Alpha Billionaire Series
Hot Mess Chapter 3

KAYLA

My cousins didn't understand personal boundaries. Jessie's friends really didn't. They were all crowded into the bathroom with me. It wasn't a big room, but it was the only room with a big mirror. Jessie stood behind me and her friend Clair stood in front of me as they hauled shape wear over my body. I felt like a sausage being stuffed into a casing.

I kept trying to cover my breasts. Even though I had a bra on, I felt naked.

They grunted as they pulled it over my rib cage.

"What if I have to pee?" I asked.

"There is a slit in the bottom just pee carefully."

"I'm wearing panties."

Clair dropped her grip on the top band and looked at me like I was ten kinds of stupid. I guess I was when it came to fashion.

"Well, I guess you are just going to have to hold it then." I could tell Clair did not like me.

"Why are you wearing panties? This thing is your underwear," Jessie said, her voice loaded with annoyance.

"No one told me not to," I tried not to whine. I was so completely out of my depth in Los Angeles. No this wasn't LA; this was the valley. A distinction I didn't understand. I thought the entirety of urban spread in this area was LA, but it was a bunch of different towns and cities. I couldn't tell the difference, everything ran together.

I really wanted to go to this costume party. It was all Jessie and Gabe had been talking about ever since I had arrived. Uncle Dave didn't seem to care much what his kids did. As long as we had fun. At least that's all he said now that I was here. Jessie or Gabe would say, "We're taking Kayla to the beach." And he would say, "Okay, have fun."

There was no discussion about personal safety. No commentary on what either of them were wearing. Jessie wore clothes that would have Mom's eyes popping out of her head. When we got back to the house there was no debriefing interrogation of questions. My uncle didn't care how much money we spent, or if we had fun. Or what exactly we did.

I was twenty-four and I didn't know what to do with this level of personal freedom. But I was learning. The first thing was to wear a tank top and not worry about exposing my upper arms or cleavage to the eyes of others. I worried about exposure to the sun and wore plenty of sunscreen, but I didn't even care if someone saw my bra strap.

I had been here a week, and now I was letting strangers help dress me for a Halloween party. Mom would have an aneurysm if she knew.

"What character am I going as again?"

"Ishtaria, from Lions of Medea. Don't tell me you haven't seen that show." Clair glared at me.

I grimaced and bit the inside of my cheek. Slowly, I shook my head. If it had violence or adult themes Mom didn't let me watch it.

She let out a heavy sigh. "Ishtaria was the love interest of the barbarian king, Mithrandes."

"Oh my God, he's so hot!" Another one of Jessie's friends, Kiki, also crowded into the bathroom with us exclaimed. Kiki was standing on the rim of the tub so she could see herself in the mirror over our heads.

"I know. I'd bone Nick Sadler in a heartbeat."

"I thought you said his name was Mithrandes. Who is Nick Sadler?" I asked.

"You don't know who Nick Sadler is? He is only the hottest man in Hollywood right now."

Jessie and her friends started laughing. They were laughing at me. I didn't replace it particularly funny.

Clair picked up her phone from the bathroom counter and held it out with a picture of a man. I assumed it was Nick Sadler in his costume for Mithandres. He had thick dark hair in spiral curls pulled back into several long braids down his back. His face was chiseled and handsome, even with the makeup around his eyes.

I nodded.

She pulled the phone back and swiped her finger over the screen before holding it back up for me to see.

I gulped. He was mostly naked with his broad chest and shoulders exposed. He was definitely attractive. "Yeah, I can see why you said he's hot. What did Ishtaria look like?"

The next picture was of a waif of a girl. Slender and petite in a barely there drape of shimmering silver fabric. She had a drape of coins around her hips and a headdress of them in her hair. I looked nothing like her.

I understood why they felt the need to stuff me and my curves into a casing that squished me into a slightly smaller shape.

"If she looks like that, why did you pick this costume for me?" I was afraid I was going to be the b**t of a big joke.

"It was the only plus-size costume they had left. You'll be fine."

I twisted so that I could look at my cousin.

