Free Eight Ways to Ecstasy by Jeanette Grey

hadn’t had to. Chase had tried to show him tonight, hadn’t he? This life he hated didn’t have to suck. He didn’t have to be alone.
    “Fuck.” He dropped his head into his hands. “It’s just…It’s all so messed up.”
    “What’s so messed up?”
    “I…” Finally, he looked up. And the frozen piece of him cracked. “I met this girl.”
    After that, it all spilled out. He kept the details to himself—what Kate felt like in his hands and on his tongue, how his whole body quaked at the triumph of bringing her to a new height. But in generalities, he laid it out. Meeting this woman who’d seen through so much of his bullshit and through the emptiness he’d surrounded himself with. Who loved art and who’d made him want more.
    How it had all come tumbling down as soon as she’d found out who and what he was.
    “She says she wants to know who I really am, but she hates the money. She doesn’t care about the company or my family or any of it.”
    That had been the appeal, at the beginning. It’d been such a relief to have someone like him for him , and not the trappings. But now the trappings were keeping them apart.
    “What the fuck does she even want from me, you know?”
    “Take it from me,” Chase finally chimed in, clinking his mug against Rylan’s. “The exact opposite of whatever the hell you seem to think she does.”
    “What?”
    “It’s how girls work. You know this.”
    He didn’t. He was starting to think he didn’t know anything.
    “How many times have we picked up chicks with a round of drinks or a ride in a fancy car? They turn to butter in your hands, man. Don’t you remember?”
    “Those girls were different.” He’d never felt like this about any of them.
    Chase’s mouth flattened, a grim line. His voice went eerily cold. “Girls. Are. All. The. Same.”
    And for a second, it was like that awful night a few years ago. The night Chase had driven all the way back to New York, hardly seeing straight, blowing off his classes, ready to blow off law school entirely, because his fiancée—his ex-fiancée had jumped into bed with someone even richer…
    Rylan swallowed. “Not all of them.”
    A long moment passed, but then the harsh lines to Chase’s face smoothed out. He let out this echo of a laugh and turned to gaze at his mug. “Enough of them.” When he twisted around enough for Rylan to see him again, the deadness to his eyes was less jarring, his tone more even. “They just. They’re raised on Disney princesses, you know? You joke about all the bullshit drama with heiresses, but the rest of them? They all want their prince to show up in his carriage.” He glanced at Rylan with a sad, flickering smile. “They want the fantasy.”
    “You think?”
    “I bet you. She may say she doesn’t want it, but I dare you. Give her the rich guy cliché experience. If she doesn’t swoon I’ll…I’ll…” He searched for a second, then snapped his fingers. “I’ll give you a weekend with Betty. A week, even.”
    “Betty?” Rylan sat up straighter at that.
    There was nothing—absolutely nothing—Chase was more protective of than his car. As crazy as his advice sounded, he was serious.
    “Betty.” Chase nodded, like that was that. “I keep trying to tell you, Ry. It’s like everything else with this life. You can wallow in the parts of it that suck, or you can embrace the good parts.” He gestured around at his apartment, and the contrast with Lexie’s took Rylan off guard, now that he was looking for it.
    Lexie had spent her money paying someone to make it look like she had taste. Chase had spent his exuberantly, with relish, on things he loved. His cars and his piano, his view of the city and his books.
    He enjoyed it.
    “Embrace the money,” Chase said. “Show her how good it can be. And I promise you. She’ll change her tune.”
    The cynicism behind that promise was a thickness at the back of Rylan’s throat. Kate had entranced him because she was