Fake Dating the Mafia Boss

Chapter 1

CINDY

There are exactly two good reasons to drive an hour into the middle of the Mojave Desert with four other strippers, a cooler full of gas-station wine, and a bag of marshmallows nobody’s going to roast right.

The first reason is that it’s free, and free is my favorite price for anything.

The second reason is Crystal, who planned this whole thing and would for sure cry if nobody came.

So here I am.

We stopped for supplies on the way out, which is how the cooler ended up full of a wine called Chardonn-Yay, four dollars a bottle, named by someone who hates both wine and words.

It’s also how the man working the register learned Crystal’s entire life story in the time it took me to pee and pick out jerky.

By the time I got back she knew about his custody weekends, he knew about her bunion surgery, and he’d thrown in a free bag of ice for the road.

Crystal cannot buy gum without making a friend.

I used to think it was the sweetest thing about her.

I still do. It just also means that somewhere out there is a gas station guy who knows all five of our names, our jobs, and our opinions on his ex-wife.

We’ve got a fire going that’s more smoke than flame, because Joss insisted she knew how to build one and then built one that mostly just hates us.

The city glow died somewhere back around the last exit, so now it’s just black sky over about a billion stars, the kind you forget exist when you live under a thousand miles of neon.

Out here the dark has a weight to it. It presses in on all sides like the desert’s deciding whether to keep us.

I’m three plastic cups of Chardonn-Yay deep and feeling great about it.

“Okay, okay,” Crystal says, waving her cup around so hard she sloshes wine on her own knee. She doesn’t notice. “But would you rather, would you rather date a guy who’s super hot but he talks during movies, or a guy who’s like a six but he’s got money and he’s quiet?”

“The quiet one,” I say. “Obviously.”

“You didn’t even think about it.”

“I don’t have to. Talking during movies is a felony.”

“He’s not talking the whole movie,” Crystal protests, like this specific man exists and she’s met him. “He just asks questions. Who’s that guy? Why’d she do that? Is he dead?”

“That’s worse. You’re describing a man who needs a babysitter, not a girlfriend.”

“I’d date him,” Lacey says, solemn, from inside her sleeping bag, which she’s been zipped into since sundown because she brought an air mattress with no pump.

We took turns trying to blow it up by mouth for twenty minutes.

Joss got dizzy. The mattress stayed a sad vinyl puddle, so now Lacey lives in the bag like a larva with opinions.

“You’d date a traffic cone.”

“If it asked about my day,” she says, dreamy, and the worst part is she means it.

Crystal cackles, this big open-mouthed laugh that fills up the whole desert, and I love her so much in that second it’s stupid.

She’s twenty-four and somehow younger than that, a girl who trusts everybody, gets her heart stomped flat about once a month, bounces back like a beach ball every single time.

She’s wearing a crop top in fifty-degree weather because she said the jacket “ruined the vibe.” Now she’s got goosebumps all up her arms, and she will not put on the jacket.

I made the jacket happen. I packed it. It’s right there.

“Cindy thinks she’s too smart for love,” says Stevie from across the fire, poking at the embers with a stick.

“I think I’m too broke for love,” I say. “Different thing.”

“Same energy though.”

“A little same energy,” I admit, and they all laugh.

Stevie’s phone has been glowing in her lap for the better part of an hour, the same unsent text to the same ex she swore off on New Year’s. We’ve all watched her type it, delete it, type it again. Finally Joss leans over and plucks the phone out of her hands like she’s disarming a bomb.

“Hey.”

“This is an intervention,” Joss says. “What does it say?”

“It says hey.”

“It’s four hundred words long, Stevie.”

“It’s a long hey.”

The verdict comes back unanimous. The phone goes in the cooler with the wine until morning, which is the legal system we have out here. Stevie takes it better than expected, meaning she calls us all bitches and accepts a marshmallow as damages.

“Speaking of.” Joss has that face on, the gossip face, the one that means she’s been sitting on something all night and the wine finally pried it loose. “Did anybody else see Dale try to talk to the new girl this week? The redhead?”

“Oh my God,” Crystal moans. “The sweating.”

“He had a whole sweat situation happening,” Joss says. “Like a back situation. You could see it through the shirt.”

