For once, a memory of Mia doesn’t make me feel tight and restless.
Taking a sip, I immediately register my mistake. It’s so sweet I almost don’t want to swallow. “Nope,” I manage once I’ve forced it down. “Still not my drink.”
The bar is dead and London leans forward on her elbows, thinking. “Well, what can I make you instead? Do you like gin?”
“Marginally.”
“Scotch?”
I sigh, wincing because I actually hate this question. “I feel like I should, because it’s such a manly drink and I have such an amazing penis”—London snorts—“but sadly, no. I don’t like scotch.”
She pats my head with a little smile before standing. “I’ve got you. Hold, please.”
It takes every muscle in my body clenching to keep from launching from the bar chair and hurling over the bar to kiss her. It’s like I’ve opened the back door and let the swarm in.
Burst the dam.
Turned on the fire hose.
I’m completely into this girl.
But the problem with Dad’s advice is that I know London isn’t into me the same way, and that asking her out, or even trying to convince her to come home with me, would only send her packing.
The other problem with Dad’s advice is that I don’t know that I want to date London. No, that isn’t exactly right. I don’t know that I should date her. I feel too close to my nightmare hookup from last week. I don’t want my brain to lump London in with the masses, to fall back onto easy, casual patterns with her. It’s claustrophobic to feel the immediacy of all the other girls I’ve slept with even when I’m sitting just a few feet from a girl I genuinely like.
I’m covered in a film of my poor decisions, and even though I want to blast it off, I’m starting to fear it will be a more gradual process of wearing it down, filing it away. Learning from it.
I watch her work, mixing up one, then two, and then I see five drinks lined up on a tray. She lifts it, turning, and carefully slides it down on the bar in front of me. “We’re doing this the scientific way,” she says. “Close your eyes.”
I close my eyes, and then something occurs to me: “You’re not going to dump these over my head, are you?”
Her husky little laugh makes an entire body’s worth of blood rush to my dick. “No, Luke, I am not going to dump perfectly good liquor over your head.”
“Because I’m having a good hair day, Logan.”
“I see that.” She places a tumbler in my hand. “Sip.”
I lift it, smell it, and immediately shake my head. “I can’t do tequila. I did a bazillion body shots junior year and I think I lost my spleen one night in a toilet.”
“God, you’re a catch,” she says dryly, taking the glass from my hand and replacing it with another.
I sip this one. “Jack? Even with the Coke, it’s all I can taste. This is a soft pass for me.”
“Let me guess: drunk, bad-decision sex followed by an epic hangover?”
For once, I wish that were the case.
“No, just a lot of associations . . .” Mia, I don’t say. The first night we ever got drunk, it was on Jack and Cokes. When I open my eyes and look at London, smiling apologetically, I can already see that she’s read my mind.
“I think your Jack Daniel’s is my J?germeister,” she says quietly.
Scrunching my nose, I tell her, “People don’t really drink J?ger, do they?”
“You’d be surprised. Okay, close your eyes again.” I do what she tells me and feel my skin grow tight when her hand accidentally brushes mine. “You’re a tough customer.” London places another drink in my hand. “Try this.”
7-Up and some kind of orange-flavored booze. Vodka, maybe. I feel my face pucker at the sugar. “Way too sweet. Worse than the amaretto sour.”
She hands me another and when she speaks, her voice is confident, if a little distracted. “Okay, okay, sorry, that one was a joke. Time to end this. This is your drink.”
I lift the glass and take a sip. It’s smooth as glass on my tongue, heavy and viscous, tart with lime. Fuck, it’s good. “What is this?”
“Vodka gimlet.”
I open my eyes and look at her. She’s already cleared away the other drinks and is watching my mouth with a glazed look on her face. When she realizes my eyes are open, she blinks away.