Just Friends Read Online Free PDF

you.”
    Freya groaned. “It’s me,” she announced, after the beep. “I need you. Call me on my cell the minute you hear this. Please. ”
    When she returned to the poker table, the men were all talking about someone she didn’t know, a guy who worked on Wall Street and was fabulously successful. He was called Waverley Lions.
    “Daft name,” she chipped in, reminding them she was still there.
    No one took any notice. They bored on regardless about Waverley’s three-bedroom apartment off Central Park, his house in East Hampton—beachfront, natch—his handmade shoes, his Lamborghini.
    “I don’t know when he does any work,” said Al admiringly. “Waverley always seems to be in the Wine and Cigar bar, drinking Cristall champagne or sending couriers for designer drugs. And you know how he likes to celebrate a really big deal? He gets himself some ‘red menace.’ ” Al nodded conspiratorially at the other men. “Know what that means?”
    “What? What?” Larry was getting excited.
    Al flicked a cautious look at Freya and lowered his voice. “A Russian hooker. A really classy one, five hundred dollars an hour. Waverley says they have to be Russian or he can’t, you know . . .”
    “Capitalist machismo crap,” muttered Freya. She had tipped her chair back on two legs, distancing herself from this trivia that they batted back and forth like tennis balls.
    “Five hundred dollars an hour .” Gus sounded envious.
    “For Waverley it’s like buying a candy bar. His annual salary’s at least one and a half mil.”
    “Jeez . . .”
    “And on top of everything else, his penis is gigantic.”
    Freya’s chair crashed back onto four legs. These men were insufferable! “How gigantic?” she asked boldly.
    “Obscene.”
    “The biggest in company history, he told me.”
    “It would be vulgar to bandy exact figures.”
    “I’ll bet.” Freya sniggered. Men could be so childishly boastful. She turned to Al. “I mean, how do you know for sure?”
    “He told me privately.”
    “Oh, he told you, did he?” Freya gave pitying laugh. “You haven’t actually seen it for yourself?”
    They all looked at her as if she were crazy. Perhaps her curiosity was on the prurient side, but now that she’d started she had to bluff it out. “Well, have you?”
    “Of course, I haven’t seen it. Don’t be stupid.”
    “Why not? And don’t call me stupid.”
    “He can’t exactly show it to me.”
    “Why can’t he?”
    “It’s in the bank, dummy.”
    “He keeps his penis in the bank?!!” Freya’s eyebrows soared.
    Five seconds of silence. Five pairs of male eyes looking at her with pitying disgust.
    Jack cleared his throat. “Al didn’t say penis , Freya, he said bonus .”
    “Oh.”
    The blush that she had kept at bay during her unseemly interrogation now lit her body like a flash fire. Suddenly she was back at junior school, a foot taller than every other girl, singing out a beat too early in the carol service. She saw Leo give Jack a look that said, Where did you find this fluff-head? and was mortified when Jack gave a responsive flicker of his fingers: I know, but let it go. Freya forced a jaunty chuckle. “Just as well I’m not Freud’s secretary, huh?”
    She got them to laugh, but she felt an idiot. From now on she’d keep her mouth shut—except for drinking purposes. Freya reached for the Southern Comfort, but all it did was fuzz her brain. In a round of five card draw she misread a six for a nine and made a fuss when she lost. She found she was out of chips again, and signed another IOU. Her eyes itched from the smoke; her skin felt dry and tight.
    At the end of another disastrous hand, Freya rested her head on table and closed her eyes. She felt terrible. Why had she come? She’d lost all her money and made a fool of herself. They all thought she was stupid. Nobody loved her. Nobody would ever love her. She wanted to go to bed.
    Bed!
    “Wait a second,” she croaked, trying to straighten up and