“Gaveyouher number, you mean. I was just the middleman.” The bartender returns with our drinks, and I take a sip. “Did you ever call her?” I ask.
Torren chokes on his drink, droplets pouring down his chin. He sets the glass on the bar and snags a cocktail napkin to wipe his face. “No! Of course not!”
“I bet she’d be wild in the sack. After decades of bad sex with a Winston Churchill lookalike? She’d break you in half.”
Torren reels back and guffaws, causing everyone around us to look over. I beam with pride. I mean, Iamhilarious, but he’s not exactly Mr. Sunshine, so I take it as a great compliment.
“He did look like Winston Churchill,” Torren says once his laughter has died down.
I take in my surroundings once more. “So, this is your place,huh?”
“It’s Tobias’s, really. I don’t do much with the Hellcats anymore.”
His past is shrouded in mystery, and I’m dying to know more about it. “Why’s that?” I ask.
Torren thinks for a moment and shrugs. “I guess I wanted something else.”
“What did you want?”
His gaze meets mine, and then a sad look washes over his face. “A normal life. But, I think that’s impossible.”
“Why? You’ve got the shop. You’re doing your thing. Why can’t you have the life you want?”
Torren cups his glass and examines the liquid inside. “Some people just can’t be normal.”
I know the feeling.“There’s no such thing as normal. Everyone is fucked up to a degree.”
Torren chuckles and says, “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” He takes a sip from his glass and asks, “You’re feeling better? You seem much better than a couple of weeks ago.”
“Much better. I kind of feel like my old self again now that I’ve stopped the pills.”
Torren narrows his eyes and asks, “Can I ask what kind of pills you were on?”
Torren
My brain’s on high alert as Felix waves a dismissive hand. “Oh, they put me on meds after my mom died. It’s nothing, really, but they make me feel awful. I stopped taking them shortly after you saw me at the press conference.”
Grilling him about these pills is definitely not the “fun time” I promised him, so I don’t want to press, but I can’t help but ask, “Does your dad know you stopped taking them?”
Felix takes a sip of his drink, eyeing me with suspicion. “No. Are you going to tell him?”
“Absolutely not,” I blurt out. “If they made you feel that bad, I’m glad you stopped. You didn’t look like yourself.”
Felix nods, his gaze fixed on the floor, and mutters, “I didn’t feel like myself, which was probably the point.”
His eyes widen, like he hadn’t meant to say that out loud, and he quickly changes the topic. “So, I see a band setting up. What kind of music will they play?”
My lips curl into a devious little grin. “How wild do you want to get tonight?”
Felix is visibly taken aback by that comment. “Jesus, are they the soundtrack to some kind of motorcycle gang orgy?”
I laugh and shake my head. “Nah, but they’re wild. They’re called theFag Hounds,and they play mostly covers of punk songs, but they sprinkle in some mellow stuff here and there. Have you ever been in a mosh pit?”
He chokes on his drink and screams, “Awhat?”
“Ever crowd surfed?” I add.
“No!”
