Almost Matched (Almost Bad Boys) (5 page)

“That’s not the worst of it,” I declare, turning the
thing
around in my hand, mesmerized by the sparkly glow. “She had it on display. Right on her sink.”

“Caroline.” Ali shakes her head. “You need a boyfriend.”

I point the pink rubber penis in my hand at her and say, “You have a point.”

“Hey, that looks like a sword,” Ali changes the subject, motioning to the dildo.
 

I scrutinize it and slowly say, “Yeah. It kinda does. A princess’s sword. All pink and glittery.”

Ali jumps up from the floor, runs to the kitchen, and returns a moment later armed with a French baguette. She takes on an impressive fencing stance—one arm bent and raised behind her head, the other grasping the baguette aimed in my direction as if it was a sabre. She bends her knees, legs apart, feet in the proper angles. Ali’s dad is a fencing instructor, and she’s spent years practicing with him.
 

Caroline scoots back on her butt, yelling, “Opponents assume your positions! On your mark, get ready… set…
 
wait for it… wait for it…”

I take a stance similar to Ali, grinning in delight. Ali pretends to concentrate.

Caroline sticks two fingers in her mouth and whistles loudly, then shouts, “Go!”

“What kind of referee whistles to start the match?” I snort.

Ali takes advantage of me not paying attention and pokes me in the chest with the baguette. “Ah-hah. Got your tit.”

“Score for Ali,” Caroline announces, lifting one finger up. She stands up, hands on hips.
 

“Not fair. Her sword is longer than mine,” I object. “Mine is actually too wobbly.” I give it a violent shake.
 

“Sorry, grasshopper. This was your weapon of choice,” Ali rebukes.

“Fine. I will show you what this beauty can do.” I swipe my hand at a strand of hair clinging to my forehead. “A-yah!” I charge and thrust.
 

Ali and I dance forward and back, attacking and retrieving, crossing our ‘weapons’, and smacking them against one another. We squeal and yell, laughing.
 

Ali dashes back, and then comes forward, baguette at the ready. She strikes, I parry; she strikes again, I dodge. We clash, and she pokes her elbow in my ribs.
 

“Heeyyyyy!” I yell, twisting away. I try to hook her leg with mine, but she sidesteps, and I almost lose my balance. “Just wait, missy.”

“Forgive me, your highness, but I won’t take this particular advice.” She smirks and strikes again and again.
 

I deflect and block, fending off. We break off, and Ali leaps back. I thrust, and she parries. I thrust again. She ducks, bending her front knee. She slices at the inside of my thigh, her rear leg straightened.
 

“That would be your femoral artery. You’re down on the ground, wheezing in pain. And bleeding to death.”
 

“And
that
would be your carotid,” I say, calmly pressing the dildo to the side of Ali’s neck. “The blood is pumping from your wound in powerful, rhythmic spurts.”

“Touché.” She bows. But then she charges again. “But I’m a villain. I play dirty.”

“You both suck.” Caroline laughs.
 

I parry, forcing Ali to retreat. I smack the rubber penis against the baguette, putting some force into it. The baguette breaks in two, one part flying to the side and hitting Caroline in the shoulder.
 

Ali bellows like a barbarian, brandishing the remains of her sword, its crumbled end jagged. She shakes it up in the air, as if it’s a real weapon, and then brings it down to her mouth and takes a fierce bite, eyes blazing.
 

I collapse onto the floor, pretending to be exhausted from the fight. Caroline high-fives me. Ali chews on the baguette, a big smile on her face. “The winner is the last one standing,” she announces.
 

I open my mouth to object, but then the buzzer sounds, and Ali walks to the door. She presses the intercom button. “Who is it?” she sing-songs.
 

We hear Jena’s voice, “Little Red Riding Hood. Who the fuck else?”

“Did you bring your granny a basket of goodies?” Ali continues, buzzing Jena in.

“Yeah, I have it right here, Granny.” Jena snorts.
 

