Chapter 7 – Josie
chapter
seven
Josie
O’Leary’s was packed by the time we got there, all sticky floors and low ceilings and Christmas lights stapled to exposed beams year-round. The music was too loud, the drinks were cheap, and Kimmy had declared it perfect before we’d even gotten through the door.
“This is it,” she said, arms spread wide, red hair catching the neon from the Budweiser sign behind the bar. “This is our place.”
“It smells like feet.” Lena wrinkled her nose and pulled the collar of her jacket over it.
“Character,” Kimmy corrected. “It smells like character.”
Lena looked at me, and I looked at Lena, and we followed Kimmy in.
A guy by the door was handing out red Solo cups from a folding table. He pressed one into my hand before I could say no. I looked at it and frowned. Who in their right mind liked warm beer? But I held onto it because putting it down meant someone would hand me another one.
The hockey team had taken over the back half of the bar, loud before they even came into view, louder than the music, the way men got when they’d won something and needed everyone to know.
Marcus was somewhere in that cluster. He’d texted me to come but hadn’t offered to meet me at the door, which tracked.
Kimmy found us a spot near the pool table and disappeared to get drinks. Lena leaned against the wall, crossed her arms, and scanned every corner of the room before she took her jacket off. I’d known her a week, and I already loved that about her.
“Hockey boys at ten o’clock,” she murmured, chin tilted toward the back of the bar.
“I see them.” I raised the Solo cup to my lips and didn’t drink.
“Marcus?”
“Somewhere in the pile.” My voice came out flatter than I meant it to.
Lena glanced at me sideways. “You going over?”
“Not yet.” This would go the way it always went. Marcus at parties had never been about me. Back home, it was the same — he’d find his guys, and I’d stand next to him holding a drink I didn’t want, smiling until my jaw hurt.
Kimmy came back with two bottles and handed one to Lena. She looked at my Solo cup. “You good?”
“I’m good.” I was never going to drink it because I hated beer, but I’d hold this one all night just to have something in my hand.
The three of us stood there watching the room fill up. Kimmy was already shouting at people she recognized from orientation. Lena made quiet, devastating observations about everyone’s outfits.
I laughed more in twenty minutes than I had all week.
All of this was new. I had friends who weren’t Marcus’s friends first, friends who texted me because they wanted to, not because Marcus had given them my number. It was nice to have people who liked me for me and not for my proximity to Marcus Kane.
A girl appeared at the edge of our group. Blond, crop top, spray-tanned to the point of commitment. She looked at me, then at Kimmy, then at me again.
“You’re Marcus’s girlfriend, right?” She tipped her Solo cup toward me.
“I guess that’s me,” I said with a shrug.
She looked me up and down, slow, top to bottom and back. “Huh,” she said. Then she turned to her friend and said, loud enough for me to hear, “I thought she’d be taller.”
Her friend laughed, and they walked away.
Kimmy’s head swiveled so fast her earrings swung. “Excuse me? Did that just —”
“Leave it,” I said, my hand finding Kimmy’s elbow before she could launch.
“I will not leave it.” Her voice pitched up, and her cheeks flushed red to match her hair. “I will follow her into that bathroom and —”
“Kimmy.” Lena put a hand on her arm. “Not worth it.”
“She just —”
“Puck bunny,” Lena said, and that covered it.
Kimmy still vibrated with it, and I raised the Solo cup to my lips and put it back down without drinking.
“I need a different drink,” I muttered, grimacing at the cup.
“I’ll go,” Kimmy said, already moving.
“I’ve got it.” That voice, right behind me. My whole body went hot before I turned around.
Waylon stood there with two bottles — one open beer in his hand, one closed hard lemonade in the other.
He put one of the bottles down on the nearby side table, then took the Solo cup out of my hand, easily, and cracked the cap off the lemonade with the edge of his palm before handing it to me.
“Don’t drink stuff people hand you at the door, no one in the house would mess with your drink, but there are a shit ton of people here and I don’t know them,” he murmured, just for me. Then he dropped the Solo cup in the trash can behind the pool table without looking.
I looked at the lemonade and then at him, and my stomach flipped.
“You bought me a drink.” My voice came out more accusatory than grateful.
“I bought you a closed drink that I opened in front of you. There’s a difference.” He took a sip of his beer. “You weren’t going to drink what was in that cup anyway.”
“How do you know I wasn’t going to drink it?” I crossed my arms.
“Dunno, maybe it’s the way you’ve been wrinkling your nose every time you look at it.” His jaw twitched with a smile he didn’t let through.
Kimmy watched this exchange with her jaw slightly open, and Lena watched it with one eyebrow raised and her lips pressed together.
“Flash, these your people?” He nodded at them.
“Kimmy. Lena. This is Waylon. He’s —” I waved my lemonade vaguely in his direction. “He’s on the hockey team.”
“Thor,” Kimmy said instantly, grinning so wide I wanted to strangle her. “Oh my god, you’re Thor?” she said with a laugh. “Honey, we know Waylon. He’s Trace’s BFF.”
“Hey girls.” His eyes cut to me, one eyebrow up. “You told them about the nickname?”
“I tell them everything.” I held his gaze.
“Everything?” His voice dropped half a register.
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” I said with a smirk as I tipped the lemonade to my lips.
He held my gaze for one more second, the corner of his mouth lifting, and then he tapped the neck of his beer against my lemonade and walked back toward the hockey cluster without another word.
Kimmy grabbed my arm the second he was out of earshot, her nails digging in. “You should have mentioned Thor was Waylon.”
I was regretting having mentioned to them that I’d made a sort of friend at work. I’d called him Thor in passing. But leave it to Kimmy to lock that detail into her steel trap of a mind.
