Chapter 8
EIGHT
Kay was sure her night couldn’t get any worse.
Ha.
Tempting fate.
She really was asking for it, wasn’t she?
The waiter returned and slid her an apologetic wince before he turned back to Doctor McMichael Macmillan who was still squished up beside her.
“Mister M-”
“Doctor,” his voice practically dripped with a caustic tone, “it’s Doc-tor Macmillan.”
The waiter nodded and rectified his mistake. “Doctor Macmillan, I’m sorry, but I need to ask you if you have another form of payment. Your card has been declined.”
The air in their corner of the bar was somehow sucked out of the room and Kay averted her gaze hoping that she would just fade away and become invisible.
She didn’t like the man at all, but really, who wanted to have someone else witness one of those really embarrassing moments?
McMichael sputtered at the waiter, but it was only a few moments later when the doctor who’d all but attached himself to her side, slid out from behind the table and stood up from the banquette bench with a lift of his chin and heavily muttered, “Well, I’ll just have to see how the waiter messed this up. ”
She tried to give him a smile but had no idea if she’d actually managed the friendly gesture. Then she sat back heavily against the bench when he was gone.
It took her a moment to realize that she still didn’t have a drink.
“What will I have to do to get a drink around here?”
Laughing she lifted her head to take a look at the room and froze.
There was a man standing at the bar across the room and he was looking at her.
It was a heart stopping moment later that she realized it was Gibson!
He'd mentioned that he was going to a wedding over the weekend, but he hadn't said that the wedding was in Chicago.
Not that it was an issue.
She hadn't told him she was headed to Chicago either.
He certainly stood out in the crowded bar. While the doctors who were there were all wearing suits and dressed to impress, the suit that Gibson was wearing fit him well.
Very well.
Okay, who was she kidding. He looked good in anything he wore, but a suit?
Kay really regretted that she didn't have a cold drink to lift and touch her cheek to cool down with.
He was hot.
Gibson lifted a hand in a wave and then he lifted his brows and gestured toward her and the table.
She was about to nod at him and share her table, but she saw the 'twins' start to walk in her direction and she panicked.
Kay stood and walked across the room as quickly as she could.
Amazingly, a path seemed to open up in front of her, but she almost brushed past one of the twins as she moved.
She could tell that Gibson was as surprised as she was to see each other, but it was in a way an incredible relief to see a familiar face in the crowd.
When she finally reached his side, she had to take a step back to look directly into his eyes. “Hi.”
His smile was broad, and his eyes shone with something like humor, but after their last meeting, she wasn't exactly sure.
“Hi.” He replied back and angled a look over her shoulder. “I thought you might get waylaid back there.”
Grinning even more, she gave him a sly look. “Almost, but I managed to escape their insidious tractor beam of boredom.”
“Tractor beam.” He repeated and for a moment she wondered if she’d just outed herself as a geek.
Something they hadn't really talked about before.
“So, Star Trek or Star Wars?”
She searched his face for some kind of judgement, but his expression would have suited him well in a poker game. Passive. No, curious.
She watched him take a sip of his drink and decided to speak the truth. “Both.”
His answering smile was encouraging, but his words gave her hope that she wasn’t destined for a crappy end to her night.
“What about Galaxy Quest?”
“Another all-time favorite.”
He looked down at her empty hand on the bar top. “No drink?”
She sighed and shook her head. “That was what I came in here for, but I kept getting sucked into-”
“Tractor beams of boredom?”
They laughed together and he reached over the bar and picked up a laminated sheet of paper. She caught a whiff of scent and closed her eyes to inhale it.
She hadn't smelled that particular scent on him before, but then again, he was dressed to the nines and at her home they'd been in casual clothes.
Kay had to drop her head and clear her throat to keep from being caught when he stood back up.
“Here.”
Here?
She looked from his smiling face to the paper he held in front of her.
Taking it in her hand she couldn’t help the little happy sound she made as she saw it was the menu of craft cocktails from the bar. “This is what I needed.” She skimmed her gaze over the paper. "These look amazing!"
“That’s what the bartender told me." He leaned in a little closer. "Go ahead and pick one, my treat.”
She heard his deeper voice and basked in the feelings it gave her.
