Finn
On New Year’sEve Bax and I hit the Molly to shoot pool, drink beer, and watch bowl games on their big screen. Danny and Callahan weren’t rolling back into town until New Year’s Day—not that we could have counted on them to join us anyway. At least Callahan and Jamaica were public about their relationship. Danny was still pretending he was “just friends” with his high-school prom date—like any of us believed him.
I leaned on my cue and swigged a drink of beer as I watched Bax line up his shot. Right as he let go with his stick, I cleared my throat—loudly. Didn’t fuck up his aim even a millimeter, damn it. Two balls dropped into their respective pockets, and he stared me down with a sardonic expression.
“That all you got, Finnegan? Lame, dude.”
“’Bout as lame as your shirt.”
The T-shirt my teammate was wearing for this fine evening read “I am currently unsupervised. (I know. It freaks me out too.) The possibilities are endless.”
“Possibilities, my ass.” I glanced around the bar filled mostly with dateless guys exactly like the two of us. The few women in attendance didn’t hold much promise—not that either of us were in the mood to pick someone up. The server was cute and flirty, and on any other night, I might have tried to make a run at her. But phantom tingles of Chessly’s lips on mine haunted me, reminding me of how little I knew about kissing until she showed me and stole away any notion I might have entertained.
With a chuckle, Bax lined up another shot and dropped another ball into a corner pocket. At the rate he was going, that dollar resting on the table was going into his wallet.
Yeah, we played high-stakes pool.
His phone buzzed with a text right as he let go for his next shot. My antics had made zero impact on his concentration, but that vibration in the back pocket of his jeans sent the cue ball careening recklessly toward his target, grazing the seven ball rather than hitting it cleanly. It limped to the side of the table, gently bounced off the board, and rolled to a sad little stop an inch from the edge.
Bax’s eyes lit up as he read the text that stole his focus. He snorted a laugh and glanced up from his phone to me. “Piper and Chessly are having a good time tonight—especially Chessly, from the looks of it.”
He held out his phone so I could see the video Piper had sent him. Onscreen, I watched Chessly dancing on a tabletop in some bar. She did some hip-swinging move that emphasized her sexy short skirt. Black tights covered her endlessly long legs, and my mouth went dry as I remembered how perfectly those legs had wrapped around me when I pinned her beneath me on the couch.
I grabbed my friend’s wrist and poked the screen again for another round of torturing myself as I watched my dream girl entertaining a bar full of people cheering on her dance moves. This time I noticed the douche standing behind the table and obviously trying to see up her skirt. My hand flexed with the need to punch the perverted son of a bitch in the mouth. What the fuck did he think he was doing trying see up my girl’s skirt?
Mygirl?
In my dreams, for sure. But after the way the evening had ended the last time she was at the house, I worried about ever scoring another chance with her.
“It’s not that far to Harlo from here,” I said as I gave Bax his hand back.
“Right. We already established that in this weather—and in the dark—it’d take hours to make it there. By then the bars will be closed and Piper and Chessly will be—” His lips thinned. “Hopefully, they’ll be all tucked in at Chessly’s place.” He checked his phone again. “Piper says the dude in the background is someone from Chessly’s high school class and kind of a dick.”
“That much is obvious in the video,” I grumbled.
A tiny grin tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Piper’s tipsy, but she says they’re headed home with Chessly’s dad.”
At Bax’s pronouncement, air gusted out of me. From the looks of things, the girls were having a bigger night out than my buddy and me, but at least they weren’t hooking up with assholes from Chess’s hometown.
“Maybe it’s time for us to call it a night too. This place is making me feel kinda pathetic.” I finished off my beer and set the empty bottle on a nearby table.
“We’re kinda pathetic.” Bax laughed. “We still have a dollar on the table. Shoot your last shot. See if you can win it.”
“’Cause I need a buck that bad. Jesus.”
Still, I chalked my cue stick, lined up my shot, and banked the ball into the side pocket. Following that success, I ran the table. With a triumphant smirk, I waved the dollar with a flourish and stuffed it into my pocket. Bax rolled his eyes, but I caught his grin as he racked his cue stick.
“You should prolly add that buck to the ten-spot you’re leaving for the waitress.”
With a sigh I fished it out of my pocket. “Yeah. We might be pathetic, but that poor woman had to wait on all of us sad saps all night.”
I slipped my winnings and a ten-dollar bill beneath my empty beer bottle and followed Bax to the door where some girl met him and tried to chat him up. Bax stammered something about it being nice to see her again, but we were on our way out. Her whine of protest was one we’d all heard at some time or other with girls we had no intention of hanging out with. The boys—and a certain hot physics major—thought I harbored an unhealthy interest in jersey chasers, but even I had standards when it came to girls with a propensity for clinging. It took him a minute, but Bax finally dredged up the girl’s name. From the sound of it, “Emily” was a first-class clinger.
I knew my friend well. If I didn’t step in and fix this, Bax and I would either be stuck with two girls we didn’t want to be with, or “Emily” would pop off with a social media tantrum that could do real damage.
In one of my rare moments of smoothness, I said, “Ladies, any other night, we’d jump all over what you’re offering. But Coach has us doing a team-bonding thing tomorrow.” I added an epic eye roll for emphasis. “He doesn’t want us twisting off and getting into trouble on New Year’s, you know?” Throwing my arm across Bax’s shoulders, I tugged him with me to the door. “Sorry we can’t hang out.”
The Emily girl seemed only marginally mollified. Her mousy friend looked starstruck, but like her friend, she only had eyes for Bax. The door to the Molly closed on their last protests as Bax and I escaped into the frigid snowy night.