“He always has a back situation.”

“Not like this. This was a personal-record back situation.”

“That poor girl.” Stevie shakes her head like she’s at a funeral. “Somebody should warn her. We should have a pamphlet. Welcome to the club, here’s your locker, do not be alone in the office with Dale.”

“Do not accept a ride from Dale,” Crystal adds.

“Do not let Dale buy you a smoothie,” I say, and Crystal points at me like I’ve said something wise, because there’s a whole story behind the smoothie that we are not getting into tonight.

This is what I love. Not the wine, not the desert, not even the stars.

This. The five of us talking trash about a man with a back situation, laughing so hard Stevie nearly falls off her cooler, the firelight making everybody’s face look soft and a little bit unreal.

We’re broke, we’re tired, most of us are nursing some kind of heartbreak or a bill we can’t pay, and none of that exists right now.

Right now we’re just girls in the dark being mean about Dale, and it’s perfect.

I drink more wine, and for a minute I forget about my rent, my busted left knee, the whole holding pattern I keep telling myself is temporary.

This is the thing nobody warns you about working at a club.

You think the job is the hard part. It’s actually fine.

Sticky floors, bad music, Dale. No, the worst part is also the best part, and it’s these girls.

These loud, broke, ridiculous women who became my family, because my actual family is a thing I left behind in a town so small it doesn’t get a dot on the map.

Promise stayed back to hold the bar tonight, on the grounds that nothing good has ever happened to a woman in a desert.

Crystal came up through foster care and built her family out of us. I built mine the same way. We don’t talk about it. We just show up to the desert trips.

Crystal scoots over next to me, finally, leans her head on my shoulder, and I can feel her shivering through the crop top.

I peel off the jacket and drape it over her without saying anything, because if I make it a thing she’ll refuse out of principle.

She just burrows into it and sighs like a cat in a sunbeam.

“You’re my favorite,” she mumbles.

“You say that to everyone.”

“I say it to you the most.” She tips her face up at me, all big eyes, smudged mascara, total sincerity. “I mean it the most with you. You’d tell me if I had something in my teeth. You’d tell me if a guy was bad news. You’re the only one who actually tells me stuff.”

“That’s because the rest of them are cowards,” I say.

I kiss the top of her head. She laughs, and I don’t know how to explain what this girl is to me.

She’s the softest person I know in a world that isn’t soft to soft people, and some animal part of me has appointed itself her bodyguard.

She tells everybody everything. She trusts the entire planet.

Someone has to watch her back, and it might as well be me.

“Okay.” She sits up suddenly, all business, clapping her hands. “Marshmallows. Who’s doing the marshmallows?”

“The fire’s basically dead, Crystal.”

“The fire is resting.”

“That’s what Joss said an hour ago, and then it died.”

“The fire is fine,” Joss says, wounded. “It’s low-maintenance.”

Crystal spears a marshmallow on a stick anyway and holds it a foot above the embers, rotating it slow, achieving nothing.

It does not toast. It does not even sweat.

She eats it cold and declares it perfect, because that’s Crystal’s whole entire thing, loving whatever shows up in front of her exactly how it is.

The wine’s catching up with me, which means my bladder is catching up with me, which means I now have to make a decision I hate. There’s no bathroom out here. There’s the dark, and there’s farther into the dark.

“I have to pee,” I announce, because we’re past dignity.

“There’s literally a whole desert,” Crystal says, generous as a queen.

“I’m not peeing where you can see my ass, Crystal.”

“I’ve seen your ass like four hundred times. It’s a great ass.”

“That’s at work. Work ass is different from desert ass.”

“Take the bear spray,” Stevie offers, already digging in her bag.

“There are no bears in the Mojave.”

“Then it’ll really work on whatever is out there.”

“I’m going forty feet to pee, not summiting anything.

If I’m not back in ten minutes, avenge me.

” I stand up and my knee gives a little click of complaint, the one it always gives, the souvenir from the worst day of my life that I keep telling myself I’ve made peace with.

I haven’t. You don’t make peace with the thing that took the only future you ever wanted. You just stop bringing it up.

I grab my phone for the flashlight and head out past the cars, away from the fire, hunting for a creosote bush big enough to give a girl some privacy.