Upper East Side #7 Read online

  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

  UPPER EAST SIDE

  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.

  Table of Contents

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  41

  Author's Note

  1

  “Wake up!” Porsha Sinclaire yanked off the plaid covers and let it fall to the floor beside the antique sleigh bed.

  Kaliq Braxton lay sprawled across the mattress on his stomach, naked and very relaxed. Porsha sat down beside him and bounced up and down as hard as she could. Kaliq kept his eyes closed as her ruthless bouncing jarred his head up and down. Why was it that s-e-x made her so hyper and him so sleepy?

  “I'm awake,” he mumbled. He opened one glittering green eye and instantly felt more awake than he had a second before. Porsha was naked too, all five feet four inches of her, from her shiny coral-glossed toes to the thick waves of her grown-out pixie cut. She had the type of body that looked even better naked than in clothes. Soft without being fat, and more delicate than her usual costumes of preppy jeans and cashmere cardigans let on. She was still a pain in his ass, but they'd been in and out of love pretty much since they were eleven years old, and he'd wanted to get naked with her for even longer. How typical that it had taken Porsha six and a half years to stop fighting with him and finally do it.

  And once they'd done it, they couldn't stop doing it.

  Kaliq reached up and pulled her down on top of him, kissing her randomly and ferociously because she was finally his, all his.

  “Hey!” Porsha giggled. The navy blue silk blinds were raised and the windows were open, but it wasn't like she cared if anyone saw or heard them. They were in love, they were beautiful, and they were sex fiends. If anyone was looking, it was only because they were seriously jealous.

  Besides, she relished the attention, even from the random perverted Peeping Toms who happened to be spying on them through gold-plated glasses from the windows of the surrounding townhouses.

  They kissed for a while, but Kaliq was too worn out to do much else. Porsha rolled away from him and lit a cigarette, giving Kaliq little puffs every once and a while like the actors in Breathless, the supercool black-and-white French film she'd watched earlier that day in AP French. The female lead always looked so chic and beautiful and was never without lipstick. All the people in the movie did all day was ride around on a Vespa motorbike, have sex, sit in cafes, and smoke. Of course they always looked gorgeous.

  But Porsha had to keep her grades up if she wanted to get off Yale's wait list, and what with school and homework and sex with Kaliq every day after school, there was hardly time for primping. Porsha's short hair was matted and sweaty, her lips were chapped from prolonged kissing and infrequent lip gloss application, and she hadn't plucked her eyebrows in two whole days. Not that she really minded. Sacrificing a little personal grooming time for sex was totally worth it. Besides, she'd read somewhere that an hour of sex burns three hundred and sixty calories, so even if she was a little scruffy, at least she'd be skinny!

  She reached up and felt the stubble gathering between her dark, neatly arched eyebrows. Okay, so maybe she minded just a teensy bit, but she could always grab a cab down to Elizabeth Arden for an eyebrow wax.

  Stubble aside, Porsha had never felt so happy. After finally doing it with Kaliq nearly two weeks ago, she was a whole new woman. The only dark cloud in her rosy sky was the irritating fact that she was still only wait-listed at Yale. Just exactly how were she and Kaliq going to get together every afternoon if she wound up having to go to Georgetown in DC—the only school that had actually accepted her—and he was up at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, or Brown in Providence, Rhode Island, or one of the other great schools he'd so unfairly gotten into? Not that she was bitter but Kaliq had shown up high for the SATs, took no APs, and barely had a B average, while she was in every AP Emma Willard offered, had gotten a 1490 on her SAT, and had almost an A+ average.

  Okay, so maybe she was slightly bitter.

  “If I joined the Peace Corps and spent a couple of years building sewers and making sandwiches for starving children in, like, Rio or somewhere, then Yale would have to take me, wouldn't they?” she asked aloud.

  Kaliq grinned. Here was the thing about Porsha that he loved. She was spoiled, but she wasn't lazy. She knew what she wanted, and because she believed absolutely that she could have everything she wanted if she tried hard enough to get it, she never stopped trying.

  “I heard everyone gets sick in the Peace Corps. And you have to speak the native language.”

  “I'll do it in France then.” Porsha blew smoke up at the ceiling. “Or one of those African countries where they speak French.” She tried to imagine herself conversing with the natives in some arid African village while balancing a clay pot of fresh goat's milk on her head and wearing an elaborately-dyed caftan that could be supremely sexy if tied in the right places. She'd have a dark tan and would be nothing but muscle and bone from all the hard work and horrible intestinal diseases. Children would clamor at her knees for the chocolates she'd order for them, and she'd smile serenely down at them like a beautiful, unwrinkled Mother Teresa. When she returned to the States she'd win some Peace Corps award for best volunteer, or even the Nobel Peace Prize. She'd have dinner with the president, who would write her a recommendation to Yale, and then Yale would fall all over themselves to accept her.

  Kaliq was pretty sure the Peace Corps only helped out in third-world countries, not economically thriving places like France, and no way would Porsha last more than half an hour in some remote African village where they didn't have Sephora or even flushing toilets.

