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“Hey, now!” Abby exclaimed.
“What?” Jen shrugged and took a sip from her wine. “She’s way more fun than you.”
Abby just laughed. “Yeah…I’m not even going to try to disagree with that.”
Jen took out a tube of lipstick from her purse and applied a fresh coat. “Okay, now that the love fest is over, let’s head upstairs and shake our asses.”
“You guys go ahead. I’m going to run to the ladies’ room. I’ll meet you up there in a few,” I lied. I didn’t want to be the Debbie Downer of the night. And even though my injured ass could’ve probably handled a few go-rounds on the dance floor, I just wasn’t feeling it.
Luckily, Abby and Jen didn’t think twice about my excuse and headed toward the stairs to get their groove on—and most likely get felt up a few times. Vertigo Lounge had a reputation for being a modern-day version of Dirty Dancing. Well, without the watermelons—and the whole “nobody puts Baby in the corner.”
Although, I wouldn’t have put that clichéd line past some of the guys plotting their next pickup lines behind their bottles of five-dollar beer. The art of conversation in the dating world was a handful of awful opening lines away from dying.
Hmmm… Now, that’s a good topic for a column, I thought to myself and pulled my phone out of my purse to make a few notes.
Sex Says: Leave the pickup lines at home, guys. If your first question revolves around your pants or seeing yourself in her pants, just stop. Go home. Try it again tomorrow. After you’ve, like, napped, rehydrated, had a banana.
Once I saved enough words to provide the right amount of inspiration tomorrow morning when I settled into a writing session, I took a sip from my glass of wine and stretched my legs out, resting my feet on the wooden bar underneath the table. My tailbone appreciated the relaxed position.
Obviously, I had zero plans to meet my friends upstairs.
My butt would stay planted to this barstool for the rest of the night.
The reasons I’d agreed to a girls’ night at Vertigo Lounge had absolutely nothing to do with dancing or drinks and had everything to do with people watching—there was always a lot of grinding and interesting dance moves—and the hot dog cart strategically placed outside the club.
Frank’s Weiner Cart was a goddamn beacon of goodness, and he only served his wieners on Friday and Saturday nights. As I stared into my wine and ran my index finger along the rim of the glass, I let my stomach lead my thoughts.
Mmmmm… I will definitely get the Chicago dog tonight… Wait… Maybe I should get the New York dog…
Unfortunately, I didn’t even get a chance to decide tonight’s winning wiener because the very worst kind stepped right into my line of sight.
“Fancy seeing you here.”
Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.
Moving my gaze up from his crotch—it admittedly moved a little slowly—I finally settled my focus into the face of none other than my archnemesis.
Reed Luca, looking fresh as a fucking daisy and smirking like the devil himself. Clad in a worn leather jacket and distressed jeans, even I couldn’t deny he looked good. Like, fuckable kind of good. Hell, put a cigarette in his mouth, and he would’ve been James Dean.
God, my eyes sure did enjoy looking at him.
This is a purely look but don’t touch scenario, Lola, I reminded myself. Reed Luca might’ve been the snake offering the apple, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to be Eve.
Without offering any sort of greeting, I got down to the real question at hand. “Seriously… Are you stalking me?”
It all started innocently enough.
I’d been behaving—if you can call working on an opposing column to Lola’s best oral techniques behaving.
Seems a little sketchy to me.
But I’d been alone in my apartment and occupied with something that led to a paycheck from my current employer, so it was at least flirting with responsibility. The farther I got into the column, and the more I read Lola’s—over and over—as research, the more obsessed I became with connecting to her in more than words tonight.
Knowing she was out, I’d opened up some of our old emails and started to read. And then before I knew it, even that wasn’t enough.
I didn’t have her phone number, and I knew Cam was done doing me favors of the personal information variety. That idea seemed stale before it even fully developed anyway.
I wanted a physical connection. I wanted her eyes to meet mine, and I wanted to find a reason to touch her skin.
