He restrained himself from hooking air quotes around the last word, but Nate could still hear it in his voice. “Thanks,” he said dryly.
Max gave him a minimalist shrug. “I better get back to work.” He slapped Nate on the shoulder on the way past. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“He might be a bit late,” Flynn warned, his voice licked with something dark and suggestive.
Max laughed.
“I’m never late,” Nate explained. “He’s been late on purpose to everything since he was ten, and to make up for it, I’m pathologically punctual.”
Flynn caught Nate’s wrist and tugged him a step closer. “You’ve not dated me before.”
“You’re that good?”
He ran a callused hand up Nate’s arm and back down again in an idle, skin-prickling caress. His mouth curved in a slow, intent smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes. A spark of humor was caught in the gray. “Naw. But I don’t have a clock in the lighthouse.”
It wasn’t that funny. Somehow it still cracked Nate up. He laughed until he had to lean against the bar and blink the tears out of his eyes. Over the years, between him and Max, they’d called Flynn a lot of things, but neither of them had ever thought he might be funny.
“Sorry about Max,” he said once he got his snickers under control. “He means… well, to be honest, he just doesn’t like you.”
“Yeah. It’s mutual.” Flynn picked up the beer by the neck of the bottle and tilted it so he could regard the label dubiously. His eyebrows rose. “He knows I’m driving, right?”
“I don’t think you can get drunk on these.”
“Nonalcoholic?” Flynn took a swig and nearly choked on it. He managed not to spit it out, but his face twisted unhappily as he swallowed.
“No, it’s just rank,” Nate said. He took both bottles and slid them down the bar. “We have distilleries making good gin and passable whiskey, but Max somehow finds the farmers making beer in the pig shed.”
He leaned over the bar and craned his neck until he caught the eye of one of the staff. The dark young man paused in the middle of pouring a beer and held up a finger in a promise to be there in a minute. It took a second, but a glossy man on the other side of the bar was already complaining about people who jumped the line.
“So, save anyone today?” Nate asked as he dropped back onto his heels.
Flynn scratched the stubble on his jaw. “Nothing quite that bad,” he said. “I pulled a guy with a broken arm out of the sea, and then some local kid got stuck on the cliff going after gull eggs.”
It sounded better than Nate’s day. He’d failed to put Teddy off his latest crazy plan and had to provide an increasingly soggy shoulder to a bride whose groom had stood her up. Not at the altar—he still planned to be there—but work commitments meant she had to ride the ferry over without him. Not the start to her fairy-tale week that either she or Nate had planned.
“I used to do that,” Nate said. “Go after gull eggs, I mean, not rescue people.”
Flynn looked Nate up and down, from knees to curls. “Can’t imagine you scrambling up and down the rocks.”
“I wanted to impress boys, and I wasn’t good at sports,” Nate said. “Stealing bird’s eggs was the only other option.”
“How’d that work out?”
“Not as well as you’d think,” Nate said with a solemn nod.
The barman, beer drawn, brought them two artisan, hand-squeezed pink lemonades from behind the bar. It was what Nate usually drank when he was working a late-night party. People celebrating could be quite pushy about someone joining them for a drink, and the tart, cloudy liquid could pass as something boozy. Nate absently thanked the guy and shoved one glass toward Flynn.
“I never got an egg,” he admitted. “Or a date.”
“Not sure that getting an egg would have helped the dating thing,” Flynn said. “Growing up hot was probably the better choice for you.”
It wasn’tthatgood a line, just like it hadn’t been that good a joke earlier, but Nate still felt his ears flush hot at the compliment. He smirked and leaned against the bar.
“After turning gray before I was twenty, I needed a win,” he said. “Leaving the island helped a lot too. The gay guys here were either too young, too old, or Max.”
They both looked down the bar to where Max was juggling cocktail shakers for a clutch of drunk ladies who were all wearing pastel variations of the same floral dress.
“I can see how that would put you off,” Flynn deadpanned. He took a gulp of his lemonade and made a face as the sour taste hit the back of his tongue. “So how many of these dates do you think it will take before we can wrap this up?”
Back when it first went viral, Nate had done the ice-bucket challenge. It felt a lot like this. He coughed to buy himself a second and wondered when it had slipped his mind that it wasn’t a date and they weren’t flirting. The lemonade should have given that away.
“I think Max is already on board with us breaking up,” he said. “So hopefully not too many.”
They toasted to it with a clink of glass. The lemonade tasted even more bitter than usual. Nate put the tumbler down and nudged it away from him.
Maybe the bar had gotten a bad bottle of grenadine.
