“Hey, can I buy you a drink?” He touches my shoulder. He’stouchingmy shoulder. I glimpse from my palm to steal a glance at Lo. He looks detached from the situation, half his leg sliding off the stool, as though ready to go and give me space that he thinks I need.
“I didn’t get your name,” the guy adds. A redheaded girl beside me stands to leave, and I want to scream out for her to come back.Keep your butt in that seat!As she disappears, the guy scoots onto the stool, his body language open for me.
My luck has officially been thrown in the toilet bowl.
I lift my head, avoiding his bushy blond eyebrows and the stubble around his chin. Yep, he’s the guy I led to the bathroom. He’s the one who locked the stall, pulled down my panties, grunted and heard me moan. At least he looks twenty-something, but I can’t discern his exact age. I don’t ask. In fact, I don’t askanything.My confidence has sputtered out with my climax, and all I feel is the heat of shame blooming across my ears.
I manage to mumble an answer. “My name is Rose.” Albeit a lie.
Lo lets out a short laugh at this, and the guy puts an arm on the bar, leaning forward into my personal space to see my friend. “You two know each other?”
“You could say that,” Lo says, finishing off another beer. He motions to the lady bartender again.
“You’re not her ex or anything, are you?” the guy wonders, easing back just a little.Oh yes, please go away.
Lo wraps a hand around his new Berry Beer. “She’s all yours man. Have at her.”
I am slowly dying inside.
The guy nods to me. “I’m Dillon.”I don’t care. Please go away.He extends his hand with a giddy grin, maybe expecting a round two. Thing is, I don’t do round twos. Once I sleep with a guy, it ends there. Nothing more, ever again. It’s a personal rule that I’ve sustained thus far. I won’t break it, especially not forhim.
I shake his hand, not knowing exactly how to shoo him off without being rude. Some girls have an easy time with sayingno. Me on the other hand…
“What are you drinking?” He tries to flag down the male bartender who’s busy with serving a group of girls. One wears a tiara and anI’m 21!sash.
“Nothing,” I say just as a lady bartender in cut-off shorts and a cropped blue top stops in front of us.
“What can I get you?” she asks over the music.
Before I can add,I don’t drinkto the statement, Dillon says, “A rum and Fizz and a Blue Lagoon.”
“We only have blueberry rum,” she reminds him.
He nods. “That’s fine.”
She starts fixing up our orders, and I squeak out, “I actually don’t drink.”
His face drops. “You don’t drink?” The disbelief makes me question my normality. I guess a sober body in a club is hard to come by. “So…” He scratches his stubbly cheek. “You’re sober right now?”
I think I just died a second time. He thinks I’m a weirdo for having sober sex in a nightclub. My neck is turning violent red, and I want to stick my head in a hole. Or an ice bucket. “I drink,” I mumble under my breath. “Just not tonight. I’m driving.”
The bartender sets the blue cocktail on a napkin, and Dillon pushes it towards me. “Go ahead. You can always get a cab.” Ulterior motives glimmer in his eyes. He’s imagining what I’ll do drunk, considering I wasn’t too prudish sober. But that was before. And this is now—when my hunger to get laid has diminished considerably. At least with him.
“She doesn’t want it,” Lo snaps, clenching his fifth beer so tightly I think it might shatter.
“I thought you told me I could ‘have at her?’” Dillon asks, using air quotes for effect.
“That was before you started fucking with my ride home. I need her sober, so go find another girl to buy blue volcanoes for.”
“Blue Lagoon,” I correct him.
“Whatever,” Lo says into his swig of beer.
Dillon’s eyes darken. “She has a mouth. Let her speak for herself.”
Wow, this took a turn.
Lo rotates his body towards Dillon for the first time. “I bet you know all about that mouth, right?”
