“I’m Berk.” He shoved his hand right in front of Chet’s face.
Chet turned to my rescuer and his eyes widened. “Can I help you?”
“Sure, you can let go of Jules. My date.”
“Jules?! Her name is Julia,” Chet snapped.
“My mistake, I just go with what I call her in bed at night.”
The bubbles from my glass of bubbly shot straight out my nose. I’m talking full on spray tan coverage of Chet. All heads swung in our direction.
Berk didn’t even try to hide his laughter behind his hand like I did. Between the alcohol burning my sinuses and my laughter there were tears in my eyes.
Chet grabbed a stack of napkins from a passing server before glaring at Berk and rushing off.
“I can already tell this weekend is going to be fun.” Berk winked at me.
I locked my knees lest I melt into a puddle beside him.
He stood shoulder to shoulder with me like he was ready to take on every ex-boyfriend that came to give me shit this weekend. Fortunately, or unfortunately, Chet was the only one, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell Berk that.
Beside him, I did feel like he was ready to take on the world on my behalf. My very own knight in shining armor even if it was only for two days and even if he was just pretending to be with me. I could pretend with the best of them.
9
Berk
Damn that dude was an asshole. Telling me what to call Jules. And then that stuck in my head. Did she hate when people called her Jules? She was the type to let something like that slide to avoid making someone feel bad.
“You are cool with me calling you Jules, right? That’s what Elle calls you,” I leaned down and whispered in her ear.
She shivered and I looked up to see if there was a vent over her, blowing the AC, but nothing was there. “You can call me anything you want—except Julia. The only people who call me that are in this room and no matter how many times I tell them differently, they still do it.”
“Anything I want, huh?” I ran my fingers over my chin and looked off into the distance. “How about Snowglobes?” I bent down and whispered the word in her ear.
Her cheeks turned beet red and she shoved at my shoulder. “Anything but that!”
“Are you sure? Anything? I’m sure I can come up with something in that same vein. How about Lana?”
Her eyebrow shot up.
“Some things are better backward.” I stood there taking a sip of my drink, waiting for her Wheel of Fortune reveal as she ran through the letters.
“Berk!” She laugh-hissed and shoved at my shoulder. “Anything that you could say in front of a classroom full of second graders.”
“What part of the city are these second graders from?”
She laughed and some of her champagne dribbled down her chin.
“Such a messy drinker. And you’ve only had one glass. Or did you get started before our party bus ride happened?”
“I’m messy because someone keeps making me laugh.” Her playful glare shot out from behind her horn-rimmed glasses.
“I’m only clarifying the nickname rules. So far we have ‘not Snowglobes’ and something that can be said in front of a classroom of second graders and their nannies from the Mainline. Any other requirements?”
“Something you could say in front of your mom.” She took another drink from her glass.
I dropped my gaze to my hands and squeezed the stem of the glass. With Jules, I never felt like I had to hide who I was, but I didn’t want to be a pity case, a sob story where she’d look at me and squeeze my hand and smile at me because she was that kind of person. But she didn’t know everything about me. What would she think if she knew?
My throat tightened and I closed my eyes for a second. Enough time to breathe through that dart to my heart and keep those walls I’d built so high and wide around my heart intact. With a gentle shake of my head, I was back to being Berk. Not Orphan Berkley Vaughn.
“You’re taking all the fun out of this, but how about Julienne Fries?”
Her eyes lit up and the corner of her mouth quirked up. If she pushed her glasses up her nose in that certain, adorable way I’d maul her on this dance floor. “That, I can handle.”
We found a spot along the wall and Jules gave me the rundown on the ins and outs of our weekend companions.
“He’s here with two of his ex-wives and his new fiancée?” I pointed at the guy with a way too perfect, nearly-touching-his-eyebrows hairline, who didn’t look much older than us. He had a stick thin strawberry blonde on his arm who managed to drape herself all over him to mark her territory without actually touching him. To other people it might look handsy, but ninety percent of the time she never made contact.
“Technically, only one ex-wife. The first marriage was annulled when she found out he’d regularly snort his monthly trust fund allowance right up his nose before the first week of the month was over.”
“He stopped using coke then?”
She shook her head and didn’t even try to cover her laugh. “Nope, his monthly allowance just got a whole lot bigger when he turned twenty-five. They paid off his debts and now if he tried to snort all the money every month, he’d be half a step from a coronary, which is why everyone thinks his new fiancée is trying to speed the wedding up to this winter.”
“And I thought the football team had drama.” I downed the last of my drink.
“They’ve got nothing on families that have been frenemies for generations with more money than sense.”
“What about you? You’re one of them, right?” I lifted my empty glass to the walking fashion magazine photoshoot happening in front of us.
“Do I seem like one of them?” Her eyebrow quirked up.
I looked her up and down. Low sensible heels. Plain pants and a top that did its best to hide all the assets I knew she rocked under the nineteen layers she usually wore. “Nah, I guess not. So how’d you end up not getting turned into one of the pod people?”
She looked out over the crowd. “My dad.”
“I haven’t seen him yet. Where is he?”
“He died when I was nine. My mom was flat out against having kids after me, so I guess I became his boy child. We’d come out here on the weekends and go camping, ride horses and have water gun fights. Laura always preferred to go shopping with Mom even when I came back telling her how much fun it was. I don’t think my mud-soaked clothes were the kind of convincing she was looking for.”
“It was a lot of rough and tumble stuff?”
“Not all. He used to read me these books when I was growing up, even way after I’d outgrown them, but the way he read the story always kept me riveted.” She took a sip of her drink with a smile that only came from those happy childhood memories.
“Which books?”
“Peter Rabbit.”
“Do you still read them?”
Her smile faltered. “They’re at my mom’s. She’s… having some trouble finding them.” Each word was a tiptoe like she was walking in a minefield.
“I hope she does. Sounds like you and your dad had a lot of fun.”