“Hmm,” she looked at the menu and saw a number of great options, but there was one that caught her interest more than the others, keeping her attention even after reading through the whole list.
“Picked one?”
She smiled up at him and then shook her head. “I did, but you don’t have to get me a drink.”
A little line creased the skin between his eyebrows, and she winced.
Trust her to take a sweet moment and ruin it.
“Let me? Please? I really just want to do something nice for you.”
His words hit her square in the heart.
She really wanted to accept the offer, but she was also having a hard time with the idea that Gibson was being so kind to her when she had cut him off the last time they'd seen each other.
“I’d like to say yes,” she tried to find a reason to accept it, but she was so used to sabotaging herself it was almost second nature, “but I don’t want you to feel obligated since you offered.”
His shoulders shook with silent laughter, but it didn’t feel like he was laughing at her. Well, not in a bad way.
She started laughing too. “What?”
“Just accept the drink, Kay.”
She put the menu on the bar top and leaned in closer. "I feel horrible about the way I talked to you at my house. I wasn't in my right headspace, but I never should have said that to you."
He shook his head and put his hand on the bar top just a few inches away from hers, but she felt like she could feel his warmth.
"Kay, I don't mind that you said it. I want to know what's going on in your head.
Just like I'm hoping you'll let me know what's in your heart someday.
The only thing I don't want you to say is that you don't want to talk to me.
"I'm pretty sure that if we spend more time together, we're going to have conflicts between us. I just want to make sure that we talk it out."
She bit into the inside of her cheek. "I hate arguments. I'm not good at it."
She saw Gibson raise an eyebrow at that.
"If you were good at arguments and conflict, I'd be a little worried."
Kay let his words wash over her and she nodded.
"Yeah, that wouldn't exactly be a good thing, but it’s kind of how I was raised.
We didn't talk through things. My parents went silent, and it was my job to make myself scarce until they spoke to me again.
I learned quite a bit of my... personal relationship skills from them, which," she let out a breath, "isn't something I'm proud of. "
"Not all of the lessons we learn as kids are good," she heard the weary tone in his voice and fought off her own curiosity, "but the good thing is that we can learn from them." He nodded. "And grow beyond them."
"You sound wise beyond your years."
Gibson gave her a strange look that she didn't want to ask about, but he didn't have any problem bringing it up.
"I'm curious," his fingers touched hers where she'd laid them on the bar top, "exactly how many years do you think I have?"
Her instinct told her to keep quiet.
She didn't know the answer to the question, but she didn't think that he'd let her stay silent on this.
With a little smile touching his lips, he lifted his chin. "Come on, I'm curious."
Oh boy.
Why did she feel like she was walking on a floor about to crumble under her feet.
Kay licked at her lips and tried to reason it out. "Good bone structure," she felt the corner of her mouth tip up at that, he had great bone structure, "you take care of yourself, exercise regularly," she shook her head, "more than regularly."
He stood up taller and looked down at her with a little smile on his face. "Still not a number."
Her shoulders sagged a little. "Why do people try to put labels on things anyway-"
"Kay?"
"Forty?"
The instant it was out of her mouth, she knew she was wrong.
The bartender was there in the next moment, and she was so thankful to him she was ready to lean across the bar and kiss the living daylights out of him.
“Hey there, can I get you something to drink, Miss?”
And she needed this moment.
Kay found it all too easy to put on her game face as she turned to the bartender. “I was thinking of getting the Moonflower. What do you think?”
Kay saw the look that passed between Gibson and the bartender.
She turned and looked at them both before she spoke. “What? What’s so funny?”
The bartender started making the drink and gave Gibson a look.
“I guess I get to explain.” Gibson leaned on the bar so that when she turned to look at him, she didn’t have to crane her head as far back to look into his eyes.
“Earlier, when I got my Guinness,” he lifted the glass for a sip and nodded to the bartender, “he was telling me that there was this beautiful woman here in the bar. The waiter for your table said that the man with you-”
“Oh, he definitely was NOT with me.”
They all chuckled at that.
“Then the man who was bothering you ordered a Cosmo for you.”
She shuddered at the reminder. “Not my drink of choice.”
The bartender stopped what he was doing and leaned toward them. “That’s what I said. I thought you should have one of our craft cocktails.”
Gibson jumped back in. “And the drink he thought you’d like was the-”