Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
“I might tap out,” Hanna said, standing at the base of the bridge they’d just crossed. “I just want to lie down.”
“If you don’t eat before you go to bed, you’ll be dead by morning,” Logan mumbled, his hand resting on her elbow as he ushered her forward. “White Castle is like a block that way, you can do it.”
“It’s actually that way,” Milo pointed in the opposite direction.
She thought she saw Logan roll his eyes, but she was having a hard time even making out faces.
“I know where I’m going, man. It’s right there,” Logan said, gesturing in no definitive direction.
“I think we’re all a little drunk,” Milo tried to pacify. “But I can promise you, it’s right there, man,” Milo hissed the final word, imitating Logan.
“Whatever,” Logan muttered.
Milo dragged them into White Castle, which was exactly where he'd said it would be. While the thought of eating anything made her want to die, a greasy slider might have been the only thing standing between her and the bathroom floor.
They waited in line silently.
Though she was convinced that the lighting inside the White Castle had been designed to make everyone look as horrible as possible, she was standing between two of the most handsome men she'd ever met—and she had no words to contribute.
She tried to think of something funny to say to get them talking again, but every second between her and food grew riskier and riskier.
So she kept her mouth shut and nodded enthusiastically when Logan ordered sliders. Somehow she made it to one of the cheap plastic booths, unsure of when they'd even left the line.
She inhaled three of the burgers before Logan or Milo had even gotten through one, and then laid her forehead down on the table, trying not to wonder when it had last been sanitized.
God, this would have been brutal in her twenties. But at thirty? She wasn’t going to make it through the weekend.
“You good, Hanna?” She managed to lift her head and look at Logan, smiling to signal that, while she was certainly not good, she was still conscious, which was a win in her book. “Oh my god, I haven’t seen you like this since college.”
“That’s not true!” she protested. “Remember your mom’s sixtieth birthday party when your dad made that… ugh, what was it? Some sort of punch that got us all trashed?”
Logan erupted with laughter, and she couldn’t help but join him.
“Shit, I forgot. You sang Happy Birthday to Marcia like Marilyn Monroe.”
“So I’m told.”
Logan turned to Milo. “It would have been super hot if she hadn’t thrown up in the lake immediately after.”
Milo didn’t respond.
Hanna only knew she was yelling because both Milo and Logan jumped when she defended herself.
“Okay, but at least I made it into the lake and not all over the back seat of my brand-new car.”
Logan held a hand over his chest. “We agreed to never speak of that night again.”
She muttered, “I don’t remember putting anything in writing.”
Milo ate his food and looked out the window toward the strip. She fished for something else to talk about so they weren’t isolating him, but even she had to admit, it was nice not fighting with Logan for a few minutes.
“You know,” Logan said to Milo. “This girl right here drank almost my entire fraternity under the table senior year.”
Milo chuckled, watching her face. “I have no problem believing that.”
“You guys make me sound like a fucking mess.”
“You’re not a mess,” Milo said, his eyes hardening as they rested on her face.
“Although,” Logan started. “That kiss back there wasn’t exactly… clean,” he laughed, but Hanna blushed.
Milo added, “Poor motherfucker, he thought he’d hit the jackpot for all of ten seconds.”
“I gotta piss,” Logan declared, slinking away from the booth.
Milo watched him cross the lobby and then leaned over the table.
“Are you trying to kill me, Hanna?”
“Yes,” she grinned. “Jealous?”
“Nah, I saw how quickly you clammed up after that guy slipped you some tongue. If it were me, you’d have been on your knees in a second.”
She tilted her head. “Is that where you like me best, Daddy?”
Milo’s face turned a delicious shade of violet. “I don’t mind watching you grind on some fucker in the club, Arizona. But I gotta tell you, I don’t think I can take three days of watching Logan drool over you without doing something stupid.”
“He’s not—”
Milo’s expression shut her up. He was very, very serious.
“I’ll talk to him.” She frowned, her eyes misting over with exhaustion. “If this is too much for you, Milo, we can dial it down.”
“No.”
“I mean it. You know how much our friendship means to me. The last three weeks have been hell.”
He nodded. “Let’s not worry about it, drunk in a White Castle, okay? That’s flight home shit.” Logan slid into the booth beside her, draping his arm along the back, and she saw it.
The agony on Milo’s face, living in the tick of his jaw.
