Upper East Side #2

by Ashley Valentine

  Also by Ashley Valentine

  Bridgeport Academy

  Bridgeport Academy #1

  Upper East Side

  Upper East Side 1

  Upper East Side 2

  Upper East Side 3

  Upper East Side 4

  Upper East Side 5

  Upper East Side 6

  Upper East Side 7

  Upper East Side 8

  Upper East Side 9

  Upper East Side 10

  Upper East Side 11

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  Author's Note

  UPPER EAST SIDE 2

  Copyright © 2016 by Ashley Valentine

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Based on the Gossip Girl series by Cecily von Ziegesar.

  1

  “To my Porsha Bear,” Mr. Harold Sinclaire said, raising his glass of champagne to clink it against Porsha’s. “You’re still my little girl, even though you wear leather pants and have a hunky boyfriend.” He flashed a dazzling smile at Kaliq Braxton, who was seated beside Porsha at the small restaurant table. Mr. Sinclaire had chosen Le Giraffe for their special dinner because it was small and intimate and trendy, the food was fabulous, and the waiters all had the sexiest French accents.

  Porsha Sinclaire reached under the tablecloth and squeezed Kaliq’s knee. The candlelight was making her horny. If only Daddy knew what we’re planning to do after this, she thought giddily. She clinked glasses with her father and took a giant gulp of champagne.

  “Thanks, Daddy,” she said. “Thanks for coming all this way just to visit me.”

  Mr. Sinclaire put his glass down and patted his lips dry with his napkin. His fingernails were shiny and perfectly manicured. “Oh, I didn’t come for you, darling. I came here to show off.” He cocked his head to one side and pursed his lips like a model posing for a picture. “Don’t I look great?”

  Porsha dug her fingernails into Kaliq’s leg. She had to admit her father did look great. He had lost about twenty pounds, he was wearing gorgeous French clothes, and he seemed happy and relaxed. Still, she was glad he’d left his boyfriend at home in their chateau in France. She wasn’t quite ready to see her father engaged in public displays of affection with another man, no matter how good he looked.

  She picked up her menu. “Can we order?”

  “I’m having steak,” Kaliq announced. He didn’t want to make a big fuss over what he was having. He just wanted to get this dinner over with. Not that he minded hanging out with Porsha’s flaming father; it was actually kind of entertaining to see how gay he’d become. But Kaliq was anxious to get back to Porsha’s house. She was finally going to give it up. And it was about time.

  “Me too,” Porsha said, closing her menu without really looking at it. “Steak.” She didn’t plan on eating much anyway, not tonight. Kaliq had promised her he was completely over Chanel Crenshaw, Porsha’s classmate and former best friend. He was ready to give Porsha his undivided attention. She didn’t care whether she ate steak or mussels or brains for dinner—she was finally going to lose her virginity!

  After all, no one really wants to go to college a virgin.

  “Me three,” said her father. “Trois steak au poivre,” he told the waiter in a perfect French accent. “And the name of the person who cuts your hair. You have marvelous hair.”

  Porsha felt her cheeks flame. She grabbed a bread stick from the basket on the table and bit into it. Her father’s voice and mannerisms were completely different from when she’d seen him nine months ago. Then, he’d been a conservative, suit-wearing lawyer, all clean lines and sharp edges. Perfectly respectable. Now he was totally gay, with his plucked eyebrows and lavender shirt and matching socks. It was so embarrassing. After all, he was her dad.

  Last year, Porsha’s father’s coming out and her parents’ ensuing divorce had been the talk of the town. Now everyone was pretty much over it, and Mr. Sinclaire was free to show his handsome face wherever he pleased. But that wasn’t to say that the other diners at Le Giraffe weren’t taking notice. They definitely were.

  “Did you see his socks?” an aging heiress whispered to her bored husband. “Pink-and-gray argyle.”

  “Think he’s got enough curl activator in his hair? Who does he think he is, anyway?” a famous lawyer asked his wife.