Honestly, the topic of these columns had me goddamn buzzing, humming, practically frothing at the mouth, and with one look to her Facebook page and a quick shower, I’d ended up here—handing my ID to the bouncer and scooting past a group of giggling girls in ass-grazing dresses.
Lola was easy to find the second I stepped into Vertigo Lounge and allowed my eyes to adjust.
She had a presence that stood out from all of the other people there, trolling for love and lust and racing to lose themselves to a mind-altering substance.
Secure in herself, she didn’t need an escape like the others, and it showed.
I watched as she chatted with two other women, her focus on them and theirs on the men around them. They spoke to her with genuine affection, but Lola wasn’t their end game the way they were hers.
When they jumped from their seats and headed for the stairs without her, I moved with purpose in her direction and didn’t let the packed crowd slow me down.
I made it to her easily enough, but she was so lost in her thoughts, I stood there in front of her for a full minute without her even noticing.
“Fancy seeing you here,” I finally greeted, breaking the spell. Her head jerked up.
It didn’t take her pretty features long to turn hostile.
“Seriously… Are you stalking me?”
“Actually, I bumped into some friends from college, and we decided to come in here and throw a few back,” I lied easily.
Her eyes narrowed, bullshit meter pinned in the red with an ability no one else seemed to have around me. “Yeah. Okay.”
I smiled. Something inside of me fucking loved that she could read me.
“You’re right. That’s not true at all. I don’t have any friends from college. I didn’t even go to college.”
“Yes, you did,” she said with a snort.
“Okay,” I admitted, still fucking smiling. “I did. But I didn’t finish, and I really don’t have any friends.”
“Reed.”
“Fine. I finished, and I have friends. But they’re not here tonight.”
And that was true. I’d gone to college at University of California Santa Cruz and gotten a degree in something—sociology—that was altogether relevant to my life but meaningless to ninety-five percent of the working world. My friends majored in business, joined major corporations, found trophy wives, and quickly impregnated them with multiple babies. I hadn’t seen all that much of them since. Actually, if you asked me for my best friend now, I’d probably say San Francisco.
Or Lola, a little voice whispered in the back of my mind. No. I haven’t known her that long. My inner voice raised a pointed eyebrow.
The city never seemed to let me down, and I had people and amusement all over it. I wasn’t planning tons of dinners at my house or trips to the bar, though.
Maybe I need to have Lola over for dinner.
“There we go,” she said with a little half smirk. “Now, why are you here tonight? The truth.”
I shrugged. “I’m stalking you.”
“I fucking knew it!”
“See, LoLo,” I said, my inner voice hanging out right above my voice box, apparently. “We’re pretty much best friends. Knowing each other and shit. Next thing you know, we’re going to be finishing—”
“Each other’s sentences. Yeah, yeah.”
“Now that’s just creepy,” I teased, and she shook her head with a smile.
“Why are you stalking me?” she semi-yelled over the music.
I didn’t want to yell. My days for screaming a conversation ended a few years ago when I started avoiding overcrowded places like nightclubs.
“I’ll tell you on one condition.”
She rolled her eyes. “Fine. No thanks. I don’t need to know.”
Leaning forward, I lifted the glass out of her hand and set it on the table before taking her hand in mine despite her protests.
“How many times do I have to tell you we’re not friends?” she asked, pulling at my hand in order to try to get me to release her.
I used my other hand to grab her elbow and pull her body close enough that she could hear me over the din. “I’m not sure. But I don’t think the tally begins until you start doing it without a gigantic fucking smile on your face.”
When I leaned back, her features were schooled into a scowl. I laughed.
“Come on, Skeets. Dance with me. It’s just a dance.”
“You probably don’t know how to dance,” she accused.
“You’re probably right. But hey, just for fun, let’s see.”
I could see the wheels spinning in her mind as she considered it over and over again. What would it cost her to dance with me just this once? Would it lessen the intensity of her hatred or aid it?
I didn’t know which decision would win the battle, but I knew what action would win the war—she was going to dance with me whether she knew it or not.