Caroline and I move from the floor to the sofa and get comfortable. The pink dildo rests across my lap. I want to see Jena’s reaction when she notices it.
 

Jena enters the apartment and stops in her tracks, seeing the pink multi-use object. “Uhm… is this the next stage of our sisterhood or something?”

“Something.” Caroline smiles at her. “Do you want to join us, darling?”

I pat the sofa next to me, running my tongue suggestively over my lower lip.
 

“Hah, hah.” Jena shakes her head. “Whatever you two are smoking, I want some too.”

“You wish, sister,” Ali teases.
 

“Is there any liquor in this house?” Jena asks, walking into the kitchen.
 

“Do you
really
need to ask? Or you just like the sound of your voice,” Caroline hollers back.
 

“If I throw a stick, will you chase it?” comes from the kitchen.
 

“If you honestly spoke your mind, you’d be speechless,” Caroline fires back.
 

They both have a whole arsenal of insulting comebacks, and are just getting started, so I intervene to shut them up, “Okay, okay, both of you. You’re smart, funny, and witty, but you have terrible taste in men.”

Caroline and Jena snicker. Ali stays out of this, flipping through a magazine and quietly smirking. This isn’t the first exchange between Caroline and Jena, but we all know they do it just for kicks. In truth, they are very fond of each other.
 

Jena rummages in the fridge. “Hey, finally you had some sense while grocery shopping, Caroline.” She walks into the room with four bottles of Pike Place Ale in her hands. “Or maybe you’ve just gotten laid, and the euphoria of the experience translated into a quality beer purchase.”

Ali and I woo-hoo in appreciation. “Thank God, not that Busch crap.” I move the dildo off my lap and stand up to grab a bottle from Jena.
 

“So, sweets.” Jena looks soberly at Caroline while opening, and then passing her the beer bottle. “You’re unhappy with your girls?”

Caroline takes a swig of beer, swallows, and makes a face, looking at the label. “This is heavy.”
 

“After drinking that piss-of-a-beer the real stuff overwhelms you?” I offer.
 

She shrugs. “I could get used to it.”
 

“Don’t avoid my question.” Jena sits cross-legged in front of Caroline. “Your titsies are fine.”

Caroline snorts and sticks her flat chest out, pointing to it, “You call
that
fine? They are nonexistent! Like they’ve forgotten to grow. Or maybe they are still waiting for puberty to hit. Well, it hit at fourteen.”

We all murmur something incoherent, not wanting to argue otherwise, since she’s got a point. But her decision doesn’t sit well with any of us, so we had to try.
 

“What if something goes wrong? If, I don’t know, they make one boobie higher than the other?” I start.
 

“Or if one is much smaller than the other?” Ali supplies.
 

“Oh, that’s just stupid.” Caroline looks at us as if we’re a group of morons. “The plastic surgeon I saw has done over six hundred of these procedures. He explained the whole process to me, including any possible complications. I have a list of happy patients that I intend to contact. And yes, I asked those very questions that you just bombarded me with. He makes sure they will be of the same size and properly positioned.”

“But you never know. Things happen—” Ali tries to appeal, but Caroline interrupts her.

“I have actually done my homework. I spent two months researching the doctors and the procedures. I know more about breast implants than I know about how the damn Swiss cheese is made, despite eating it all the time.”
 

Jena and Ali have puzzled looks on their faces. It was the Swiss cheese comparison.
 

I say, somehow stupidly, “I didn’t know you ate cheese all the time. You know how much fat and salt is in that stuff?”

Caroline looks at me as if I traded three quarters of my IQ for a box of tampons. But Ali and Jena are nodding in agreement. I know Ali eats cheese with everything, from her favorite burgers to pasta to some greasy cheese curls. But I’m not about to point that out.
 

“Ugh,” Caroline grunts unhappily. “Would you just for once let me do what I want, you guys?”

“But sweetie—” I try, but she doesn’t let me finish.