“What? It’s no big deal.” I peeled her fingers off my arm.
“Girl. No big deal my ass. Waylon is six-foot-three of No-Big-Deal making sure you had a safe drink you like.” She pointed at the lemonade.
“What’s the big deal? We work together at the tutoring center.” I shrugged and took a sip, determined not to search the crowd for him.
“And he watches you drink from across a bar?” Damn Lena for missing nothing. Just this one time, she couldn’t pretend to be blind?
“Drop it, Kimmy.” My jaw tightened.
“I will not drop it.” She grabbed Lena’s wrist. “Lena, tell her I will not drop it.”
“She won’t drop it,” Lena confirmed, fighting a smile.
I took a sip of the lemonade. It was cold and sweet and tart and a thousand times better than the beer, and I hated that he’d known that.
The music shifted when somebody plugged a phone into the speaker system, and a low, heavy bass beat filled the room. My hips started moving before I’d finished my drink.
Kimmy grabbed my hand and Lena’s and pulled us toward the back, where people were dancing in the dark space between the pool table and the wall.
The lights didn’t reach back here, so all we had was the glow from the bar, the red-green pulse of the Christmas lights, and the bodies moving in the half dark.
I danced, and I closed my eyes and moved. Kimmy danced next to me, all elbows and hair, and Lena rolled her hips on my other side in a way that turned heads, and for ten minutes, I forgot about Marcus and puck bunnies and everything that came with them.
Then I caught a flash of Marcus’s jacket near the hallway. Or I thought I did.
“Bathroom,” I told Kimmy, leaning into her ear. “Be right back.”
She gave me a thumbs-up without breaking her rhythm.
I pushed through the crowd toward the hallway, but the bar had gotten tighter in the last hour, bodies packed shoulder to shoulder, and by the time I got past the pool table, I’d lost him. I stood on my toes and looked, but there was nothing except people and noise and blinking lights.
I turned the corner into a darker, quieter stretch where the music barely reached.
A couple pressed against the wall near the restrooms, and past them, a propped-open door let in cold air from a back patio where someone smoked.
And in the shadow between the jukebox and the wall, leaning against the wood paneling with a beer hanging loose from his fingers, was Waylon.
His eyes found mine, and I froze mid-step.
“Lost?” he asked, tilting his head.
“Looking for Marcus.”
“He left twenty minutes ago in Kowalski’s truck.” He said it evenly, like he was trying not to sound judgmental. But I could see it in the way his lips were pressed flat.
The hallway suddenly felt very small, and the bass thudded through the wall behind me, thick and steady. I wanted the floor to swallow me whole just to spare me the embarrassment.
Yeah, pathetic is really not your color.
I glanced up, mildly surprised to see myself not swallowed up by said hole. “You’re still here,” I said, and it came out too soft.
“I’m still here.” His eyes didn’t move from mine.
I should have turned around and gone back to Kimmy and Lena and the dance floor and the safe, loud, well-lit part of the night, but I didn’t.
He pushed off the wall, set his beer on the jukebox, took my wrist, and pulled me into the dark beside him. His other hand landed on my hip, and we were moving before I’d decided to let him.
“What are you doing?” I breathed, my pulse slamming against my ribs.
“Dancing with you.” His mouth barely moved.
“There’s no dance floor back here.” My voice shook, and I hated it.
“Don’t need one.” His grip tightened on my waist, and my knees went soft.
The jukebox played something low and slow, separate from the main speakers, and the bass vibrated in my ribs.
His hand rested warm on my hip, not gripping or steering, his thumb tracing a slow line along the bone. He turned me around so my back was pressed against his chest, and I let him. Why I let him was a problem for later.
We moved, barely, just hips and weight shifting and the bass keeping time, and I leaned back into him.
His chest was solid behind me, and his breath was warm on the side of my neck.
My hips rolled against him, and he was hard against the small of my back.
I bit down on the sound that tried to escape.
I pressed back harder, and his fingers tightened on my hip in one quick squeeze, then loosened.
His mouth hovered close to my ear, close enough that I could feel his breath, and my eyes shut and my pulse dropped between my legs. His other hand came up to brace against the wall beside us, his arm locked straight and every tendon in his forearm tight.
The song changed to something slower. His mouth dipped closer, and his lips brushed the shell of my ear and then the corner of my jaw, barely there.
His hand slid from my hip to the flat of my stomach and pulled me back against him, and I stopped thinking.
His nose traced the line of my neck, and his mouth hovered over the spot below my ear. He breathed me in, his chest expanding against my back, and I tilted my head to give him room. His lips were right there, barely a breath away —
I stepped forward, out of his hands and out of the shadow and into the light from the hallway.
He let me go instantly, his hands dropping to his sides as he leaned back against the wall and looked at me with dark eyes and a tight jaw and didn’t say a word.
“I have a boyfriend,” I blurted out.
You sound ridiculous.
Yep. Thanks for that. Like I didn’t know that unprompted announcement didn’t make me look weird.
“Oh, I know.” He didn’t move. “Knew it when I bought the lemonade.”
We stood there while the jukebox played and the bass from the main room thudded through the wall. My whole body buzzed, and I could still feel where his hand had been on my stomach and where his breath had been on my neck.
“You’re dangerous, Flash,” he said, quiet enough that I barely heard it over the bass.
I turned and walked back down the hallway and into the noise and the light.
Kimmy found me at the bar, her brow creased. “You okay? You look flushed.”
“I’m fine.” I pressed the cold lemonade bottle against my cheek. “It’s hot in here.”
I wasn’t fine. I could still smell his cologne on my skin and hear his voice in my ear, and I wanted to turn around and walk back down that hallway.
All I could do was take a long sip of the lemonade he’d opened for me.