Erin McCarthy - Sweet

Riley didn’t say anything though. He just wove us through the crowd from toilet to toilet. I wanted to offer advice on where the toilet had been, but I couldn’t quite remember. I was actually doubting that I had even left my purse on a toilet. I might have set it down when I had refilled my drink. Or when I had been dancing. But after a few minutes Riley pointed. “Is that it?”

My little red bag was on a pink toilet lid. Yay, me. “Yes!”

He leaned over and snagged it from between two girls. The one glared at him, but he ignored her. I held my hand out to take the purse but he just kept it tucked in his palm along with my shoes dangling from his fingers. I was starting to think he didn’t trust me to have my shit together tonight.

I was starting to think he might be right.

Because I actually walked into a neighborhood bar with Riley barefoot with no concern whatsoever to what might be sticking to the bottoms of my feet.

“Hey, what’s up?” the bartender said to Riley when we walked in.

Riley waved and pulled out a stool for me. I eyed the bartender, expecting him to card me, but he looked more interested in checking his phone than preventing underage drinking.

So this was a townie bar. It was dark, with a full display of liquor bottles behind the bar, the chairs cracked vinyl. It was nothing like the dance clubs we always went to, but more like what you see in movies, where hairy loggers are grabbing a beer before the zombie apocalypse.

Spinning on my bar stool to get a view of the room, I lost my balance and almost wiped out. I wasn’t sure why I was having so much trouble staying upright.

Riley laughed. “Settle down over there. I’m going to get a beer. I hesitate to ask this, but do you want something?”

“Let’s do a shot,” was my brilliant answer. It seemed to sound like a fabulous idea. We had dropped Tyler back off at the house, and I was thinking that tonight Riley and I could finally have sex. I was thinking a shot might increase the probability.

“Only if I can do it off your tits,” he said, with a look that said he clearly thought that was about as cheap and ridiculous as you could get. He gave a mock fist pump. “Hooter tooter. Dickwads.”

“Ha ha.”

“So who’s your friend here, Mann?” the bartender asked Riley, eyeing me with blatant curiosity.

“Maybe you should sit down,” Riley told him. “Because this is Jessica, my girlfriend.”

The guy laughed, stroking his long beard. He was bald and heavily tattooed. “No shit?” He held his hand out to me. “Well, it’s nice to meet you, Jessica. I’m Zeke.”

I shook his hand and gave him what I assumed was a charming smile. “Nice to meet you, too.” Then I nudged Riley. “Why is it so hard to believe I’m your girlfriend?”

“I don’t bring girls to bars.”

“So how did you two meet?” Zeke asked. “At the mall?”

Was I being insulted?

Riley just laughed. “Screw you. No, Jess is Tyler’s girlfriend’s roommate. We’ve known each other for about a year I guess.”

“Six months,” I corrected.

He shrugged. “Six months.”

“Nice. Make Tyler do all the hard work of scoring a girl, then you just shop from her friends. I admire that.”

What, was I a pair of jeans? But I had to assume Zeke was joking.

“Yeah, well, I’m working with a handicap here.” He gestured to his face, then eyed me. “Okay, how about one shot of vodka, since that’s what you’ve been drinking all night? Zeke, you going to do one with us?”

“Why the hell not?” was his opinion as he reached back for a bottle. Shot glasses appeared from under the counter.

“Now if you’re going to do a shot,” Riley instructed me, “you have to do it right. None of this sipping on it crap.”

“I know how to do a shot.” I gave him a dirty smile. “Open my throat.”

His eyebrows went up. “You good at that?” His knee nudged mine.

“Oh, yeah.” Yes, I was flirting. Yes, I was lying. I could do a shot no problem, but I never gave blow jobs. Ever. So the implication was false, but I figured he wouldn’t care once we were naked and I was offering other alternatives.

Our three glasses filled, Zeke handed one to me. Riley took his and we lifted them. “Cheers!” I said.

Zeke just nodded and raised his glass to his lips.

I knocked my glass into Riley’s. It was meant to make a sweet little chink sound. Instead, I overestimated my strength and half of his shot sloshed over the glass onto his hand. “Oops. Sorry.” I leaned over and licked his hand. “Trade me.” I switched our shots and then drank the halfsie one down.

He drank his in one tilt, wrinkling his nose. “You want something on the jukebox?”

