The Bad Boy's Girl (Now Available as a Paperback and ebook)

Chapter Forty: What Do I Need to Know About Baby Dolls and Teddies?

Great, that buys me enough time to get Drew out of the country. 

"So let me get this straight, Dickhead Drew basically attempted to get into your pants whilst your boyfriend was sitting at the table." Beth asks stopping amidst painting her nails. 

The three of us are sitting at the kitchen table, all painting our nails and unwinding from a hectic day. It's not the norm for me to watch a fistfight take place live and then take a rather adventurous trip in the back of an ambulance. 

Well maybe it is, mostly since Cole's come back. At least I can't complain about having a boring relationship. 

"And he pretended that Cole wasn't even there? Did he want to get hit? Megan asks 

I blow on my nails, pretending to ignore the anger rising inside me as I remember the meeting. Dickhead Drew is such an appropriate name for the guy. I'd gone to meet him in the hopes that he would convince my mom to not interfere with my relationship. Instead he had shown as much respect for it as she had, which was basically none. He'd barely acknowledged Cole and had flirted blatantly with me. I don't know what kind of Kool-Aid the people in New York drink but apparently they don't know what to do with boundaries when they see them. Or maybe they just tend to want to demolish them in general. 

I fume silently as I remember him kissing my cheek when Cole and I had shown up. His lips had been stuck to my skin as if with semi permanent glue and I'd counted seconds till he'd back off. A kiss on the cheek is acceptable form of greeting and I'm not a complete prude but as the afternoon progressed, he made sure to touch me in some way making me highly uncomfortable. He'd drag his chair closer to mine, place his hand over mine when talking and more importantly he ignored the fact that my boyfriend was barely restraining himself from bludgeoning him to death. We didn't even talk about my mom, kind of funny that that was the point of the dinner. Instead Dickhead talked about himself, and then some. 

I'd excused myself to go to the bathroom, hoping that an escape route would magically appear as I pretended to re-touch my makeup but before I could tell Drew that my dog had diarrhoea he flew over the railing of the cafe we were dining in. Chaos ensued and I couldn't quite get to Cole and ask him what the hell had happened in a space of ten minutes. 

"I should never have agreed to see him. My mom's vapid enough to tell that the people she hangs out with would be the same. She's probably feeling really smug right now and can't wait to point out that she was right about Cole."

"But she wasn't, he didn't do anything wrong. Hell any guy in his position would've done the same, definitely Travis." Beth glowers at me like I've made the biggest mistake ever by suggesting that Cole had flawed. Recently she's become a pretty big supporter of his and it amuses me to no end. Sometimes I think she's trying to makeup for Travis's treatment of him. That because her boyfriend would be likely to want to pummel Cole to death at times, it's up to her to compensate for that kind of behaviour. The fact that she's so in sync with my brother's life makes me feel all sorts of warm and fuzzy. 

"I know that okay? I'm not blaming Cole for anything. It's just that this tendency of his to get violent scares the shit out of me. I don't want him to get into trouble and ruin his life. He's been to prison at least once since I've known him and..."

"Oh but I really wanted to see Jay get beaten up at some point. Isn't that the bright side in all of this?" 

Megan looks at us expectantly and we burst out laughing, the tension dissolving easily. Maybe I need to stop stressing and just be grateful that Drew isn't pressing charges and that Cole isn't going to jail. My mother's opinion stopped mattering to me around the time she decided that being overweight made you the equivalent of a second class citizen. There's no reason why what she thinks of Cole should be of any importance.