"Stop looking at me with those hurt puppy dog eyes. I'm not about to make you look stupid. It's not that kind of party." Jessie rolled her eyes and smirked at me. The fact that she knew what I was thinking led me to believe she had considered it. "I don't have the right kind of bra for this." The sturdy straps of my Maidenform eighteen-hour full figured underwear would ruin the effect of the costume.

Clair pulled a length of tape from a roll I hadn't noticed. The counter was so cluttered with makeup and brushes and everything, there could have been a coffee maker and I wouldn't have noticed it. "We've got you covered. Take your bra off." I must have turned as red as a very ripe tomato. "Um..."

"Look, I've got boobs too. It's not like any of us haven't seen boobs before."

None of them had a chest larger than a C cup. I was out past having double Ds. It didn't really matter that they had seen breasts before. I hadn't exposed myself before.

The band of my bra popped open as Jessie unfastened the hooks in the back.

I bit my cheek and pulled it off.

"You've got good boobs. I'm not going to need to really tape them up," Clair told me.

"I didn't think big boobs stayed up like that." Jessie looked over my shoulder at my chest.

I wanted to crawl in a hole and hide. And then Clair was sticking tape to my chest. It was all very surreal. I would never be able to tell Mom about this. Amber, on the other hand, would die with laughter. That is if I didn't die of embarrassment first. I was stuffed and taped.

"Put your arms up," Jessie directed before she pulled the flimsy dress over my head.

I shimmied into the dress. The top was loose and flowy, even around my bosom. There was no back. The bottom half was tight on my hips. I watched myself in the mirror. My reflection didn't look bad. It just didn't look like me.

I turned to face Jessie to thank her and then I completely forgot everything I was about to say. As I turned, my left b****t fully came out from under the fabric of the dress.

"Oh no." I pushed myself back into the dress and blushed again. That was somehow even more embarrassing than Clair putting tape on my body.

"You need fashion tape," Kiki announced.

"Fashion tape?"

"I've got some in that top drawer," Jessie said as she pointed at the drawer for Clair.

I was a little surprised by both Jessie having some organization skills and knowing where something was. She couldn't replace her car keys every time we wanted to go anywhere. Her wallet went missing constantly, and she never seemed to remember where she put her purse. "What's a fashion tape?" I asked again.

"It's Hollywood's secret," Clair answered mysteriously, as if she was charged with maintaining the secret.

"It's how all those actresses never have a boob pop out of those low-cut dresses they wear," Kiki said.

"It's double-sided tape designed to stick to skin on one side and fabric on the other. Now hold still and put your arms back up," Jessie directed.

She worked on one side, and Clair worked on the other, and they taped the top sides of my dress down along my ribs.

"Just to be safe." Clair lay tape along the top edge of the neckline as well.

"Is this going to hold?" I was nervous. The dress tied around my neck with a thin halter strap, that I didn't trust not to break.

"Let's test it. Dance around a bit."

I awkwardly moved about. The dress seemed to stay where I needed it to.

Jessie handed me the belt of cheap plastic coins. It didn't fit around my hips.

"She needs something around her hips, or no one will know she's Ishtaria," Kiki complained.

Clair may not have liked me, but she really came through for fixing the costume. A few safety pins and a long scarf later, I had a coin hip wrap.

The headdress clipped more plastic coins into my hair and draped a row of them across my forehead.

Clair finished my makeup with plenty of input from Jessie and Kiki.

When they finally declared me ready, I thought I was going to have to help, or wait while they got dressed.

"Don't you need to get ready?"

"Oh no, we're already dressed." Kiki danced around in a little circle. She wore a pink dress with a black belt, and white plastic knee-high boots. Her long red hair was brushed back and held into place with an Alice band. That was when I realized they were all wearing the same dress that barely covered their tushies but in different colors.

I clapped my hands, excited to recognize them as cartoon superheroes from a show I had once watched before Mom got all bent out of shape over the weird monkey bad guy.

We all traipsed downstairs in a line. Gabe waited for us in the living room. He was dressed as some guy from the latest dinosaur movie. He had a stuffed toy dinosaur in his pocket so that people could make the connection.

"The car is already here. Let's go," Gabe clapped his hands at us to keep us moving along.

"Have fun, kids," Uncle Dave called out as we left.