Sacha who was two seats down, next to Carter, who was on my left, was looking at me with a grin on his face. The fact that he was one of the few not checking out the two half-dressed girls hadn’t escaped me. It was his grin that fueled my fire of ridiculousness. "You know I quit the biz a long time ago."

The guys closest to us started laughing, and Mason pulled on the end of my ponytail before grabbing where the hair band was and using my loose hair as a whip. "I'm glad you didn't grow up to be a slut," he said with all the seriousness that was Mason Meyers.

Cocking my head to look at my longtime friend, I karate chopped him gently in the throat, making him gag. "I couldn't. You stole that role from me."

"Asshole," he laughed, yanking on my hair one more time.

Eli walked back to the table in that instant, carrying a large glass bowl between his paws. When we were debating what to do for Julian's birthday celebration and karaoke had been the one and only thing the new twenty-eight-year-old wanted, we'd agreed that each person would write down a song that we wanted to see performed. It had to be a popular, Top 40s type at some point in recent history. The problem was that there were some of us—moi included—that weren't musically inclined, so the consensus had been that we could pair up if we wanted to. Anyone who wanted to go multiple times could.

"Choose your doom, bitches," Eli called out, placing the bowl in the middle of the two tables we had pushed together.

In no time at all, we filled the bowl with pieces of paper with song titles on them. Carter, my partner from the moment the duets had been made a possibility, gestured with his head for me to go pick out our choice. We'd agree to get it over with first. Each person or team—there was only one other duet that consisted of two of the TCC lackeys— would choose a slip when their turn was up, to keep the choices a surprise.

"Let's see what we," I started to tell Carter as I opened up the slip to see Justin Bieber’s “Baby” written on there. "Damn it, Eli!"

My twin grinned. "How do you know I chose it?"

"Mom," I groaned. It was the song he'd saved as his personal ringtone on our Mom's phone when he called her. Fucking idiot. Something about him being her baby. Like I wasn’t technically the baby in the family. If that wasn't enough, I could recognize his chicken-scratch handwriting from a mile away.

He threw his head back and laughed. "Oh, yeah."

Carter made a face and sighed. "I guess it could be worse."

I couldn't even disagree with him. It could be. He got up to join me with sagging shoulders, and Julian threw his hand out to knuckle-bump us on the way to the stage. The karaoke stage was one of the biggest I'd ever seen, but I didn’t let it intimidate me. The guy working to the side of the stage asked us what song we wanted to sing and when we told him, he smirked but nodded, handed over two microphones and waved us up. My brother had already spoken to him about our large group, and we'd agreed to switch on and off with the other people at the bar.

"FLABBY!" my brother bellowed from the table.

I could see them all laughing their asses off when the music started up and the lyrics appeared on the screen behind us. I glanced at Carter and slapped him on the back. "Remind me never to do this again unless I've been drinking," I told him, pulling the mic away from my face.

He grinned and nodded. "Remind me never to do this again, period."

That was an even better idea. Swallowing hard, I pointed at the birthday boy in the audience and said, “Happy Birthday, Julian!”

Then we started.

I sang the lead and Carter sang the chorus. We were only about a quarter through the song when I was laughing too hard to actually sing along. The rest of our performance was just an awkward mess of us mumbling, and the guys catcalling.