Her eyebrows rose, and her mouth curved up into a sweet grin.

Some might perceive my comment as bragging, but there was purposeful disdain in my voice I knew Paige wouldn’t recognize. She was still smiling. I could probably mention my mother had admitted to me during a Xanax binge that she loved my sister Finley more, or how I deliberately totaled the Ferrari my father had bought me for my sixteenth birthday (mostly as an apology that he’d missed it), or even the time my roommate, Kennedy—also an heiress—brought a Ziploc bag full of her miscarriage along on a women’s rights march at Berkeley. Paige would still gaze up at me as if I were professing my love for her instead of detailing seven levels of fucked up.

I breathed out a laugh. “You’re definitely a local.”

“Guilty. Boyfriend?” she asked.

“You get right to the point.”

She shrugged, taking a drag and holding her breath for five seconds before hacking out a puff of smoke. “Is that a no?” she asked, still coughing.

“Unequivocally.”

She tried to pass the roach back, but I shook my head. She jutted out her glistening bottom lip.

“Disappointed?” I wasn’t sure if she wanted a threesome or a drug buddy.

“You just look like you’d be a fun girlfriend.”

“You’re wrong.” I stood up, already bored with the conversation. A glass broke across the room, and a small group tightened around whatever show was happening in the center.

Laughter turned to yelling and chanting. Peter Max’s Better World was knocked off the wall, shattering the glass. Cheap beer splashed over the fifty-thousand-dollar brush strokes. I pushed my way to the front, seeing two men throwing punches, making an unholy mess of every piece of art around them.

All eyes fell on me, and the spectators quieted, causing the two in the middle to pause. They were all waiting for me to break up the fight, or yell, or maybe cry over the damage, but my gaze fell on the shirtless man covered in tattoos. He watched me, too, his chestnut eyes scanning my tits and legs, and then the room. His adversary had turned his red ball cap backward, bouncing as he circled Tattoos, rolling his fists back and forth in the air like he was in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

“Maddox, you’ve proved your point. Let’s go,” someone said to the tattooed man.

“Fuck you,” he replied. He didn’t take his eyes off me. “We’ll just take it outside.”

Red Cap had at least fifty pounds on Maddox. I pulled out five bills from my cleavage and held them above me. “I’ve got five hundred on Maddox.”