lost.
He grins and jerks my arm towards him this time.
“And since you already let me go down on you once,” he adds and my eyes widen, “I think I could tell you to lie back and spread your legs and you’d have to listen, right?”
I can barely move my eyes around to see if anyone walking by had heard him. Andrew didn’t exactly say that in a whisper, but I wouldn’t expect as much.
Then he slows our pace and leans in toward my ear and says quietly, “If you don’t let me have my way with something simpler soon, I might have to torture you again with my tongue between your legs.” His breath on my ear, combined with his wetness-inducing words, sends shivers up the side of my neck. “Ball’s in your court, babe.”
He pulls away and I want to slap that grin off his face, but he’d probably like it.
Dilemma? Let him have his way with something simple, or keep getting my way and him ‘torture’ me later? Hmmm. I guess I’m more of a masochist than I thought.
Night falls and I’m ready for our night out. I’m wearing a new pair of tight jeans, a sexy black strapless top that hugs my waist and the cutest black heels I’ve ever found in any mall.
Andrew gawks at me in the doorway.
“I should play my card right now,” he says coming into the room.
I’ve braided my hair into two loose braids this time, one resting over each shoulder, stopping just above my breasts. And I always leave a few strands of blonde hair to fall freely about my face because I always thought it was cute on other girls, so why not me?
Andrew seems to like it. He reaches up and slides each one within his fingers.
I blush inwardly.
“Babe, no fucking joke, you are smokin’.”
“Thanks …” Oh my God, did I just … giggle?
I look him up and down, too, and although he’s back to jeans and a simple t-shirt and his black Doc Martens, he’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen no matter what he’s wearing.
We head out and I turn a few old guys’ heads in the elevator and down the hall. Andrew is enjoying the hell out of that, I can tell. He’s beaming walking next to me and it just makes my face beet red.
We hang out at d.b.a first and watch a band play for about an hour. But when I get carded and it looks like I’m not going to get to drink here, Andrew takes me farther down the street to another bar.
“It’s a hit or miss,” he says as we approach the bar, hand in hand. “Most of them will card you, but every now and then you get lucky and they don’t bother if you look twenty-one enough.”
“Well, I’ll be twenty-one in five months,” I say, gripping his hand as we cross a busy intersection.
“I was worried you were seventeen when I met you on the bus.”
“Seventeen?!” I hope like hell I don’t actually look that young.
“Hey,” he says glancing over once, “I’ve seen fifteen-year-olds that look twenty—hard to tell anymore.”
“So you think I look seventeen?”
“No, you look about twenty,” he admits, “I’m just sayin’.”
That’s a relief.
This bar is slightly smaller than the last and the people in it are a mixture of fresh-out-of-college and early thirty-somethings. A few pool tables are set side by side near the back and the lighting is dim in the place, mostly localized over the pool tables and in the hallway to my right, leading into the restrooms. The cigarette smoke is thick unlike the last place where it was non-existent, but it doesn’t bother me much. I’m not fond of cigarettes, but there’s something natural about cigarette smoke in a bar. It would almost seem naked without it.
Some kind of familiar rock music is playing from the speakers in the ceiling. There’s a small stage to the left where bands usually play, but no one’s playing tonight. That doesn’t diminish the party-like mood in the atmosphere though, because I can barely hear Andrew talking to me over the music and the shouting voices all around me.
“Can you play pool?” he leans in, shouting near my ear.
I shout back, “I have a few times! But I suck at it!”
He tugs my hand and we walk toward the pool tables and the brighter light, pushing our way carefully through people standing around in just about every available walkable space.
“Sit here,” he says, able to lower his voice a little with the speakers in front of us. “This’ll be our table.”
I sit down at a small round table pressed against a wall where just over my head and to my left there is a staircase leading up to a second floor on the other side of me. I nudge the cigarette-laden ashtray across the table and away from me with the tip of my finger as a waitress walks up.
Andrew is talking to a guy a few feet away next to the pool tables, probably about joining a game.
“Sorry about that,” the waitress says, taking the ashtray and replacing it with a clean one, setting it upside-down upon the table. She washes the top of the table off afterwards with a wet rag, lifting the ashtray to get the spot under it.
I smile up at her. She’s a pretty black-haired girl, probably just turned twenty-one herself and she’s holding a serving tray on one hand.
“Can I get yah anything?”
I only have one chance to act like I’m asked that question a lot without being carded, so I say almost immediately, “I’ll have a Heineken.”
“Make that two,” Andrew says stepping back up with a pool stick in his hand.
The waitress does a double-take when she notices him, and like Andrew in the elevator with me, I’m eating the hell out of it. She nods and glances back down at me with that you-are-one-lucky-bitch look before walking away.
“That guy’s got one more game and then we’ve got the table,” he says, sitting down on the empty chair.
The waitress comes back with two Heinekens and sets them in front of us.
“Just wave if yah need anything,” she says before leaving again.
“She didn’t card you,” he says, leaning across the table so no one will hear.
“No, but that doesn’t mean I won’t eventually get carded—that happened once in a bar in Charlotte; Natalie and me were almost drunk by the time we were carded and sent packing.”
“Well, then just enjoy it while you can.” He smiles, bringing his beer to his lips and taking a quick drink.
I do the same.
I’m starting to wish I hadn’t brought my purse so I wouldn’t have to keep up with it, but