“This is what always happens: I want to do something so badly, but the three of you, freakin’ Fates, always have to shut me down with your reasoning.”
 

“Is that a correlation to Greek mythology?” I ask, trying to decide if she just insulted us or not.
 

“She means the Three Weird Sisters in Macbeth.” Jena clanks her bottle with mine, winking. “The prophecy bitches.”
 

“Oh, oh!” Ali says excitedly. “Do you remember the Orson Welles’s adaptation? The witches were these Haitian voodoo—”

The buzzer from downstairs disrupts Ali’s animated recollection. She looks at Caroline, “Are we expecting boys?”

“Yeah. One. Probably a pimply sixteen-year-old. Not your type, I hope. Pizza’s here.” I get up and march to let the delivery boy in.
 

We drop the subject of Caroline’s implants for now, and instead indulge in eating the greasy goodness called pizza. Jena tells us about her date with Jeff, her sex buddy. Jeff attends some of the same classes at the UW as Jena. They’d met a few months earlier, but remained good friends until recently—after Jena broke up with the latest psycho boyfriend.

“You and Ali are probably doing it right,” Caroline says around a bite of pizza. “No attachments, no jealously, no control freak boyfriends. But I don’t think I could do that. I fall for them too easily. It wouldn’t work.”

“It would, if you weren’t expecting anything in return, just great sex and friendship. I mean, you gotta be friends with the guy, really like him… you know, like a good friend,” Ali explains. “Brian and I can watch TV, play chess, walk his dog, you name it. We don’t have to end up in bed if we just want to hang out. Although we always end up in bed.” She smirks. “But the point is, this is temporary, and we both know it. If one of us finds someone else… not another sex buddy, but someone to actually have a relationship with, there is no drama. We agreed to it. And we know what to expect from each other.”
 

“Still, I’m not built this way.” Caroline sighs.
 

I wash down a piece of my pizza with a long swig of beer. “I’m not either. So you and I get screwed in life, while Ali and Jena have fun.”

“It’s all in your mind, girls.” Jena licks her fingers and reaches for her third slice of pizza. “You need to snap out of the teenage mentality—first love is the only love, crap like that. Take your life by the horns, or whatever that saying is, you know?”

Of course Ali wouldn’t be Ali if she didn’t seize the opportunity to turn the discussion into something to laugh about. She makes her fingers into straight horns by her temples, forces the air three times through her nose, and pretends to paw the dirt with her foot just like the bulls do. Then she pokes Caroline with her fingers still poised as horns.
 

Caroline shrieks. The piece of her pizza ends up on the side of Ali’s head. It slides down, leaving pieces of goat cheese, basil, and diced tomato stuck to her hair. Jena and I gasp, and then burst out laughing. Ali’s not happy, and Caroline tries to clean up the mess off Ali’s hair with a napkin.
 

“Oh, stop it. I need to wash my hair now. This is yucky,” Ali huffs. She marches out of the room and into the bathroom. Soon we hear the shower going.
 

Caroline puts her beer down. “I hope she’s not too pissed off at me.”

“She’ll be fine. Goat cheese can’t be that bad for the hair.” I wave my hand dismissively.
 

“So, Caroline.” Jena bites into her mushroom and Italian sausage pizza. “You’re totally sure you want to go under the knife? After all, it’s a major surgery.”

Caroline rests her head in her hands, elbows on her knees. She sighs loudly and whispers something under her breath. I suspect a string of profanities.
 

I scoot closer to her on the sofa and put my arms around her. “Let’s just say you go ahead and do it. What if you’re not happy with your new image?”

Jena jumps in, taking another humongous bite of her pizza, “You might start feeling conscientious about the way your boobs
stick out
all of a sudden.”

Caroline gives a bitter laugh. “Like I’m not conscientious about how my boobs
cave in
now? I mean, look at me,” she dramatically points with both hands to her chest, “see? This is what I deal with every day. I can’t even get a half-decent guy, because all of them want
at least
a B cup.”