Betting on the Brainiac: a Sweet Romantic Comedy

9. Chapter Nine

Niles knocks ten minutes early. He’s not even wearing a tie. He’s in nice pants and a button-down shirt, so technically, he’s within the restaurant’s dress code, but who doesn’t wear a tie to his own engagement? Or at least a freaking sport coat.

“Ruby,” I call. “Come in, Niles. She’ll be out in a minute.”

He steps inside and immediately looks bored, like he’s already been waiting ten minutes and we’ve exhausted our conversation. If he hates being kept waiting, why does he show up early?

Probably so he can be grumpy about having to wait.

I keep my face friendly like I do when a VIP in my section reveals himself to be a tool but a tool who has booked a two-thousand-dollar champagne service with a mandatory gratuity.

“Heard you’re going to Spenser’s. Nice place.”

He nods and jingles his keys, his shoulders tense.

Maybe this isn’t impatience. Maybe this is nerves? Always the hostess with the mostest, I try to set him at ease for Ruby’s sake. “So, big night?”

He gives me a look of mild annoyance. I know it well because I get it from him all the time. “In the mood for steak.”

“Sure. Who isn’t?” But I always thought Niles was a Sizzler kind of guy. Spenser’s cheapest steak is a hundred bucks. I had them often on my parents’ dime, until I realized that accepting those kinds of luxuries from them left a bad taste in my mouth not even a dry-aged ribeye can hide.

Well, I’ve done my best friend duty. I’m about to disappear into the kitchen when Ruby emerges from the hallway, looking like the luckiest break Niles ever had in his life. Except he doesn’t see it.

“You look nice. Ready to go?” he asks.

She beams at him and nods.

Nice. The servers in Spenser’s with their immaculate suits look nice. Ruby looks divine.

“Bye-bye, kids,” I say. “Have fun storming the castle.” Niles gives me a weird look. “The Princess Bride? Miracle Max?”

He shrugs.

Right. Charlie is the movie buff.

I keep my smile in place until the door closes behind them. “Sami?” I call, already racing toward the stairs. “I need Josh to advise me on all the legal ramifications of my five hundred plans to get rid of Niles.” I walk through her open bedroom door. “I’m going to need to borrow your balcony.”

Josh’s balcony is next to hers, and sitting out there on chilly winter nights and talking made them fall in love.

She pats the bed beside her. “Here, bestie. Sit down and we’ll figure this out.”

I dive into the spot and curl up against her side. “He doesn’t deserve her.”

“I need to practice not puking when she texts the picture of her ring and his smug face.”

“No kidding. Let the plotting commence.”

Two hours later, there has been no text from Ruby, but Ava has joined us on Sami’s other side. Joey is stretched across the end of the bed, and Josh leans against the doorframe, listening to Sami and Joey argue about whether the Oliver/Gatsby’s situation is one of Ruby’s tricks.

“No way,” Joey is insisting. “That guy is a simp. Madison would chew him up and spit him out. Ruby wouldn’t try to set them up.”

“A simp?” Ava asks.

“A guy who goes overboard for a girl he likes, buying her stuff because he’s desperate,” Sami explains.

Ava’s eyes narrow at Joey. “You and I both had a first date on the same day. Oliver took me to the botanical gardens to listen to a plant lecture, and we got ice cream after. You drove your date an hour out to Fredericksburg for dinner at an expensive vineyard. But Oliver is the simp?”

Joey’s face gets very stubborn, but Josh heads off the rest of the argument.

“Neither of them are simps,” Josh says. “Joey is flashy and Oliver is thoughtful but neither of them is desperate.”

“Y’all are losing the plot,” I say. “It’s not a setup. Ruby told me Oliver isn’t my type, and she’s right.”

“Disagree,” Sami says. “It’s the whole princess situation.”

“The what?” Josh asks.

Joey grins. “You gotta hear this. Don’t you know you live next to royalty?”

I roll my eyes. “At best, I’m the daughter of pageant royalty. But apparently, for my parents, that counts.”

“Honey, you might want to sit for this,” Sami says. “I forgot you don’t know this story.”

Josh looks at me. “Sit down as in I’m going to be shocked?”

Ava shakes her head. “No, sit down as in Madison tells a long story.”

“It’s true,” I tell Josh. “I do love a spotlight. If I think a story will be too short, I’ll put three more stories in the middle of it so I can keep the mic.”

Josh plops down on the carpet beside the open door.