  “He’s got a better figure than his ex-wife, I’ll tell you that much,” one of the waiters remarked.

  It was all very amusing, to everyone except Porsha. Sure, she wanted her father to be happy, and it was okay for him to be gay. But did he have to be so obvious about it?

  Porsha looked out the window at the streetlights twinkling in the crisp November air. Smoke billowed out of chimneys on the roofs of the luxurious townhouses across 65th Street. Finally their salads came.

  “So it’s still Yale for next year?” Mr. Sinclaire asked as he stabbed at a piece of endive. “That’s where you’ve got your heart set on going, right, Bear? My old alma mater?”

  Porsha put her salad fork down and sat back in her chair, leveling her eyes at her father. “Where else would I go?” she said, as if Yale University were the only college on the planet. Porsha didn’t understand why people applied to six or seven colleges, some of them so bad they were called “safeties.” She was one of the best students in the senior class at the Emma Willard School for Girls, a small, elite, all-girls, uniform-required school on East 93rd Street. All Willard girls went to good colleges. But Porsha never settled for just plain good. She had to have the best of everything, no compromises. And the best college, in her opinion, was Yale.

  Her father laughed. “So I guess those other colleges like Harvard and Cornell should send you letters of apology for even trying to get you to go to them, huh?”

  Porsha shrugged and examined her newly manicured fingernails. “I just want to go to Yale, that’s all.”

  Her father glanced at Kaliq, but Kaliq was looking around for something else to drink. He hated champagne. What he really wanted was a beer, even though it never seemed appropriate to order one in a place like Le Giraffe. They always made such a fuss about it, bringing you a cold frosted glass and then pouring in the Heineken like it was something special, when it was just the same old crap you could get at a gas station.

  “What about you, Kaliq?” Mr. Sinclaire asked. “Where are you applying?”

  Porsha was already nervous about losing her virginity. All this talk about college was just making things worse. She pushed her chair back and stood up to go to the bathroom. She knew it was disgusting and that she had to learn to stop, but whenever she got nervous, she made herself throw up. It was her only bad habit.

  Actually, that’s not exactly true. But we’ll get to that later.

  “Kaliq’s going to Yale with me,” she told her father. Then she turned and strode confidently through the restaurant.
>
  Kaliq watched her go. She looked sexy in her black silk halter top, with her thick hair hanging between her bare shoulder blades and her skintight leather pants hugging her hips. She looked like she had already done it, many times.

  Leather pants tend to have that effect.

  “So it’s going to be Yale for you, too?” Mr. Sinclaire prompted when Porsha had gone.

  Kaliq frowned at his champagne glass. He really, really wanted a beer. And he really, really didn’t think he could get into Yale. You can’t wake and bake and take a calculus test and expect to get into Yale—you just can’t. And that was what he’d been doing lately. A lot.

  “I’d like to go to Yale,” he said. “But I think Porsha’s going to be disappointed. I mean, my grades just aren’t that good.”

  Mr. Sinclaire winked at him. “Well, just between you and me, I think Porsha’s being a little hard on all the other schools in the country. No one says you have to go to Yale. There are plenty of other schools out there.”

  Kaliq nodded. “Yeah. Brown seems pretty cool. I have an interview there next weekend,” he said. “Although that’s definitely going to be a stretch, too. I got a C on my last math test, and I’m not even taking the AP,” he admitted. “Porsha doesn’t think Brown is even a real school. You know, because they have less requirements, or whatever.”

  “Porsha has impossibly high standards,” Mr. Sinclaire said. He sipped his champagne, his buffed pinky pointing outward. “She takes after me.”

  Kaliq glanced sideways at the other diners in the restaurant. He wondered if they thought he and Mr. Sinclaire were together. Boyfriends. To squelch such speculation, he pushed up the sleeves of his green cashmere sweater and cleared his throat in a very manly way. Porsha had given him the sweater last year, and he’d been wearing it a lot lately to reassure her that he wasn’t about to break up with her or cheat on her or do whatever it was she was worried about.