  Poor Porsha. It was completely unfair that he'd gotten into Yale without really trying, while she, who'd wanted to go to Yale since she was two years old, had been wait-listed. Then again, Kaliq was used to getting things without really trying.

  He propped his head up on his hand and tenderly smoothed Porsha's hair away from her forehead. “Unless you hear soon that you got in, I promise I won't go to Yale,” he vowed. “I'm fine with going to Brown or wherever.”

  “Really?” Porsha stamped out her cigarette in the marble ashtray beside Kaliq's bed
and flung her arms around his neck. Kaliq was by far the best boyfriend a girl could ever ask for. She couldn't imagine why she'd ever broken up with him, not once, but again and again.

  Because he cheated on her again and again?

  All Porsha knew now was that she never ever wanted to leave Kaliq's side. She rested her cheek against his strong, bare chest. Now that she thought about it, moving into the Braxtons' town house wasn't such a bad idea, since her own house wasn't exactly an episode of Fresh Prince right now. Her mother had given birth to her baby sister just over two weeks ago and was now suffering from severe postpartum depression. Just this morning Porsha had left her mother weeping over a DVD sent from a Peruvian Alpaca farm. Apparently, if you adopted a herd of alpaca yearlings, you could custom-order handwoven blankets and sweaters made from the hair of the animals in your herd. Her baby sister would soon be the proud new owner of a hairy white alpaca blanket that would be completely useless all summer long, and probably the rest of her life, unless as a teenager she got into the hippie handmade-chic thing, cut a head-hole into the blanket, and fashioned it into a poncho.

  Back when her mother was still pregnant, she had asked Porsha to name the baby, and out of devotion to her favorite college Porsha had chosen the name Yale. Now baby Yale served as a living, breathing, very noisy reminder that no matter how stunning Porsha's record was, the school had all but rejected her. Worse still, the baby had taken over her bedroom, and she was forced to sleep in her stepbrother Tahj's room until she left for school in the fall. Tahj was a vegan Rastafarian dog-lover, so the room had been decorated specifically for him in wall-to-wall organic products in shades of eggplant and wild sage. To add insult to injury, Porsha's cat, Kitty Minky, had taken to peeing on the cushions and throwing up on the floor mats in an effort to rid the room of the scent of Tahj's dog, a drooling boxer named Mookie.

  Hello, nasty?

  Move in with Kaliq. Porsha didn't know why she hadn't thought of it before. A freaky mother, a cat-pee-soaked bedroom, and a newborn baby sister named Yale were not exactly conducive to studying or s-e-x. It was only natural for her to seek other accommodation. Of course there was always Chanel's house, but they'd tried that before and wound up fighting. Besides, Chanel couldn't offer her much in the way of sex,

  Unless those old rumors were actually true…

  Kaliq ran his hands lazily up and down her smooth, bare, milky chocolate back. “Have you ever thought about getting a tattoo?” he asked out of nowhere as he traced the lines of her shoulder blades. Except for a brief stint in rehab earlier that year, Kaliq had been high pretty much all day every day since he was eleven, and Porsha was used to his random questions.

  She wrinkled her pointy, slightly upturned nose at the thought of having a big scar filled with black ink. “Gross,” she responded. Leave that to ghetto, skanky-looking bitches.

  Kaliq shrugged. He'd always thought carefully chosen, tiny tattoos in just the right places were insanely sexy. A little black cat between Porsha's shoulder blades, for instance, would totally suit her. But before he had a chance to take the notion any further, Porsha briskly changed the subject.

  “Kaliq?” She nuzzled her face into his manly, perfect collarbone. “Do you think your parents would mind if I stayed—?” Before she could finish her sentence, the downstairs buzzer rang.

  Kaliq's personal wing of the townhouse took up the entire top floor, necessitating his very own front door buzzer. He rolled away from Porsha and swung his feet to the floor. “Yeah?” he called, pressing the button on the intercom.

  “Delivery!” Jeremy Scott shouted in his hoarse stoner voice. “Hurry while it's still hot!”

  Kaliq heard laughter and other voices in the background. Porsha waited for him to tell them to get lost. Instead, he pressed the button to unlock the door and let them in.

  “I should get dressed,” Porsha observed tersely. She slid out of bed and stomped into Kaliq's adjoining bathroom. How could he be smart enough to get into Yale, yet too dumb to understand that inviting his stoner friends up to their steamy love den would totally ruin the mood?

  Not that Yale had accepted Kaliq because of his smarts: the school needed a few good lacrosse players. End of story.

  At least Porsha had an excuse to use the delicious sandalwood body shampoo the housekeeper stocked in Kaliq's shower. She toweled herself off with a thick towel, slipped on her flimsy silk underwear, zipped up her blue-and-white uniform skirt, and buttoned two of the six buttons on her white blouse. Braless and barefoot, it was the perfect my-girlfriend-just-got-out-of-the-shower-and-would-you-please-leave? look. Hopefully Kaliq's friends would get the hint, make like bees, and fuck off. She tousled her damp hair with her fingers and pushed open the bathroom door.