She hit her hands on the table. “As much fun as this is, gentlemen, if I don’t get to my hotel in the next twenty minutes, you’re going to be carrying me across the strip.”
They both laughed, but something in the slur of her voice made them take her seriously. They all fell into an Uber within minutes.
“Longest legs up front,” Milo quipped to Logan, who begrudgingly took the passenger seat.
The strip whizzed by in swaths of light and color as Milo’s hand drew circles on her knee, the impact of which she wished she was sober enough to feel.
“I’ll walk you up,” both men said when they exited the Uber at the entrance of The Cosmo.
They all exchanged glances, and she awkwardly mumbled, “The more the merrier!”
They weaved through the casino toward the Chelsea Tower elevators. The silence was deafening in the elevator with Milo on her right, Logan on her left, and her brain running a mile a minute trying not to say anything that would make things weirder than they already were.
She battled a threesome joke into submission multiple times.
When they got up to the penthouse suites, she stumbled toward their door, and Logan fished through her purse for her key card while she leaned against the wall and tried to think sober thoughts.
The door swung open and she wrapped her arms around Logan’s neck—muscle memory—and hugged him goodnight. Then, because she hated herself, she forced Milo into the same drunken embrace.
His hands splayed across her back and she realized just how thick he was compared to lean, lanky Logan. He lingered longer than Logan liked and, even drunk, she could see the disapproval pursed on his lips.
She could still hear Logan’s internal screaming as she stumbled into the room, her phone buzzing before she even got her heels off.
ALWAYS ANSWER
Meet me downstairs in ten? I’m going to the old strip.
HANNA
I’m going to die.
ALWAY ANSWER
No more drinking, I’ve got a buddy with a new tattoo shop and I promised I’d stop by.
Hanna stared at her phone, weighing the repercussions of walking out of the hotel with Milo. She snagged a bottle of water off the countertop and chugged as much as she could before she swapped her shoes and stumbled back downstairs.
* * *
The cab ride was quiet—too quiet.
Hanna hated hearing him breathe so steadily when she felt anything but. They hadn’t been alone since the night Logan walked in on them. She swallowed, her heart circulating sheer panic through her system.
“Jenner opened this place a few months ago. He did most of my work.”
“What?” Her head swiveled as the cab wound down a street behind the glowing lights of old Vegas, gliding to a halt outside of a shop with a neon sign that read TATTOO. Milo smiled and got out of the cab, rounding behind it and opening her door.
“I was saying that Jenner did almost all my tattoo work.” He held a hand out for her and she let him pull her out of the cab, the counterbalance nice as her head continued swirling.
He didn’t drop her hand until he pulled back on the metal door of the tattoo shop. The receptionist’s head snapped up from their phone, their bright pink hair catching and holding the lights that danced across the street.
“Jenner around?” Milo asked.
“Ink or jewelry?”
Milo glanced at Hanna. “Just catching up with a friend.”
“Jenner!” they barked over the counter, eyes gliding back to their phone. “Hot guy here for you!”
Jenner, all six-foot-five of him, burst out from the back of the shop to the lobby, his amber eyes searching over the few lingering faces before pulling Milo into a warm hug.
“I thought you were coming by two hours ago,” Jenner boomed.
“I got distracted.”
Jenner’s eyes fell to Hanna. “Can’t blame you.”
Milo reached for her hand, a gesture sober Hanna might have resisted, but drunk Hanna found quite enjoyable.
“It’s a great space,” Milo said, gesturing to the walls claimed by black paint and framed tattoos in a dozen different styles.
“Thanks, man. You still looking for something?”
Milo tilted his head toward Hanna. “You mind?”
She shook her head, happy to sit with him. She followed them back behind the dimly lit lobby and down a hallway punctuated with black doors.
“Each artist gets their own private studio,” Jenner explained, tapping one of the open doors. “Sup, Javi?” The artist in question leaned over his tablet and waved as they walked by.
“Are we still doing the bouquet you sent me?”
“Yeah,” Milo said, dipping behind Jenner and into the last door on the right. He pulled his shirt off and tossed it onto a chair in the corner, pointing to one of the few empty spaces on the back of his arm.
Jenner held out his fingers, measuring the spot.
“Let me go print a few sizes. You want anything to drink, Milo’s Plus One?”
“Hanna,” Milo said, leaning against the table. “And she needs water.”
Jenner smiled, his lips pierced with two sterling silver hoops that glinted in the overhead fluorescent lights.