I roll my eyes at him. “Don’t be a wuss.”
He laughs.
The waitress quickly comes back with the shots.
“No wuss zone. Drink up, Parker,” Jamison says to Noah and then clinks my glass to his.
I throw back the shot. Then I notice the woman with honey-colored hair. She looks like her, and my pulse creeps up.
I stand up quickly, knocking over my chair and take a few steps. I grasp the back of her shoulder. “Billie?”
The woman turns around. She isn’t Billie.
“I’m so sorry. I thought you were someone else.”
She bats her eyes at me and smiles. “That’s okay.”
I sulk back to the table. “Shit. I will never find her.”
“Stop searching for her. You’re not with her. You don’t want her,” Chase says.
I glare at him. “Don’t tell me what I want or don’t want.”
He’s about to say something else when the staff in the restaurant start singing “Happy Birthday,” and a cake with the number thirty-five on it is placed in front of me.
How the hell am I thirty-five?
The candles are flickering, and the guys are singing along with the staff when all the anger, frustration, confusion, and desperation I’ve felt the last month comes to the surface. I pick up my pint of beer and dump it on top of the cake.
The staff stops singing.
“Have you lost your mind, Xander?” Chase stands up quickly as the beer drips off the table and onto his pants.
“Yeah, motherfucker, I have lost my mind, in case you haven’t been paying attention,” I yell at him.
“Get a grip, man,” Chase yells back.
I land a punch right in the middle of his nose. He steps back for a minute then comes back at me, and his fist collides with the side of my chin.
There is a ton of commotion and loud noise as people scream. Noah and Jamison are dragging us away from each other, and Chase and I are yelling.
Within minutes, the cops are in the restaurant, and Chase and I are being pulled out to the back alley. Jamison follows, and Noah is nowhere to be seen.
When we get outside, one cop demands, “What are you two thinking?”
“It’s just a misunderstanding among friends, Simon,” Chase mutters.
“It will kill me to arrest you two. You better hope Noah can clean up your mess,” the other cop says.
They seem like they know us, but I’ve never seen them before. I glance at Jamison for answers.
“Crandle, can I talk to you a minute?”
The cop named Crandle and Jamison step away, leaving Chase, Simon, and myself.
“Xander, you could be in massive trouble with the medical board for this. What are you thinking, throwing punches in a restaurant?” Simon asks.
“I’m sorry, butdo I know you?”