“My family is rich,” I begin. This is the part of the story I hate, the part I never elaborate on, but Sami snorts as if it’s an understatement. They all stayed at my house over New Year’s our freshman year of college because my parents wanted to do Christmas in the Swiss Alps and I didn’t. I was eighteen, and it hadn’t even been a full year since I’d had all my illusions about them ripped away, and I wasn’t taking a dime of their tainted money—including vacations.

“My family is very rich,” I revise, “but no more editorializing or I don’t tell the story.”

Joey levers himself up and claps his hand over Sami’s mouth, then yelps and yanks it back. “She licked me. Gross.”

Josh smirks at him. “Then you’re a broken man.”

“He likes it when I do it,” Ava says.

We all pause to look at her with various degrees of respect.

“It’s always the quiet ones,” I say.

Ava waves off our attention, unfazed. “Continue, Madi.”

“It’s generational,” I tell them. “My grandfather’s great-grandfather started Copperhead Boots.”

Josh gives a low whistle. It’s the name in cowboy boots, respected from the rodeo circuit to the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. Ranch workers wear regular Copperheads, but wealthy people from celebrities to drug cartel bosses wear the couture boots as a sign of status. The waiting list is years long, and the only thing comparable is a Birkin bag. But even those are easier to get.

“Yeah. My grandfather grew the company and started acquiring subsidiaries in related fields, then my dad came along and went even bigger. He met my mom when he was judging the Miss Texas Rose pageant because Copperhead Boots was a sponsor. She won. He decided to marry the queen. And do you know what daughters of a queen are called, Josh?”

“Princesses.”

“Correct. The king, the queen, and their two princesses lived happily in their castle on the lake.” I don’t get into the specifics. No one feels sorry for the poor little rich girl who takes way too long to realize that she’s earned none of her “specialness” and that, in fact, she’s trapped by it. “Each princess would marry only the worthiest prince deserving of her hand.”

“What is a worthy prince?” Joey asks, settled back at the foot of the bed. “Is he supposed to slay a metaphorical dragon?”

I shake my head. “Don’t be silly. You can’t earn a princess on merit. He only needs equal or greater social status and equal or more money.”

“Totally reasonable,” Ava says, dryly.

“One day, the elder princess discovered that the monarchs were more cunning than wise, decided that the monarchy is stupid, and decided to pull a Prince Harry.” This is the part I hate digging into, so I don’t. “It was me. I decided the story didn’t make sense anymore, and I left. When I’m occasionally dragged back to the royal court, I play the jester and flip everything on its head.”

“And this relates to Oliver . . . how?” Josh asks.

“When my parents try to throw one of their princelings at me, I always tell them that I’m the princess with the frog, and I’m super committed to doing right by the kingdom, and I need to kiss all the frogs. So I do.” Here I break into a big smile. It gets under my parents’ skin, and I love it.

“Uh, Madison?” Joey says. “That is a downright evil grin.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Sami says. “Our senior year we were tailgating before the Texas Tech game. Madison and I were hanging out with one of the fraternities, and her sister sees us. She was a freshman, and she comes by in time to find Madi evaluating the skills of the fraternity president.” Sami gives a suggestive waggle of her eyebrows.

“Not his grilling skills,” Ava adds.

“Got that,” Joey says.

“So her sister hauls Madi over to a tree for a royal reprimand.” Sami squishes the sides of her face and makes her eyes big. “She’s over there with her baby face, hollering about who is that and why is she kissing him out in public and—” Sami makes her voice shrill—“what does Madison mean she’s not even dating him?”

Her imitation is so spot on that I bust up laughing.

“To be honest,” Sami says, “it wasn’t that funny. She was going on and on about how that was a stain on their family reputation, and how could Madi treat it so lightly.”

“What did you do?” Josh asks me. “Because there’s no chance you just took it.”

I point at myself. “Jester, remember? I inform her of my frog-kissing Texas princess responsibilities. She says she’s tattling to the monarchs and stomps off, and I tell her to make sure they know I’m taking it seriously and working hard.”

“What Madison actually did,” Sami interrupts, “is yell after Kaitlyn to tell their parents that she’s grinding.”

Joey and Josh lose it, and I give them an innocent smile. “I meant at work. Guess she thought I meant something else because she got even stompier.”

When they stop laughing, Ava says, “But wait, there’s more. The next morning, Madi makes me draw a fake tattoo of a frog on her.”

Josh looks surprised. “I didn’t know you could draw.”

Ava shakes her head. “I can do a pretty good lab sketch, but that’s about it. Definitely not well enough to draw a tattoo.”

