The bartender blinks, nods, and gets to work.
I lean in closer, voice low enough that only he hears it. “Two drinks. Then I carry you upstairs.”
His thighs twitch around me. His mouth opens. “Yes, sir.”
Elias snatches the drink, ice clinking in the glass as he holds it up with both hands and beams. It’s yellow. Mango fucking yellow. With a bendy straw. And an umbrella.
I stare at it. Then I stare at him. “Are you twelve?” I ask, voice flat as cement.
“It has rum in it!” he defends instantly, all wide green eyes and wounded innocence.
“It’s a slushie,” I deadpan. “You ordered an alcoholic slushie.”
“You said fruity…” he whines, sipping it through the damn straw with both hands like a delinquent smoothie addict. “It’s so fruity.”
Jesus Christ.
I kiss him before he can dig himself deeper. Just lean in and claim his mouth, slow and filthy, swallowing the sticky-sweet taste right off his tongue. He gasps into it, lips parting easy, one hand still holding the drink while the other curls around my neck. His body leans into mine like muscle memory, between my hands, under my mouth, in my goddamn jacket.
When I finally pull back, his pupils are blown. “Hollywood’s trying to flirt with your alternate again,” he murmurs against my ear.
I don’t even look. “Jealous?”
“No,” Elias hums, wrapping both arms tighter around my neck, hips nudging closer like he belongs pressed to my belt buckle. “Just wondering he’s gonna give up. Viktor hasn’t looked at him once.”
Not true. Viktor looked once, when Cole slipped during warmups and landed flat on his ass. Smirked. Just barely. Cole’s been chasing that smirk ever since.
I huff a laugh, curling one arm around Elias’ back, the other ghosting down his thigh. “Give it time,” I murmur, dragging my lips against the shell of his ear. “Some of us like the long game.”
Elias shivers, straw halfway to his mouth. His drink glows mango-yellow in the low light. My good boy, sipping a slushie like a brat and watching the room like he’s already captain. He could be wearing my ring, my number, my name tattooed across his chest, he’d still find a way to make it look like his idea.
Elias is one and a half slushies in. Which, for anyone else, would be barely a warmup. For Elias? It’s catastrophic. Because the brat doesn’t just get tipsy, he gets lethal. Legs swinging off the bar, lips slick with mango slush, curls stuck to his forehead from heat and bad decisions. He finishes the last sip with a ridiculous slurp and looks me dead in the eye. “You know…” he purrs, dripping with alcohol and chaos, “if you bent me over the bar, I wouldn’t even mind the ice cubes.”
He’s going to kill me.
Cole chokes on his beer and launches himself behind Shane. Tyler actually drops a chip.
I don’t move. Not even when Elias drapes himself all the way across my chest, one leg sliding up the outside of mine. His arms loop around my neck, and suddenly I’m wearing a tipsy twenty-year-old like a second skin, his mouth right at my ear. “I do look really good in your jacket, don’t I?” he whispers, smirking like he didn’t just say that out loud in front of three teammates and a terrified bartender. “Bet you want to peel it off with your teeth.”
I inhale once. Then I down the last of my whiskey in a single swallow and slam the glass on the bar. “No more drinks,” I growl. “We’re leaving.”
Elias blinks, innocent. “Already?”
“You’re drunk.”
“I’m flirty,” he purrs, full brat mode now, batting his lashes. “Don’t you like it when I flirt, Cap?”
My cock twitches, and that’s the end of it. I lift him clean off the bar, one hand under his thighs, the other wrapped around his back and start carrying him out. He squeals, clutching the empty mango glass.
Cole yells behind us, “I did not buy him that second one!”
Shane mutters, “Dead man walking,” and raises his drink in a mock toast.
Elias, meanwhile, nuzzles into my neck, giggling like he’s already halfway home. “You’re hard,” he whispers, smug as sin.
“You’re getting gagged the second we hit the elevator.”
“Promises,” he sings, fluttering his lashes.
