Drinking I could do.
So I hurriedly put on some jeans and a ratty old collegeT-shirt, grabbed my Jeep keys, and hurried out the door. I should have brought an umbrella—or at least my raincoat—because by the time I got to the parking lot, it was pouring here, too.
The drive down into Odette took maybe ten minutes, and I white-knuckled it the whole way, plotting how best to murder Myke with ay, dentist idiot extraordinaire. At least it distracted me from Rus.
The trees bent ominously as the storm came in, lightning crawling across the skies like centipedes. Driving anywhere in this kind of storm was reckless. Maybe it would be best to stay at the Wharf until most of the weather blew over.
I could use a drink after a day like today, anyway, because in my head I kept replaying his kisses. The way he cradled my face. The way he had whispered against my lips—
I have been starving, I think.
The words curled hungry and hot in my belly. Something I wasn’t accustomed to. Something that scared me in its intensity—scared me not because I was afraid of it, but because I wasn’t.
Not in the way I told myself to be.
“Stop it,” I muttered, curling my hands around the steering wheel tighter.
I found street parking for the dive bar and ran inside. Not that it mattered—even though I’djusttaken a shower, I was muddy, wet, and sweaty. Again.
A work of art, obviously.
There weren’t many people in the Wharf, thankfully, aside from a group of men playing pool and Wykofski with his banjo and his hodgepodge band, all looking like he got them from Craigslist that morning, so Juliette was easy to spot at the bar,drawing flowers into the condensation on her beer bottle. She’d ordered two beers already and had requested One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful” from Wykofski, and apparently every other hit song from their discography. The bartender looked like he was debating whether he was in a horror movie or a rom-com.
Neither, sadly.
I came up to the bar and climbed onto the stool beside Juliette. She didn’tlookterribly destroyed, only a little wet and sad. “Hi there,” I greeted her gently.
She glanced over at me, then returned to morosely drawing flowers on her bottle. “Hi,” she mumbled.
I shifted on the barstool. “Wykofski’s kinda good, isn’t he?”
“He’s great. He’s always great,” she said dourly, and huffed, wiping the flowers away with her thumb. “I feel so dumb, Sunny.”
“You arenotdumb,” I told her.
“Mmh.”
“He’sdumb.”
“He’s not dumb.”
“And neither are you,” I said adamantly.
She lowered her head. “Thank you.”
I motioned to the bartender for a drink and told Juliette we should stay awhile. There was a storm raging outside, after all, and I drove aJeep. “Not very seaworthy,” I added in all seriousness, and ordered two shots of whatever was cheapest, because even working as the head gardener of a historic house and garden didn’t pay as much as you’d think.
The bartender poured us two shots of cheapass Jimmie Beam, and I slid over my credit card to open a tab. I raised myshot glass, and so did Juliette. In the corner, Wykofski howled about “Night Changes.”
“To hoping all of Myke with ay’s teeth rot out,” I declared.
“Cavity-pocalypse,” she agreed.
We clinked our glasses and downed them.
I winced at the taste. It never got better, not in college, and certainly not now. On the other hand, Juliette took it without a blink. I had a feeling she could drink many of the men here under the table. She seemed like the unexpected person who could. Harriett loved surprises like that—people who you assume one thing of, but it turns out you were wrong. She loved being wrong. It was ironic, really, because she rarely was.
When I first met Juliette, she reminded me of Harrie in how different they were. Cherry ChapStick instead of mint, kitten heels instead of sensible flats, bright colors instead of muted tones. They were like reflections of each other in a funhouse mirror.