  “I don’t know,” he said, grabbing a roll from the bread basket and breaking it violently in half. “It would be great to just take a year off and go sailing with my dad or something, you know?”

  Kaliq didn’t understand why, at seventeen, you had to map out your entire life. There would be plenty of time for more school after taking a year or two off to sail around the Caribbean or go skiing in Chile. And yet, all of his classmates at the St. Jude’s School for Boys were planning to go straight to college and straight to grad school after college. The way Kaliq saw it, they were signing their lives away without thinking about what they really wanted to do. For example, he loved the sound of the cold Atlantic spraying against the bow of his boat. He loved the feel of the hot sun on his back as he hoisted the sails. He loved the way the sun flashed green before it dropped into the ocean. Kaliq figured there had to be more stuff out there like that, and he wanted to experience it, all of it.

  As long as it didn’t require too much effort. He wasn’t big on making an effort.

  “Well, Porsha’s not going to be happy when she finds out you’re thinking of taking time off.” Mr. Sinclaire chuckled. “You’re supposed to go to Yale together and get married and live happily ever after.”

  Kaliq’s eyes followed Porsha as she walked back to the table, her head held high, her milky chocolate skin gleaming. All the other diners in the restaurant were watching her, too. She wasn’t the best dressed or the prettiest girl in the room, but she seemed to sparkle a bit more brightly than the rest of them. And she knew it.

  Their steaks came and Porsha tore into hers, washing it down with gulps of champagne and mounds of buttery mashed potatoes. She watched the sexy way Kaliq’s temple throbbed as he chewed. She couldn’t wait to get out of there. She couldn’t wait to finally do it with the boy she was planning to spend the rest of her life with. It couldn’t get more right than that.

  Kaliq couldn’t help noticing how intensely Porsha was wielding her steak knife. She cut the meat into huge hunks and gnawed on them ferociously. It made him wonder if she’d be that intense in bed. They’d fooled around a lot, but he’d always been the more aggressive one. Porsha always just kind of lay there, making the sorts of mewing sounds girls made in the movies, while he roamed around, doing things to her. But tonight Porsha seemed impatient, hungrier.

  Of course she was hungry. She’d just thrown up.

  “They don’t serve food like this at Yale, Bear,” Mr. Sinclaire told his daughter. “You’ll be eating pizza and Hot Pockets in the dorms with the rest of them.”

  Porsha wrinkled her nose. She'd never eaten a Hot Pocket in her life. “No way,” she said. “Kaliq and I aren’t going to live in a dorm, anyway. We’re going to have our own place.” She stroked Kaliq’s ankle with the toe of her boot. “I’ll learn how to cook.”

  Mr. Sinclaire raised his eyebrows at Kaliq. “Lucky you,” he joked.

  Kaliq grinned and licked the mashed potatoes off his fork. He wasn’t about to tell Porsha that her little dream of them living in an off-campus apartment together in New Haven was even more absurd than the idea of her eating Hot Pockets. But he didn’t want to say anything to upset her.

  “Shut up, Daddy,” said Porsha.

  The plates were cleared. Impatient, Porsha twisted her little ruby ring around and around on her finger. She shook her head to coffee and dessert and stood up to head for the ladies’ room once more. Twice in one meal was extreme, even for her, but she was so nervous she couldn’t help it.

  Thank goodness Le Giraffe had nice, private bathrooms.

  When Porsha came out again, the entire waitstaff filed out of the kitchen. The maÎtre d’ was holding a cake decorated with flickering candles. Seventeen of them, including one extra for luck.

  Oh God.

  Porsha stomped back to the table in her pointy stiletto boots and took her seat, glaring at her father. Why did he have to make a scene? It wasn’t her fucking birthday for another three weeks. She downed another glass of champagne in one gulp.

  Waiters and cooks surrounded the table. And then the singing began.