  “Bonjour!” A buxom, raven-haired, long-legged L'Ecole girl greeted Porsha from Kaliq's bed. Porsha had met the girl before at parties. Her name was Lexus or Lexique or something equally annoying, a sixteen-year-old junior who'd done some modeling as a child in Paris and was now working on perfecting the French hippie-slut look.

  Lexique, whose name was really Lexie, was wearing a hand-dyed cotton wraparound dress that looked homemade but had actually been purchased for four hundred and fifty dollars, and those ugly flat sandals from Barneys that everyone but Porsha seemed to think were so cool this year. Lexie's face was makeup-free, and she cradled an acoustic guitar in her skinny arms. On the bed beside her was a Ziploc bag full of weed.

  What a rebel. Most L'Ecole girls never go anywhere without a pack of cigarettes, red lipstick, and heels.

  “The boys are making bong hits on the roof,” Lexie explained. She strummed her thumb across the guitar strings. “Alors, want to jam with me till they get back?”

  Jam?

  Porsha wrinkled her nose with even more emphasis than she had at the thought of getting a tattoo. She was so not into the whole getting high, playing-guitars-and-laughing-at-your-friends'-totally-stupid-stoned-observations scene, and she really didn't want to hang out with this Lexique girl, who obviously thought she was the coolest French girl in New York. She'd rather watch Oprah reruns on Oxygen in her cat-pee-soaked room while her delusional mom wept over baby alpacas.

  Someone had stuck a stick of burning amber incense into the cork heel of one of Porsha's new Christian Dior espadrilles. She grabbed the stick of incense and jammed it into a porthole in one of Kaliq's beloved model sailboats on his desk. Then she laced up her shoes, buttoned a few more buttons on her blouse, and grabbed her vintage Prada bag. “Please tell Kaliq that I've gone home,” she instructed briskly.

  “Peace!” Lexie saluted Porsha with stoned gaiety. “Au revoir!” A tattoo of the sun, moon, and stars was printed on her shoulder blade.

  Hence Kaliq's sudden interest in tattoos?

  Porsha wondered why was it that the girls who went to L'École Française looked twenty-five when they were only seventeen. And how come all the guys she knew secretly or not so secretly lusted after them. They ate only hot chocolate and pommel frites, they chain smoked, and you never saw them jogging or playing field hockey in Central Park. Yet none of them were fat or zit-ridden. It was as though their meres and grandmères introduced them to Lancôme and Gucci when they were only babes, and the alpha hydroxy acids or whatever permeated their systems, leaving them with perfect skin, perfect bodies, and feet that were most comfortable in three-inch heels. Their school even allowed heels—unlike all the other girls schools on the Upper East Side—which basically proved her point. When it came to educating girls, the French seemed to follow a completely different curriculum.

  Not that she was jealous or anything.

  Porsha stomped down the stairs and let herself out onto 82nd Street. It felt like summer already. The sun was still two hours from setting, and the air smelled of fresh-cut grass from nearby Central Park and suntan lotion from all the half-naked girls hurrying home to their apartments on Park Avenue. A gaggle of eleventh-grade St. Jude's Kaliq-and-Jeremy-wannabes were hovering around the downstairs
buzzer outside Kaliq's townhouse. One of them had a guitar slung over his shoulder.

  “Bien sûr. Come on up!” Porsha heard Lexie call out to them over the intercom, as if she lived there.

  Kaliq's house seemed to draw all the stoner kids on the Upper East Side with some sort of spiritual magnetic pull. And Porsha swore she didn't mind—really, she didn't—as long as she didn't have to sit around watching them all jam. After all she and Kaliq had been though, Porsha knew it was going to be different this time. She and Kaliq were together spiritually, and now physically, too, which meant she could leave him alone, feeling perfectly confident that he wouldn't dream of cheating on her.

  She carried on down 82nd toward Fifth Avenue, checking her cell phone for a text from Kaliq at every corner. Obviously he'd call any second now. Like all possessive, aggressive, obsessive girls, she liked to think Kaliq didn't have a life without her.

  Then again, if he didn't, she'd go completely nuts.

  2

  “They gave us five spreads,” Chanel Crenshaw explained as she flipped through the hot-off-the-press June issue of W magazine. “That's ten whole pages!” The world-famous fashion designer Les Best had just messengered the fashion magazine over to her apartment with a note that read, “As ever, you are fabulous, darling. And so's that little curly-haired hottie friend of yours!”

  The same supposed curly-haird little hottie, fourteen-year-old Bree Hargrove, was desperately trying not to pee in her pants. Chanel, the coolest senior girl at Emma Willard, and totally famous and beautiful model/Upper East Side girl-about-town, had actually asked her to hang out after school today. She was now sitting in Chanel's huge, awesomely old-fashioned room—her private sanctuary—on her bed, flipping through the latest issue of the coolest fashion magazine in the world, looking for pages featuring the two of them modeling the type of amazing designer clothes Bree had always gazed at longingly in stores but never once dreamed she'd actually wear. It was so unreal she could hardly breathe.