cringe—it draws attention to our two-man party—but my parents are currently on holiday in Spain, so I have nothing to worry about. The only people who could possibly hear us are the house staff, but I slip them cash all the time so they’ll never tell my parents that Rupert and I are drinking in my dad’s office, wearing ancestral pants, while stroking the faux skin of a bear my father believes he once murdered.
“Truth or dare?” I ask as he passes me the bottle back.
“Dare,” he answers. He always goes for the dare option, hence the pants he’s wearing.
I glance around the pompous decor of my father’s office, where he admires the wealth that has been passed downto him from generation to generation rather than conducting any business. The brown houndstooth curtains my mum has changed out at least eight times cover the floor-to-ceiling windows, the obnoxiously large mahogany desk where Gertrude Storch blew me twice that one infamous night, and the self-indulgent oil painting of my father above the mantel, his foot perched on top of a rock in his hunting gear, looking out toward a pretend field of domesticated grasses.
I hate everything about this office, and yet…some of my best memories have been made between these pretentious and abhorrently expensive walls—and I’m not just talking about with Gertrude. Rupert and I have defiled this office in more ways than one.
Ehh, that came off wrong. Rupert and I haven’t defiled it in the way that Gertrude and I have. But Rupert has rubbed his arse on almost every surface, because, you know, he always chooses dare. I don’t think there is a spot in this office that his bare arse hasn’t touched.
Which reminds me, steer clear of that brown tweed ottoman over in the corner. If memory serves me right, that thing had more than just Rupert’s arse on it—it had a full-on affair with his twig and berries too.
But that picture…that picture is the fucking worst. It’s everything my father wants to be seen as and everything he’s not.
Respected, accomplished, a man of superior stature.
But he didn’t earn his respect.
He didn’t earn his title.
He didn’t earn anything in this life. It’s all been handed to him.
Just like it will be handed to me.
And because of that, I nod toward the picture and say, “I dare you to take a permanent marker and add something to the painting.”
Rupert’s face blanches as he adjusts the bear on his shoulder. “Do you want your dad to shoot my head off with Great-Great-Great-Grandpa Charles’s musket?”
I chuckle. “It can be small.” When Rupert doesn’t move, I add, “We’ve never broken the truth-or-dare pact. And it’s the one thing in this office that we haven’t besmirched.”
Rupert looks up at the picture and then back at me. “How small? Because I just found out that my dick can pleasure women in a way I never knew.” Whispering, he adds, “I found that G-spot, mate, and I don’t want to lose such a sacred secret.”
I give him aget reallook because if I know anything about my best friend, it’s that he doesnotknow where the G-spot is. “You didn’t find it.”
“The fuck I didn’t. I found it.”
“Christa was faking.”
Rupert points at me with the whiskey bottle. “She was not fucking faking it. I felt it.”
