“I’ve been wondering what’s in it too,” she says.
Juliet spins around, her back to Chloe before she whispers to me, “I saw you checking her out. You’re welcome.”
My sister takes off, leaving me alone at the makeshift bar with the stunning redhead.
For a few seconds, I come up empty. It’s been a while since I’ve chatted with a woman I was interested in. Being with the same person for four years before discovering she’s cheating can knock a man off his game. Do people even meet in real life anymore? No idea. But Juliet already left me an opening, so I go with it.
I meet those pretty eyes and ask, “A Paw-garita…Does it mean the dog dipped his paw in the drink behind the bar?”
Chloe lifts a brow like she’s sayingwell played. “If so, then I’ve been making Paw-garitas every time someone comes to a dinner party at my place and says they don’t like dogs.”
Something funny happens. Something I haven’t experienced in a while. I laugh, and it’s chased by a smile. It surprises me—howeasy this is with her. I don’t know this woman, but something about the way she owns the moment, like she’s completely at home in her skin, wakes something up inside me.
“Remind me never to cross you,” I say.
“Oh, I don’t think you’ll forget, Sawyer,” she says.
And I believe my night just got a whole lot more interesting. Because…fuck my day from hell. Screw my stresses. Forget the home I had to sell. “Chloe, can I buy you a drink?” I ask, nodding to the bar.
She leans in closer, her cinnamon-y scent drifting past my nose again and making my head hazy. “Spoiler alert: drinks are free. So it’s your lucky night.”
“That so?”
“Maybe it is. Since I’m in the mood for a Fuzzy Navel Hound. No idea what it is. But I feel like it’ll erase the day.”
“Tough one?” I ask.
She hesitates, then gives a one-shouldered shrug. “It was a day all right,” she says, ending with a sigh.
I scratch my beard, and she follows my hand as I say, “Yeah. I know the feeling.”
We share a second of understanding, kindred spirits perhaps in life getting turned upside down. Until she smiles again. “But I’m here now.Notat home with boxed wine and salted caramel tiramisu ice cream.”
I suppose I could say the same. “I promise I won’t let you erase the day alone. Since I’ve had one that needs obliterating.” I turn to the bartender, a pale white dude with a straw hat, amustache, and a striped shirt that makes him look like a carnival barker at the turn of the last century, and ask him for two Fuzzy Navel Hounds.
“Coming right up,” he says, but when he grabs a bottle of peach schnapps, flipping it in a theatrical way, then a pitcher of orange juice, I’m already regretting the drink choice.
A Fuzzy Navel Hound really is just a Fuzzy Navel. I was hoping it was going to be a new concoction. Not something I tried to smuggle out of the liquor cabinet and whip up as a teenager.
I turn to Chloe, then whisper, “Schnapps?” Like, can you believe this?
“Just go with it,” she whispers back.
“But…schnapps,” I say again, with a skeptical groan.
“Carpe diem, Sawyer,” she adds.
I arch a brow. “Carpe bad decisions, you mean. Pretty sure schnapps is a bad idea, as my seventeen-year-old self would like to remind me.”
She wiggles her eyebrows. “Mine too, but…perhaps a bad idea is what webothneed to erase the day.”
Both.
The way she says that word with a hint of sensuality, chased with a little bit of hope, makes me think a Fuzzy Navel with her will be just fine after all. Since this woman is impossible to resist.
When the bartender slides the drinks our way, I reach for a few bills, stuff them into the tip jar, then thank him.
“No, thankyou,” the chipper guy says, then mouths “good luck”to me.
