CHAPTER 1
JULIA
“His penis looks like your shrimp.”
Julia Carpenter paused, chopsticks hovering near her lips as she stared at her friend Andie, seated on the other side of their regular lunch booth in Tasty Thai. Next to Julia, their friend Kat hid a snicker in her noodles.
“What?” Andie reached across the table for Julia’s phone. “Am I wrong?” She tilted the image on the screen toward them for comparison. “See?”
“Well,” Kat snickered again, “maybe her shrimp looks like his penis.”
The shrimp in question slipped from between Julia’s chopsticks and landed back in her bowl with a squicky splat. She set the utensils down and made a grab for her phone. “Stop waving that thing around.”
Kat and Andie both snickered this time.
Julia resisted the urge to join in their juvenile appreciation of the unintentional innuendo and plucked her phone from Andie’s grasp. But when she glanced at the screen, she had to admit the male anatomy currently on display did bear an unfortunate resemblance to the shrimp in her pad kee mao. And now she was snickering too. Really, it was either laugh or cry. Shaking her head, she deleted the image sent by her most recent dating fail. “Why do guys think we like looking at pictures of their junk?”
“Because they like looking at ours.” Andie shrugged. “How often does a dick pic come accompanied by the eloquent request to”—she paused and lowered her voice to dude-bro level—“send me your nudes?”
“All the time.” Kat rolled her eyes as she sipped her tea.
“And how often do you comply?” Andie crossed her arms and rested against the back of the booth, one dark brow arched.
Kat’s full lips pursed around the rim of her cup. “Never.” She swallowed and added, “Well, there was that one time…”
Andie’s other eyebrow jumped to join its twin as she leaned forward. “What?”
“I’m kidding.” Kat’s smile was wicked. “What about you, Jules?”
“Not on purpose.” Julia picked up the teapot and poured out a measure of steaming liquid.
“Now you’re the one who’s kidding,” Kat insisted.
“It was one time, and it was just my butt.” Julia lifted her teacup, inhaling the soothing scent of jasmine while enjoying the looks of fascinated horror on her friends’ faces. “And it was an accident.”
“I’ve heard of accidentally butt dialing someone.” Andie shook her head, her dark fringe of bangs falling over one eye. “But sending a butt pic by accident?”
“Forget sending it. I’m still confused about how you managed to take a selfie of your naked butt by mistake in the first place,” Kat admitted.
“Oh,” Julia confessed, “that part was on purpose.”
“What do you call a butt selfie, anyway?” Andie mused.
“A belfie,” Julia answered immediately.
“For the record, I knew that, but I refuse to ever use that word,” Kat declared.
“Also, in case you were wondering, yes, there is such a thing as a belfie stick.”
“I refuse to use that, too,” Kat amended.
“For someone who claims it was ‘one time,’” Andie made quotation marks with her fingers, “and ‘an accident,’ you sure know a lot about butt pic stuff.”
“In my first year at TrendList, I wrote an article about the top five ways to get the best angle for your belfie,” Julia explained. “And yes, it was an accident, and it really was just that one time. I can’t believe either of you are surprised. This is me we’re talking about, remember? Murphy’s Law on two legs.”
“Oh, come on. You’re not that bad.” Kat patted her on the shoulder. “You make yourself sound like a walking disaster.”
“I mean, she kind of is.” Andie blew her bangs out of her face. “No offense, Jules.”
“None taken.” Julia grimaced good-naturedly. It was true. In her experience, anything that could go wrong, did go wrong. Murphy’s Law incarnate. If there was a way she could screw something up, odds were, she would. Case in point: sending a dude she’d gone on a few casual dates with a close-up of her bare ass by mistake. “I never told either of you about this?”
“Trust me, I’d remember,” Kat assured her.
“It’s not really a big deal.” Julia recalled the incident, cheeks heating from more than just the tea. “I had a bug bite on my butt, and it was swelling up and itching and I was worried it might be a deadly spider or something that bit me.”
“So you took a selfie of your dupa?” Kat shook her head. “Why not just look in the mirror?”
“It was at an odd angle and I wanted to send a picture to my mom for her opinion.” Her mother was a dermatologist who saw plenty of weirder things in her average day on the job.
“Too bad you didn’t have a belfie stick.” Andie smirked.
“Anyway…” Julia ignored her and continued. “Let’s talk about the plan for Friday night.”
“Hold on.” Andie raised a hand. “I still have questions.”
“It wasn’t poisonous,” Julia assured her. “Just a mosquito bite.”
“Uh-huh, yeah, great.” Andie waved that aside. “What I want to know is who’d you accidentally send the belfie to?”
“Yeah,” Kat chimed in, blue eyes twinkling. “Who got the literal booty call?”
“Funny you should call it that.” A reluctant smile tugged at Julia’s lips. She really did have a talent for messing things up. “Because that’s exactly what Derek thought when he got it.”
“Derek?” Kat tapped her chopsticks together in thought. “The I just bought a boat guy?”
“The I took an hour to make my hair look like I slept funny guy?” Andie added.
“That’s the one.” Julia nodded. “He showed up at my door so fast, I still didn’t have my pants back on.”
“What did you do?”
“I told him the truth. That it was a mistake. That I’d meant to send the pic to someone else.”
“Uh-oh.” Andie winced. “Did you explain to him it was meant for your mom?”
“I don’t know if that would have been better,” Kat chortled.
“He bailed before I could.” Julia shrugged, then stopped, eyes widening. “Oh, God. He thought I was sending the pic to another guy, didn’t he? No wonder he was so mad!”
Copyright © 2021 by Melonie Johnson
