I shake my head. “We hooked up a couple times, but we both agreed we’re not looking for anything exclusive.”
Her lips pucker and those silver eyes harden to steel. It looks like she’s got more to say on the subject, but instead, she lowers her guitar case to the floor and slips onto the stool. She looks right at me, holding my gaze as she starts to strum. And when she launches into Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats,” all my guts turn to lead.
So, it looks like a week is probably optimistic.
Carol comes by and I give her Brenda’s order, then mix Lilah’s rum and Coke and set it in front of her with a tip jar. She blasts through three more songs about dirtbag guys before she stops and chugs her drink.
“So, if you weren’t coming, what are you doing here?” I ask, refilling her glass with straight Coke.
“I need the money.” She messes with the tuning knobs at the end of her guitar and strums a few times.
“What did you do before you moved here?”
“Nothing but this,” she says with a wiggle of her guitar. “Me and a friend made bank in the BART stations.” She pulls her guitar into position, but her gaze stays on me. “What about you? Have you always tended bar?”
“Got out of the Marines two years ago.”
I watch her silver eyes flit over my arms and I feel them as if she was brushing her fingers over my tattooed skin. When they find mine again there’s something in them I can’t read. “How long were you in the Marines?”
“Six years.”
“Six years,” she repeats, her eyes widening.
“Two tours in Afghanistan.”
She nods slowly as her gaze combs over my face. “Glad you made it home safely.”
I blow out a laugh. “Me too.”
“Do you miss it?”
But before I can answer, the guy on the stool next to hers, who I’m now realizing I should have cut off two beers ago, starts unbuttoning his shirt and says, “Army. Got this in Iraq.”
He pulls open his shirt to reveal a scar on his stomach, and behind him, his two buddies elbow each other and stifle a laugh.
I look the guy over. There’s no way he’s older than me. Probably younger. “Where were you stationed?”
“Baghdad,” he says, still showing us his beer gut.
“Which camp?”
His eyes pull away from Lilah and he squints as he tries to focus his beer goggles on me. “Why do you care?”
“Because Army forces pulled out of Iraq in 2011. I don’t see how you’re old enough to have been there before that.”
His blurry eyes widen and then track back to Lilah as he stumbles off his stool. “He’s a fucking liar.” He lurches toward her as his buddies snicker under their breath.
I leap over the bar and pin him against it. “Don’t you lay a fucking hand on her.”
I grab him by the back of the neck and escort him to the door as he hurls a string of protests my direction. He resists when I haul him outside and pin him against the wall with a forearm across his throat.
“There’s nothing I hate more than lowlife posers. Good men died over there so you can jerk off in your own fucking bed every night. You stay the fuck out of my bar or next time you’ll leave bloody.”
His buddies stumble through the door just as I shove him out of my grasp and one of them grabs him by the arm to keep him from toppling. “C’mon, Mike.”
He grumbles something that I don’t bother to listen to as I slam back through the door.
Lilah is mid-song when I come back in and she gives me a look as I step around her to the tap to draw myself a beer. When she finishes, she says, “He was my best tipper.”
“He was dick,” I say, grabbing a fistful of green from my tip jar and shoving it into hers.
Carol slaps a drink order on the bar and I get to work on it. When I’m finished, I look up and my already boiling blood heats for a whole different reason with the way Lilah’s gaze rakes over my chest and abs. When it pauses at my belt buckle and she licks her lower lip, my cock predictably responds. So maybe a week isn’t out of the question after all.
She plays and I listen, feeling every fantasy I’ve had about her taking root in my dick. My T-shirt is a little too snug and short to hide the growing bulge in my jeans, so I don’t even try. I want her and I want her to know. No clearer way to demonstrate the point than to give my hard-on free rein.
A couple comes in and takes the stools Poser and his buddies where occupying. I set them up with a Greyhound and a Midori Sour. When I glance at Lilah, her eyes lift from my package to my eyes and there’s an unmistakable spark in them. She noticed. She shifts in her seat and her voice roughens even more on the refrain of “Take Your Time.” Don’t know who sings it, but it’s all over the radio the last few months. And the message in the song and all over her face tightens my cock even more.
I refill my beer and let the cocky smile spread. I take a quick sweep of the bar, clearing off a place that a guy has vacated and shoving his tip in Lilah’s jar.
“That was yours,” she says when she finishes her song.