Tori:You alive? You were pretty wasted when I left you last night.
Me:Yeah…but I kinda wanna die at the moment.
Tori:Bad hangover?
Me:Well, yeah, but something else happened…
Tori calls me less than a minute later.
“Hey, what’s wrong? Are you alright?”
I just now realize how cryptic I sounded in my text.
“Sorry, yeah, I’m fine,” I say. “It’s just that, I did something really, really humiliating last night.”
There’s a long silence.
“Well, are you gonna tell me?” Tori asks.
I wince just thinking about what I’ve done. “Oh my god, Tori, I can’t even say it. It’s too mortifying.” I grab a nearby pillow and smother my face.
“Come on, it can’t be that bad.” She gasps. “Wait, please don’t tell me you drunk sexted Ben.”
I toss the pillow aside and scoff. “No way.”
She exhales like she’s relieved. “Good. Honestly, nothing you could have done would be worse than that.”
I groan. “I don’t know about that.”
“Becca, you can tell me anything. We’ve been best friends since middle school. We work together. We’ve lived together. We hold each other’s hair back when we vomit. Nothing is too embarrassing. No matter what it is, I won’t judge you.”
I huff out a breath. “I sent Gage Grant, the TikTok star, a drunk DM last night. And, um, he messaged me back.”
She chuckles. “Very funny.”
“I’m serious, Tori. I was absolutely wasted last night after you left, started scrolling TikTok, and watched his video. Then your text popped in my mind, the one where you joked that I should slide into his DMs.”
“Holy shit. You asked him to hook up with you?”
“What? No way! No, I asked him to teach me how to make sexy TikToks for Sweet Cheeks because he’s so good at sexy TikToks and I thought that could help my business.” I give her a summary of what I wrote in my message to him and what he wrote in his reply.
She sounds like she’s choking on her own laughter. “I can’t believe you did that. And I can’t believe he replied to you.”
“I know. God, this is beyond humiliating.”
Tori makes a huffy sound. “No way. Don’t you see what a golden opportunity this is?”
“Um, what?”
“He messaged you back! Gage Grant messaged you back! Dude’s got, like, three million TikTok followers, and he actually replied to you. Becca, you have to message him.”
I’m sputtering. “No way. I’ve humiliated myself too much to ever reply to him.”
“You have no reason to be humiliated. Clearly he’s intrigued by you. You have to look at this as an opportunity to save your ice cream shop.”
Tori’s tone is firm, which means she’s dead serious.
“Yeah, maybe this all started as an embarrassing drunken moment, but this could be what ends up saving Sweet Cheeks. If Gage Grant can coach you on how to go viral on TikTok, this could mean serious money for Sweet Cheeks, just like you said in your DM to him.”
