Thank God I had said I was leaving first.
I didn’t know him well enough to decide whether he was being unfriendly because he didn’t want to have anything to do with me in public or if today was just not the day for small talk. Then again, once he realized who I was, his expression had just turned guarded. Why, who the hell knew?
Slightly more embarrassed than I had been minutes before—I should have just pretended not to see him, damn it—with my drink in hand, I made the walk along the edge of the bar toward my original seat. I’d barely sat down when I faintly heard Ginny’s voice over the loud music. A moment later, the seat next to me was pulled out and so was the one on the other side of her.
“Sorry, sorry,” she apologized, scooting the stool forward as the blond man she’d called her cousin did the same at the stool beside her.
I shrugged, shoving the moment with my neighbor to the back of my mind. I wasn’t going to let it bother me. There wasn’t anything worth bothering me about the situation. Good for him not being a giant whore, I guess, if that was why he hadn’t been friendly. “It’s okay.”
And then, of course, the blond named Trip leaned forward and tipped his chin up at me. “You know Dallas?”
“The guy over there or the city?” I asked, gesturing toward the end of the bar with a quick and not-so-inconspicuous head jerk.
He nodded with a grin. “The man, not the city.”
“Uh-huh. We’re neighbors.”
That had Ginny turning her red head to look in the direction we’d both gestured to. I could tell her eyes narrowed.
“No shit?” Trip asked, bringing his mug of beer to his mouth.
“He’s two houses down, across the street.”
“You’re across from Miss Pearl?”
How the hell he knew who Miss Pearl was, I didn’t understand. “Yep.”
“I remember seeing a for sale sign up in front of that house. How ‘bout that.”
Someone knew my neighbor well.
Meanwhile, I noticed that Ginny was still trying to look over at the other side of the bar to search whom we’d been originally talking about. I touched her elbow and, with my palm flat to the surface of the bar, pointed right at my neighbor pretty damn discreetly if I did say so myself. “The guy in the white shirt.”
Then she turned to look at me over her shoulder, her eyes a little too shrewd. “You live across the street from him?”
“You know him too?”
“I didn’t…” She flubbed her words before shaking her head and using her thumb to gesture to the blond beside her. “He’s our cousin.”
That man was Ginny’s cousin? Really? She had never, ever mentioned him before. I’d pegged him to be about forty, right around her age. The same age as I figured the cute blond on her other side might be also.
“So, you cut hair too?” Trip asked, ending Ginny’s explanation of the man at the end of the bar, damn it. I could always ask her about it later… maybe. After the way he’d just been, I wasn’t exactly interested in hearing his life story. Plus, he was married. Married. I wouldn’t roll down that hill even if he’d been interested. Which he hadn’t. It was fine. I wasn’t interested either.
“Yes,” I answered, focusing on the blond’s question, even as Ginny snorted into her beer. “I prefer hair artiste, but yeah.” Doing hair color was my favorite and what I made more than half my money off, but who needed to be specific?
“You wanna cut mine?” the flirt just went ahead and asked.
I scrunched up my nose and smiled. “No.”
The big laugh that bubbled out of him made me grin.
“It’s nothing personal, I promise,” I explained, smiling at him and Ginny, feeling a little like a jerk for how that had come out.
Ginny’s cousin shook his head as he continued cracking up, his handsome face getting that much more good-looking. “Nah. I get it. I’ll go cry in the bathroom.”
My boss groaned as she put her beer mug up to her face, rolling her eyes. “Don’t believe anything that comes out of his mouth.”
“I wasn’t going to.” I winked at her, earning us another laugh from the only man talking to us.
“Fuck, you two are brutal.”
We didn’t even have to say “thank you.” Ginny and I grinned at each other over his compliment that wasn’t supposed to be one. I had just sat back into my stool when, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted my neighbor’s face. He was looking right at us.
Before I could process that, Trip leaned his forearm onto the counter, catching my attention once more, and asked, “What did you say your name was again?”
Chapter Five
Fuck.
Ginny pulled the words right out of my mouth. “Why is it so bright out today?”
I squinted against the shaft of sunlight beaming through the glass doors and windows of the shop. Despite suffering through the worst of my hangover yesterday, I still wasn’t back at 100 percent after our drinking fest. My head ached and my mouth still tasted faintly like a dead animal.
God, I was getting old. Five years ago, I wouldn’t still be feeling like shit almost forty-eight hours after going out.
“I’m never drinking again,” I muttered to the redhead who had woken up on my couch the day before.
“Me neither,” she moaned, practically hissing as the door to Shear Dialogue swung open and even brighter sunshine poured into the salon at eleven in the morning as Sean, the other stylist, stepped inside with his phone to his ear. He gave us a chin dip in greeting, but we were both too busy acting like we were Dracula’s children to care.
God.
Why did I do this to myself? I knew better. Hell, of course I knew better than to drink so much in one night, but after we’d left the biker bar, aptly named Mayhem, in a cab together—because there was no way either one of us had any business behind the wheel of a car—we’d gone on to drink a bottle of wine each.
When I’d woken up the day before on my stomach and felt that first stir of nausea and flu-like symptoms hit my body, I’d promised God that, if he made my nausea and headache go away, I would never drink again. Apparently, I had to accept that he knew I was a damn liar and wasn’t going to do a single thing to ease my suffering. My mom had always said you could lie to yourself, but you couldn’t fool God.
“Why did you make me drink that entire bottle of wine?” Ginny had the nerve to ask.
Slumping deeper into my work chair, I slanted a look in her direction. I didn’t trust my neck to do what I requested. “I didn’t make you do anything. You were the one who said you wanted your own, remember? ‘I don’t want white. I want red.’”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Of course you don’t remember it.”
She let out a snicker that made me smile until my head hurt worse.
“I don’t know how we’re going to make it through the rest of the day.”