Sweet (True Believers #2)(46)
Author: Erin McCarthy

“I’m sorry.” I felt sad, and I wasn’t really sure why.

He sighed. “Do you really want to go back? Were you having fun?”

Was I? Not particularly. I just had a good buzz and didn’t want to waste it. But I’d rather be with Riley. I shook my head. “No.”

“If you don’t want to go home yet I’ll take you to the townie bar and we can play the jukebox.”

I wasn’t sure if that sounded fun or not. I wasn’t sure I even knew what a townie bar was. Standing there, not even moving, both ankles gave out from my drunken wobbling, and I fell off my shoes.

Riley laughed. “Alright, come here. Hold my shoulders.” He squatted down and grabbed my ankle.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m taking these stupid shoes off your feet before you break your ankle.”

I held onto his shoulders, digging my fingers into the fabric of his shirt to stabilize myself as he undid the straps on my shoes. “I’m fine.” On the spectrum of fine I was probably right in the middle, and that was good enough for me. “The ground is icky. I don’t want to be barefoot.”

“Tough.”

Then my shoes were in his hand and I was on stable ground. Or as stable as the ground is when you’ve basically had a vodka IV in all day.

“Where is your phone?” Riley asked me. “Did you bring a purse?”

“Oh, poop!” I felt my pockets and my boobs. “I had a wristlet. I think I set it on a toilet.”

“Do you remember which toilet? There were about twenty laying around that yard.”

I burped and tried to pretend I didn’t. “The pink one.”

“Alright, come on.” Shoes in one hand, Riley used the other to pull me back toward the yard.

Tyler followed a step behind and I turned and made a goofy face at him for no apparent reason. He laughed and shook his head.

As we moved through the crowd I noticed a girl from my design class was letting a guy do a shot from between her br**sts. “Hooter tooter!” his friends were chanting.

She was giggling and bending over as his head tipped back so that tequila and her tits fell into his face. So maybe I could see why this wasn’t Riley’s kind of party.

Riley didn’t say anything though. He just wove us through the crowd from toilet to toilet. I wanted to offer advice on where the toilet had been, but I couldn’t quite remember. I was actually doubting that I had even left my purse on a toilet. I might have set it down when I had refilled my drink. Or when I had been dancing. But after a few minutes Riley pointed. “Is that it?”

My little red bag was on a pink toilet lid. Yay, me. “Yes!”

He leaned over and snagged it from between two girls. The one glared at him, but he ignored her. I held my hand out to take the purse but he just kept it tucked in his palm along with my shoes dangling from his fingers. I was starting to think he didn’t trust me to have my shit together tonight.

I was starting to think he might be right.

Because I actually walked into a neighborhood bar with Riley barefoot with no concern whatsoever to what might be sticking to the bottoms of my feet.

Chapter Fourteen

“Hey, what’s up?” the bartender said to Riley when we walked in.

Riley waved and pulled out a stool for me. I eyed the bartender, expecting him to card me, but he looked more interested in checking his phone than preventing underage drinking.

So this was a townie bar. It was dark, with a full display of liquor bottles behind the bar, the chairs cracked vinyl. It was nothing like the dance clubs we always went to, but more like what you see in movies, where hairy loggers are grabbing a beer before the zombie apocalypse.

Spinning on my bar stool to get a view of the room, I lost my balance and almost wiped out. I wasn’t sure why I was having so much trouble staying upright.

Riley laughed. “Settle down over there. I’m going to get a beer. I hesitate to ask this, but do you want something?”

“Let’s do a shot,” was my brilliant answer. It seemed to sound like a fabulous idea. We had dropped Tyler back off at the house, and I was thinking that tonight Riley and I could finally have sex. I was thinking a shot might increase the probability.

“Only if I can do it off your tits,” he said, with a look that said he clearly thought that was about as cheap and ridiculous as you could get. He gave a mock fist pump. “Hooter tooter. Dickwads.”

“Ha ha.”

“So who’s your friend here, Mann?” the bartender asked Riley, eyeing me with blatant curiosity.

“Maybe you should sit down,” Riley told him. “Because this is Jessica, my girlfriend.”

The guy laughed, stroking his long beard. He was bald and heavily tattooed. “No shit?” He held his hand out to me. “Well, it’s nice to meet you, Jessica. I’m Zeke.”

I shook his hand and gave him what I assumed was a charming smile. “Nice to meet you, too.” Then I nudged Riley. “Why is it so hard to believe I’m your girlfriend?”

“I don’t bring girls to bars.”

“So how did you two meet?” Zeke asked. “At the mall?”

Was I being insulted?

Riley just laughed. “Screw you. No, Jess is Tyler’s girlfriend’s roommate. We’ve known each other for about a year I guess.”

“Six months,” I corrected.

He shrugged. “Six months.”

“Nice. Make Tyler do all the hard work of scoring a girl, then you just shop from her friends. I admire that.”

What, was I a pair of jeans? But I had to assume Zeke was joking.

“Yeah, well, I’m working with a handicap here.” He gestured to his face, then eyed me. “Okay, how about one shot of vodka, since that’s what you’ve been drinking all night? Zeke, you going to do one with us?”

“Why the hell not?” was his opinion as he reached back for a bottle. Shot glasses appeared from under the counter.

“Now if you’re going to do a shot,” Riley instructed me, “you have to do it right. None of this sipping on it crap.”

“I know how to do a shot.” I gave him a dirty smile. “Open my throat.”

His eyebrows went up. “You good at that?” His knee nudged mine.

“Oh, yeah.” Yes, I was flirting. Yes, I was lying. I could do a shot no problem, but I never gave blow jobs. Ever. So the implication was false, but I figured he wouldn’t care once we were naked and I was offering other alternatives.