  “Happy birthday to you…”

  Porsha grabbed Kaliq’s hand and squeezed it tight. “Make them stop,” she whispered.

  But Kaliq just sat there grinning like an asshole. He kind of liked it when Porsha was embarrassed. It didn’t happen very often.

  Her father was more sympathetic. When he saw how miserable Porsha was he increased the tempo and quickly finished the song. “You smell like a monkey, and you look like one too!”

  The waitstaff clapped politely and went back to their posts.

  “I know it’s a little early,” Mr. Sinclaire said apologetically. “But I have to leave tomorrow, and seventeen is such a big birthday. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  Mind? No one likes to be sung to in public. No one.

  Silently Porsha blew out the candles and examined the cake. It was elaborately decorated with marzipan high-heeled shoes walking down a spun-sugar Fifth Avenue, past a rock-candy model of Henri Bendel, her favorite store. It was exquisite.

  “For my little shoe fetishista,” her father said, beaming. He pulled a wrapped present out from under the table and handed it to Porsha.

  Porsha shook the box, expertly recognizing the hollow, thudding sound that a pair of new shoes makes when they’re shaken in their box. She tore into the paper. MANOLO BLAHNIK, said the type in big bold letters on the lid of the box. Porsha held her breath and pulled off the lid. Inside was a pair of beautiful leather stilettos with adorable little kitten heels.

  “I got them in Paris,” Mr. Sinclaire said. “They only made a few hundred pairs. I bet you’re the only girl in town who has them.”

  “They’re fantastic,” Porsha breathed. She stood up and walked around the table to hug her father. The shoes made up for him humiliating her in public. Not only were they unbelievably cute, but they were exactly what she was going to wear later that night when she and Kaliq had sex. Those and nothing else.

  Thanks, Daddy!

  2

  "L
et’s sit in the back," Chanel Crenshaw said as she led Mekhi Hargrove into Serendipity 3 on East 60th Street. The narrow, old-timey hamburger-and-ice cream parlor was crowded with parents treating their kids while the nanny took the night off. The air was punctuated with the shrill cries of sugared-up children as tired waitresses hurried to and fro carrying huge glass bowls of ice cream, frozen hot chocolates, and extra long hot dogs.

  Mekhi had planned to go somewhere more romantic with Chanel. Somewhere quiet and dimly lit. Somewhere where they could hold hands and talk and get to know each other without being distracted by angry parents scolding deceptively angelic-looking little boys in button-down shirts and khakis. But Chanel had wanted to come here. Maybe she was really craving ice cream, or maybe her expectations for the evening weren’t quite as big and romantic as his were.

  “Isn’t this great?” she burbled exuberantly. “Me and my brother Cairo used to come here like once a week and eat peppermint sundaes.” She picked up a menu and examined it. “It’s still all exactly the same. I love it.”

  Mekhi smiled and shook his short, scraggly twists out of his eyes. The truth was, he didn’t really care where he was, as long as he was with her. Mekhi was from the West Side, and Chanel was from the East. He lived with his father, a self-proclaimed intellectual, and his little sister, Bree, who was in ninth grade at Emma Willard, the same school Chanel went to. They lived in a crumbling Upper West Side apartment that hadn’t been renovated since the 1940s. The only person who did any cleaning around the place was their huge cat, Marx, who was an expert at killing and eating cockroaches. Chanel lived with her well-heeled parents, who were on the board of just about every big institution in the city, in an enormous penthouse decorated by a famous decorator, with a view of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Central Park. She had a maid and a cook who she could ask to bake her a cake or make her a cappuccino any time she wanted.

  So what was she doing with Mekhi?

  They had stumbled into each other a few weeks ago while trying out for parts in a film directed by Mekhi’s friend and Chanel’s classmate, Yasmine Richards. Chanel hadn’t gotten the part, and Mekhi had almost given up hope of ever seeing her again, but then they’d met again at a bar in Brooklyn. They’d seen each other and talked on the phone a few times since then, but this was their first real date.