“I don’t know this part,” Joey says. “You get a sus frog tattoo to do…what?”

“I pick up my sister at her dorm that afternoon for Sunday dinner with my parents. I’m wearing a deep V neck that shows off my new tattoo. Did I mention I made Ava draw it right over my heart?”

Even Ava gives a soft laugh at the sheer glee in my voice.

“Ahhh, Kaitlyn.” I lean back on my hands, remembering. “It still makes me smile to remember the sound she made when she got in the car and saw it. It didn’t have words. I told her our talk inspired me to get it after the game because someday one of these frogs would find my heart, and I was more motivated than ever to kiss a thousand if that’s what it took.”

Once Kaitlyn had realized it was fake, she hadn’t spoken to me for a solid week. It had been a good week. Kaitlyn starting at UT had meant my third parent was on campus and ready to scold me if I didn’t see her soon enough to avoid her.

“Dang.” Josh shakes his head.

“Oh, come on,” I say. “You’re not really surprised to hear I’m a button-pusher.”

“Hold up,” Sami says. “You’re skipping part of the story: boys and girls, Princess Madison Armstrong blew up her own game.”

“That’s an overstatement,” I say.

“It’s exactly what happened.” She leans forward to the audience she just stole from me. “She said the thing about frog kissing so often that she began to believe it.”

I huff. “I don’t even like y’all knowing this story. These two don’t need to hear it.”

“We do,” Josh and Joey say together.

Sami lifts an eyebrow at me.

I groan. “Ugh, fine. In the worst kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, I can tell with one kiss if a guy is the guy. It’s annoying.”

“It’s not, Madi. It’s good,” Ava says.

“It’s the reason she never breaks hearts,” Sami says. “She won’t let these guys fall further than she thinks she can fall.”

I don’t like being painted as a do-gooding marshmallow. “It’s also why I kiss so many guys. Lots of frogs, blah blah blah.”

“Aw, Mads, that’s cute,” Joey says, “but you’re supposed to lick frogs, not kiss them, and only if you’re on a psychedelic retreat in Argentina.”

“Don’t lick toads,” Ava says. “That’s not how it works. You collect their mucus secretions and smoke them when they’re dry. That’s how you get 5-MeO-DMT.”

“You okay, bestie?” I ask. “Need me to reboot you?”

“It’s called the God molecule,” she says, patient as always with us dumber mortals. “And you can find Sonoran Desert toads in Texas.”

“Excellent news,” Josh says, deadpan. “Taco and toad Tuesday next week, guys?”

“Is this going to come back to Ruby and the bet?” Joey asks.”

“Yes,” Sami says. “Everyone assumes Madison is jaded but she’s the opposite. Total romantic. She believes in one true love that you know when you find it, and that you pretty much know it right away.”

“I get it,” Joey says, and I look up, surprised that he’s not going to tease me even more. “You’re being efficient. If the kiss isn’t it, why waste time? Jump to the test and bail if it’s another frog.”

Ava gives him a light kick. “You would think that.”

Joey catches her foot and holds it against his thigh, his thumb pressing into her arch as he smirks at her. “How do you think I knew how to teach you to be a great kisser?”

“Want me to hold a pillow over his face?” I ask.

Ava frowns at him. “Yes, but when he’s done with this foot rub.”

“That’s why you think Ruby isn’t setting you up with Oliver,” Josh says. “Because he’s not the kind of guy you’d kiss?”

“Exactly,” I say. “I don’t have a type—” Ava and Sami bust up laughing, and I glare at them. “I have a lot of types,” I continue, and Ava nods. “But there are a couple of types I’ve never been into, and Oliver is one of them.”

Joey smiles, pleased by this. “Dude is a nerd. Good call.”

“Let it go, Joey,” Sami says. “She went out with Oliver twice and dumped him for not being you. You won.”

Ava isn’t letting Joey’s nerd comment pass. “You should all know that I made Joey watch an episode of Firefly and now he won’t let us watch anything else until we’re done with the series. Nerds love that show. You love that show. Guess who’s a nerd now?”

He scoffs. “It’s all right, but I’m glad there’s only one season.”

She lifts an eyebrow. “He bumped his elbow yesterday and cursed the ‘gorram’ door. That’s a Firefly swear.”

Joey sighs. “Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal.”

“Also a Firefly quote,” Ava says.

“What if that’s exactly why Ruby picked Oliver for you?” Sami says. “What if—”

The front door slams and cuts off the question.

Ruby is home.