“You at least gonna kiss the girl this time?” Jody asks with a smirk. He tears his eyes from the band to scan the pool table as Brooks takes his next shot. Mercifully, he also misses, and the game continues.
“Try and stop me, brother.” I take another shot and finally pocket the one ball. I immediately take another turn and pocket the two. Jody crows with excitement.
“Out of all of us, I never saw Ev being the one to settle down with an older woman,” Brooks muses as I scrutinise the table. I lean in for another shot.
“She’s older?” Jody sounds mildly surprised.
“Fisher, you love an older woman. How did younotnotice?” Brooks laughs loud enough to distract me, and my turn ends when I fail to sink another ball. He lines up his cue.
“I mean, she’s pretty and all, but… not really yeeingmyhaw, you know?”
I narrow my eyes at my best friend, and he narrows his in response.
“All I’m sayin', man, I ain’t about to steal your girl. She’s a beautiful woman, I’ve got eyes. But my eyes aren’t on her.” He turns back to the band, who are still playing some kind of jangly, funky country and western music, with two of the women from earlier grinding on them. Brooks scoffs.
“Your eyes are on every woman,” he says with a smirk.
“Not if she’s taken,” Jody answers smoothly. “What about you, anyway? Still enjoying quality time with your hand every night, Hart?”
“Dick,” Brooks mutters. He pockets his third ball in quick succession. “Biding my time. Waiting for the right one to come along, that’s all.”
“Sure. When you’re eighty, and blue pills are the only thing that’ll do it for ya…”
“Fuck you, Fisher.” Brooks pockets another two balls with his next two strikes of the cue ball, leaving just two left on the table. He misses the eight ball, and I line up.
“Nah. I love you, but you’re not my type, brother.”
I tune out my best friends’ playful bickering, and shrug them off when they collide with me as they begin to slap and shove at each other in jest. I pocket the eight, and then turn my focus to the nine.
“Hey, Ev,” Jody says suddenly, distracting me from my goal. “Your little London girl.”
“What about her?”
“That friend who likes a cowboy. You get ‘er number for Brookey here?”
Committed to the movement, I miss the nine ball entirely, and Brooks guffaws. I frown. Brooks pockets it immediately, blowing me a kiss.
“You’re both assholes,” I mutter. “Hope you both choke on your beer.”
“Love you too, brother,” Brooks says with a grin. Jody racks the next game, and I surrender my cue to him, dragging a chair over to the table so I can sit and watch the game unfold, and think about Ruth.
Chapter fifteen
Ruth
Everett and I tookturns to cook for each other when I was in Austin. It turns out he’s not half bad in the kitchen, although his repertoire is small. Luckily, he’s a keen student and a quick study. I sent him a shopping list of ingredients yesterday, and instructions to have a pot of water boiling when he called me this evening for our regular FaceTime date. My phone rang at seven on the dot. Everett Tanner is nothing if not punctual, and it’s sexy as hell.
“Okay, the first thing we’re doing is putting the pasta on.” I twist the top of my salt grinder to dispense salt into the pot of water. It’s almost at a boil already. Everett studies me, then grabs what looks like a pot of table salt.
“Just regular salt, right? How much?”
“You want the water salty, but you don’t want it to taste like an entire ocean.”
“Great, thanks,” he mumbles, rolling his eyes even as he concentrates on pouring the grains slowly into his own pot of water. I watch him through the screen of my iPad as he puts the salt down and picks up a box of pasta. The dried pieces rattle loudly as he holds it up to his phone.
“Now we add the pasta.” I pour a healthy amount of pasta into my own pot of water, now bubbling away, and then turn the heat downjust a little. Everett studies the box, then dumps its entire contents into his pot with a small shrug and an adorable half-smile.
“You said there’d be leftovers anyway, right?”
