AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Then again, walking away now felt a lot like giving up. I took a sip. Once again, they’d nailed the flavor. It wasn’t sweet or candy-like. Like the others, it was more of an essence of chocolate than an overwhelming flavor. And it didn’t taste fake.
“Well?” Gage prompted.
“It’s good.” I admitted begrudgingly.
Was it better or worse that he hid his smirk behind his own glass, rather than owning the reaction?
I wanted to knock him off-balance, and I hadn’t yet.
Or I wanted to reach across the table and kiss him again. Do more with him. Fuck him until we were spent and he walked bow-legged for a week. While Evie watched, and enjoyed every fucking second of it.
I needed to stop drinking.
“We should get this to go or something.” Not what I meant to say. Some of the words were right, but the meaning was the opposite end of the field from I should go. And who got a beer flight in to-go cups?
“I didn’t picture you as a lightweight,” Gage said.
Fuck him and his smug-ass, witty retorts. “I thought I could do morning-drunk, but it’s not clicking for me. I’d like to at least wait until after noon to be three sheets to the wind.”
“We could go back to my place.”
“Are you hitting on me?”
“You wish.”
I didn’t. Or maybe a teensy bit. “Don’t you have to work?”
“It’s supposed to be my day off. I came in for the beer.”
That was one hell of a life. I’d wrapped up a lot of my work early this morning—thanks, insomnia—and I was buzzed enough that Gage’s suggestion sounded like a good one. “Sure. Let’s go back to your place. Drink the rest later.”
“Be right back.” Gage pushed away from the table, took our half-finished flights into the back room, and emerged a short while later with a four pack of beer bottles and a to-go box.
He made quick work of transferring the remaining fries to the container, and we were on our way.
We decided his truck could stay at the diner, and we were better off walking. As we headed to his house, the serenity of the town sank in. It was barely ten in the morning, and aside from the occasional car or pedestrian, Main Street wasn’t busy. The shops had customers, but they were inside the respective buildings.
It was both comforting and eerie that a place like this still existed in this world. “How do you not go insane from the mundaneness of this town?” I asked Gage.
“You’ve been here for several days now, you tell me.”
That was a shitty counter. Mostly because it meant he’d turned the conversation back on me again. Fortunately, this time I didn’t have any emotional attachment to the answer. “I’ve been working a lot. Hanging out with a few people. I leave town when I get bored.”
“And there you have it. My life, Evie’s life, most of our lives, in a few sentences.” Gage made it sound like the most reasonable answer ever.
“And when it all gets to be too much, you drive to Wendover?” I asked.
He shrugged. “More or less.”
“And not to gamble.”
“Sometimes to gamble. Depends on the day and the person, but we went just because.”
I didn’t understand him at all. Or rather, I wanted to say that was the case. I wanted to look down my nose at everything Gage said, the way he lived his life, and his entire appreciation for this small town experience.
And I couldn’t do any of that because part of me agreed with how good it sounded.
“Whatever,” I said.
