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I’m showered and changed when Dix strolls in. “You done already?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I mumble. “You?”
“Skipping today. My quad still hurts from Whitaker checking me into the boards last week. I just came to grab something from my locker.” He drops to a seat on the bench. “Me and Colin were gonna go out, though. Come get a drink with us. It’s been a while.”
I shake my head. “I should get home to Sloan.”
Dix chuckles. “Surely she’s seen enough of your ugly mug. Come out. Throw some darts. Shoot some pool. Man cannot live by sex alone.”
“Says who?” Colin asks from behind him.
“You wouldn’t know,” Dix retorts. “You haven’t been laid since that hooker gave you the clap.”
Colin shoots a double bird at Dixon as he saunters in. “Kiss my ass, Hayes.” He glances up at me. “He’s right, though. You should come with us.”
I sigh. “Fine. One drink.”
“Famous last words,” Colin warns with a laugh.
We pile into Dixon’s Jaguar and zip over to his favorite bar, a hockey-themed spot called The Tide. Dix has been crushing on one of the bartenders lately, and when he sees her, he orders a Sex on the Beach without so much as an ounce of shame.
“You’re despicable,” I inform him.
He grins. “It’s an innuendo. She gets it.”
“The only thing she ‘gets’ is that you’re a moron.”
“I gotta agree with Beckster here,” chuckles Colin. “You can’t be making bedroom eyes at some broad if you’ve got your lips wrapped around a pink bendy straw.” Still laughing, he breaks off to go hit the bathroom.
Dix and I lean up against the bar while we wait for his neon monstrosity and my beer. “So,” he says, “how are things with you and Sloan?”
“Fine.”
“Ah. Feeling verbose today, I see.”
I rub my temples and exhale. This might be the longest “one drink” of my life. Between Sloan’s erraticness and Viv being… well, herself, I’m just running short on patience these days.
“We’re good. Mostly. Bumps in the road.”
“Bumps in the belly, too,” he teases.
“Yeah. That, too.” I sigh. “Just feels like a lot of shit all at once sometimes.”
He claps a hand on my shoulder as the bartender brings our drinks over. Shooting her a saucy wink, he hands me my beer and we saunter over to the dart board in the back room. He pries the darts loose and gives me a few.
“You need to lock Sloan down,” he advises as he takes the first shot.
Colin comes up, still buckling his pants. “Yeah,” he agrees. “So she can’t run off when you inevitably do something stupid.”
“You’re talking a lot of trash to a man who’s holding several pointy projectiles,” I warn them.
The Irishman holds up his hands in self-defense. “I’m just sayin’. Girl like that wants a ring.”
A ring.I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about it. About how good it would feel to mark her as mine. To give her something eternal so she knows I’m not kidding when I say that what she and I have is forever.
I turn and skewer the bullseye with a hard-thrown dart.
Dixon nods, impressed. “You’re considering it, aren’t you?”
