Free Some Like It Hot by Zoey Dean

by everyone else. That he was the starting point guard on the school basketball team didn't hurt, but Adam couldn't have cared less about the social pecking order. That was weird, because everyone Cammie knew could pinpoint his or her own place on that pecking order with cruise-missile accuracy. Not Adam. He was sincere, smart, and always his own person. He didn't care where he was in that social pecking order, for example. As for the sex, it had started out south of zero but had improved rapidly once he got over his initial nervousness.
    Plus, he treated Cammie like a jewel … which was a bit of an issue. Cammie knew she could be a stone-cold bitch, and she preferred to be treated like one at least some of the time. Sure, she knew that was twisted, but if a good man was hard to find but easy to hold on to, a bad boy was easy to find and impossible to hold onto. She admired badness. In fact, she often craved it. Whoever said that your boyfriend had to have the sensitivity of Dr. Drew? It wasn't like
he
was hot.
    Cammie gazed up and down the pristine beach, cut off from the Pacific Coast Highway by an endless stretch of mansions that appeared nondescript from the highway but were in fact spectacular from the beach side. Azure waves lapped against the diamond-white sand. Terns wheeled and dove at a school of baitfish driven to the surface by hungry albacore. Off in the distance, a luxury liner lumbered north, maybe to San Francisco, maybe to Alaska. It was a perfect setting for peace and serenity, which she needed today, for reasons she hadn't shared with Adam.
    Her gaze followed a bikini-clad redhead who was running her golden cocker spaniel down the beach; Cammie vaguely recognized her from a long-running, now-deceased sitcom set in the seventies. Coming in the opposite direction was an older world-famous singer who had married a second-tier television actor; they were hand-in-hand, strolling on the packed wet sand left by the receding tide. She had a long paisley scarf wrapped around her head that trailed behind her in the light breeze, and wore baggy white linen clothing that covered her completely and sported oversize black Chanel sunglasses—but still, that
nose
made her instantly recognizable.
    The actress lived just up the beach, three houses away from a diminutive female rap artist who had just switched representation to Apex, the new agency co-owned by Cammie's father. It was courtesy of this singer that Adam and Cammie were here—Cammie and the singer had bonded when a crucial strap on the rap artist's metallic dress had snapped at an Apex party, exposing perhaps the world's tiniest hot-pink leopard-print thong. The omnipresent photographers had done their thing, as other party guests offered safety pins. Cammie had done two things. One, in the bathroom, she showed the artist that she was wearing an identical thong. Two, she figured that the rap artist had done it completely on purpose, as a publicity stunt. The suspicion was confirmed when the artist made the cover of
Star
magazine just in time to coincide with the release of her latest CD,
Your Mama Ain't in Kansas Anymore, Neither.
    Cammie had called her new friend to ask if she and her boyfriend could hang on her beach. The rap artist said sure, but she'd be lounging by her swimming pool since she hated the beach, as it was full of fucking sand.
    Now Cammie stretched, the better to show off her curves, and smiled down at Adam, who sat on the large Indian blanket he'd brought along, looking extremely cute in blue-and-white surfer jams. She knelt so that he could see his initials dangling near her right hipbone.
    “I thought about getting a tattoo,” she told him, shaking her strawberry curls out of her eyes. “But those are so Cher-Angelina Jolie-mall-girl-in-the-'burbs now. Every chick in the valley has a tattoo just above her butt. And it's not like those girls can afford laser removal.”
    He fingered the charms. “I'm flattered.”
    “You should be.