At any rate, now that Dalton was here, Koen could go back to his friends, no longer feeling the need to be charitable.If he didn’t play pool, then there really was no reason for him to hang out over here any longer.With his good deed done for the day, it was time for him to head back to his side of the tracks with his black hair, grey eyes, and perfect face.
“Since you were cheating, you get to rack them first,” Dalton announced, making me smile, despite how I’d just been insulted not five minutes ago.
I turned towards Koen, praying that he couldn’t see right through me.“Well, I’m sure your friends are wondering where you went off to,” I joked.“Plus, it’d be great if you can let Leandra know that Dalton’s here, so that she’s free to make other plans if she wants.”
He looked a bit surprised, but then he quickly recovered.“Oh, yeah...sure.”
I smiled to soften the obvious dismissal.“It was nice meeting you, Koen.”
“You, too,” he replied before giving Dalton one of those universal male head nods.
As soon as he was out of earshot, Dalton asked, “What was that all about?”
I started racking the billiards, hoping that he wasn’t going to make a big deal out of it, but I knew him too well.“I think he was feeling sorry for me,” I answered.“A couple of his friends invited Leandra to go join them, so I think he was just trying to be nice.”
“Because, of course, she had to go,” he scoffed.
“Stop it,” I chided.“I told her that it was okay.”
“And she could just as easily have said no, Rya,” he argued.“Instead, she left you sitting alone, so that random dick could fawn all over her.”
“That’s not fair, Dalton,” I said as I rounded the table to give him room to break.“She knew that you were coming, and she also knows that you don’t care for her much.”
“It really blows my mind that you can defend her like that when she has absolutely no regard for you,” he replied coldly.“In all the time that we’ve been hanging out, I’ve yet to see her think about anyone other than herself.’
While he was wrong about what was inside Leandra’s heart, he wasn’t wrong about Leandra’s behavior.For whatever reason, Leandra let Dalton bring out the worst in her, and so she acted accordingly whenever he was around.She acted like a flighty blonde, and she never made any effort to correct Dalton’s assumptions of her.
“I also think you’re wrong about Casanova,” he went on.
“What are you talking about?”I asked as the jerkoff sunk both a stripe and a solid.
“Solids,” he called just to punish me for practicing without him.“C’mon, Rya.The guy looked like he just lost his dog when you dismissed him.”
“Now you’re just being ridiculous,” I muttered as Dalton began cleaning up the felt.“He was just being nice.”
Just then, Leandra came flouncing over with a big smile on her face, and a part of me wondered if she did it just to piss Dalton off.Again, no matter what she put off to the public, Leandra was a pretty sharp cookie, and so it wasn’t like she wasn’t self-aware.
“So, it’s Ivan and Netti’s anniversary, and they’re the couple at the small table,” she said, rattling on as if we knew these people.“And the other guys are Teddy, Joseph, Aaron, and Koen.The other two girls are Natalie and Casey.”
“And we care, why?”Dalton drawled out, and though it was rude as hell, he wasn’t wrong to ask why we’d care about complete strangers.
“Because if Rya comes over to join us, then it’ll even out the numbers,” she announced.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”Dalton bit out.
Leandra’s blue eyes flashed with a bit of contempt as she said, “Oh, c’mon.It’s not like you can’t find someone here to entertain you, Dalton.”
“While that might be true, I didn’t come here for pussy,” he said, not bothering to deny his sex appeal.“I came out to hang out with my friends.At least, that’s what I’d been led to believe.”
“Like you care if I hang out with you guys or not,” Leandra retorted.“If you did, then you wouldn’t always play pool, knowing that I don’t know how to play.”
“C’mon, Leandra,” I said softly.“That’s not fair.We’ve offered to teach you plenty of times.”
Ignoring that, she said, “I just thought that it’d be fun if you joined us, Rya.That’s all.”
I wanted to tell her about the earlier insult, but I knew that Dalton would lose his shit if I did, and I didn’t want to ruin the night like that.However, I also didn’t want her to feel like I was choosing Dalton over her, either.I considered them both my friends, and it really was a delicate balance with the two.
“Leandra, if I went over there, it would put too much pressure on everyone to hook up, and that doesn’t sound fun to me in the least,” I told her, half-ass telling the truth.“I really didn’t come out for that anyway.”
