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“You’ll drink it and you’ll like it,” Wyatt orders, then holds his glass aloft.“To Mr.Finchy!You were a miserable prick of a boss, but you were our miserable prick of a boss.”
We cheer, sip, and grimace.
“To Jerry, you ham-loving bastard!”I say, and we happily drink to the burnout nighttime security guard who gives us the run of the driving range one night a year for the low, low price of one sugar-cured ham that he’ll cook for Christmas dinner, as well as our promise that we won’t leave chicken bones on the greens.
It’s Gabe’s turn.“To our women!Past”—he nods at Wyatt—“present”—he nods at Sebastian—“and potential.”He nods at me, and I slam the rest of my nog.
“Uh, here’s to our women who are trying to reach us,” Sebastian says with a glance at his phone screen.“Birdy says we should come by.”
Wyatt twirls his keys as we gather all traces of our party and shove it into the trunk of his Audi.Once we’re all piled in, he asks, “Where are we headed?”
Gabe rattles off an address that I don’t recognize.At my confused look, he slants me a shit-eating grin.
“You can thank me later, buddy.”
Seventeen
Liv
“Wait, so he kicked you out of his bedroom?”
Darby’s looking at me in utter confusion.
“No,” I say, gesturing with my glass to emphasize my point and sloshing peppermint martini on my wrist as I do.I lean forward to slurp up the spilled drops.“We started making out and he got weird about honesty and, like, expectations, and then I left.”
CJ’s nose wrinkles.“He knows you’re only here for a little bit longer, right?This is a fun hookup situation.Easy breezy, everybody wins.”
“That’s what I thought!”I toss my hands in the air.“But he was all, ‘No, fair maiden, I cannot sully you with my beastly reputation.’”
“Really,” Darby says.“Jonesy said all that.”
“Close enough.”I deflate onto the couch.“And then he told me to forget about it so we could go back to being friends.”
And I’d wanted to smack him for it.I watched Hollis and his tortured vulnerability vanish, to be replaced by that forced Jonesy smirk that lodged itself deep in my chest.
“I begged him to sleep with me, and he turned me down.”I stare into the bottom of my martini glass like there might be an explanation in there somewhere.“And that sucks because Ilikehim.Like for real.”
CJ pulls me into a hug.“I’m sorry, love.He’s an asshole.”
“He is,” I say into her neck.Then, “He’s not.”
CJ sighs.“I know.”
For a moment, I’m back at Hollis’, inhaling the warm, sleepy smell of his sheets, feeling the hardness of his body, watching his eyes flare when I bit his lip.He’s not an asshole, which is what makes this afternoon so confusing.
Darby’s almost-sister-in-law Birdy raises her hand like we’re in class.“Can we just go back to the hot stripper for a second?”She punctuates her question with a loud slurp of her drink.
I press the backs of my hands to my overheated cheeks at the memory.It took two and a half martinis for me to spill everything about the past week to CJ, Darby, and Birdy.And I do mean ev-uh-re-thing, starting with Hollis turning me down and working backward to the fact that I’m pretty sure making me come made Luke come.
“The thing with Luke,” I say, “is that before he bailed, he was surprisingly sweet.Just kind of holding me and stroking my back and breathing hard against my neck.It was weirdly, I dunno, intimate.”
Darby bites her lip before speaking.“That does sound like it was special.”
“Which is wild, right?We’re strangers.”
I hop up when the oven timer goes off to swap the Christmas tree-shaped cranberry-brie pull-aparts with the wreath-shaped pigs-in-a-blanket pull-aparts.The big plans CJ, Darby, and I talked about a few weeks ago turned into an evening at CJ’s house, drinking and gossiping and snacking our way through a charcuterie board while Gabe and Darby’s brother Sebastian were off with the Jones brothers doing some kind of Christmas tradition that I don’t fully understand.We’ve gotten to the part of the evening that requires heavyhors d'oeuvres to soak up the alcohol, so we did it up festive style.
“That smells amazing!”Birdy says, reaching for a doughy circle of brie when I set it on the coffee table in the living room, then hissing when it burns the tips of her fingers.