“Well, yes, I do.” The vodka was warming me down into my inner thighs and I wanted to dance with him. After I got a little closer. I leaned over to his stool, hands on the bar top, feet on the footrest bar, and kissed him.

He kissed me back, hand firm on the small of my back, gradually shifting down onto my ass. He broke away. “Every woman in here hates you right now.”

“Why? Because I’m kissing you?” That was a little arrogant on his part. Not that it was untrue but yeesh. I glanced around and saw that of the ten people in the bar, nine were watching us. The men were all in their fifties except for one and they were all gawking openly. The women were of the big hair, blinged butt jean variety and they were shooting me glares. What did I do, besides have a hot boyfriend?

Riley patted my butt. “No. Because you have legs that are a mile long and the shortest pair of denim shorts in the history of the world on and you look smoking hot.”

“Oh.” Well, that was okay then. As long as he thought I looked hot. I licked my lips. “Thanks.”

“You’re killing me.” He stood up. “Come on, let’s play pool.”

We did. Or rather, he did, and I tried, but all I succeeded in doing was almost taking my own eye out. But it had the added benefit of forcing him to lean over me and help me with my strokes. No one in the bar bothered us, and I decided I liked it there, in the dark, smoky quiet. Everyone was disregarding the no-smoking law and just puffing away, and while I didn’t love the smell, I liked the haze.

Dark and seductive, that’s what it was.

The jukebox took negotiation. “No way in hell,” Riley said to a pop song.

I flipped and pointed.

“Lame. No. Over my dead body.”

“You pick one then,” I told him, pinching his arm.

“Hey. You can’t just pinch me.”

“Yes, I can.” I did it again.

He laced his fingers through mine so I couldn’t touch him anymore and grinned. “You are asking for it.”

“You say that all the time,” I murmured, “and nothing ever happens.”

“You say that like you want something to happen,” he said, eliminating all the space between us.

My lips parted.

He bent, his expression intense. When he kissed me, he nipped at my bottom lip and I closed my eyes. I wanted him so much, the alcohol making my body feel liquid and hot, and I shifted so that his thigh was between my legs, my hips bumping against him.

His eyes darkened, the corner of his mouth tilting up. “I’m picking the song.”

He did and it was something I’d never heard of. It sounded like it was a fuck-me song masquerading as a love ballad from the seventies. Or rather a love ballad from the seventies masquerading as a fuck-me song. Something like that.

Riley pulled my arms up to rest around his neck, and right there, in the skeezy bar, with Zeke and bullet-bra-wearing women watching, he slow danced with me. He actually had good rhythm.

I sighed. “This is better than prom.” My date had been Tweeter Brinkley and he was nice enough, though with a serious sweating problem. But he had been in love with Chelsea Zane and had spent the whole night following her around while I had gotten drunk in the restroom with Kylie. At one point, I pulled out my hair extensions and wrote on my arms with a Sharpie brilliant things like Seniors! Prom Blows! And Troy Trojans . . . because she rode the wrong horse. My parents were not amused the next day, even though I insisted I had been held down forcibly against my will.

“I didn’t go to prom,” Riley said.

“You didn’t miss a damn thing.”

“What I was missing was you,” he said.

My breath caught. Everything inside me melted. I had never felt more female in my entire life than I did right then and I felt softer, languid.

Like I was falling in love.

“Let’s go home,” he said as we swayed to the song that was now my favorite song ever, because it had created this moment.

“You always have the best ideas.”

Riley pulled me toward the bar. “What do I owe you?” he asked Zeke.

“It’s on me,” the bartender said, drying a glass in his hand. “Thanks for the entertainment.”

They fist bumped.

“Got everything?” Riley asked.

“I left everything in the car.”

His hand rubbed my knee during the three-minute drive home, and I wouldn’t have thought such a simple thing could be so erotic, yet it was. It just went in slow circles over my bare skin and it felt as sexy as that slow dance.

As we went down the hallway to his bedroom, Riley paused once to kiss me, cupping my cheeks with his hands. “God, you’re so beautiful.”

Not only did I feel beautiful with Riley, I felt like a nicer, better person, softer, like melted butter. Maybe it was the vodka, maybe it was dark hallway or our whispered voices, the boys all asleep, but I felt like I was going to crawl out of my skin if I didn’t get to have sex with Riley in the next five seconds. When he stripped off his shirt, after carefully closing his door and locking it, I yanked off my shirt and tossed it on the floor. I took my bra off, too.