“You’re not going to let perfectly good alcohol go to waste, are you?” Sloane said as another douche with a guitar took the stage and murdered a John Mayer song. Slowly. Painfully.
I looked up to see if he was watching, but he was gone. I searched the rest of the bar, but it was too crowded to see. Well, a drink was a drink.
Taking the drink away from Sloane, I downed it and shoved the glass away so even if he looked over, he wouldn’t see the empty glass.
“Way to go,” Marisol gives me a thumbs up and a smile as the John Mayer wannabe finally exited the stage. “I’m not sure if my ears are going to recover from that. Why do we do this to ourselves?” She rubbed her ears as if to rub the last song out of them.
“Because we’re young and hot and it’s Friday night in Boston,” Sloane said, mimicking the heavy accent so many people around here had. Mine only came out every now and then, but I definitely had a tendency to drop the R’s in certain words.
I could feel the effect of the alcohol starting to take hold of me after the next two acts. I became pretty much cool with everyone and everything and I couldn’t stop touching everyone’s faces.
“Um, you should look at the stage right now, Ror,” Sloane said, moving my head for me.
It was him. Lucas Blaine. He was holding a guitar, had swapped out his diamond ear stud for a silver hoop and his hair was falling all over the place. Add the guitar and flannel shirt and he was one bow tie, pair of nerd glasses and a set of suspenders away from being a hipster. I’d personally never seen the appeal, but Lucas Blaine could make a duck costume sexy.
Damn him. Damn all good looking guys and their chin dimples and well-proportioned muscles and their hair that you want to touch so bad you can barely sit still.
Damn them all to the fiery pits of hell.
The announcer started to introduce him, but Lucas whispered in his ear, and then the announcer spoke into the mic. “Our next act is Lucas Blaine. Give him a hand everyone.”
Lucas pulled a stool forward and adjusted the mic as Sloane and Marisol talked about the various sexual things they’d like to do to him. Chloe just stared into her drink.
“Do you want to go?” I asked her, hoping she’d say yes so I had an out.
She shrugged.
“I’m good for now.” Crap.
I decided that I wasn’t going to watch. Nope.
But then the bastard started singing, “Sooner Surrender” by Matt Nathanson and my head snapped around at the sound of his voice.
Oh, f**k me. Again.
His eyes were half closed, his hair falling in front of them. And his voice. Oh, his voice touched me in places that a voice shouldn’t have access to.
His voice crawled down my body and under my clothes and teased me, taunted me, pleasured me. Like he was making love with music.
Alcohol. It had to be the alcohol causing me to be more turned on by a song than I’d ever been before. Everything else faded into the background as my entire being focused on him on that stage.
The song ended, and the spell was broken, almost with a snap, and I was back to reality.
And everyone was staring at me as my face flamed up.
“You, um,” Sloane said, taking a sip of her drink, “you didn’t tell us he could sing.”
“I . . . I didn’t know.” He sure didn’t put that on his résumé. Not that it would have made a difference.
My throat was dry, but I was out of drinks. I should have gotten a glass of water.
“I’m, I’m going to get another drink,” I said, getting up and hurrying to the bar without asking if anyone else wanted anything. I just needed to get away for a minute. Try to clear my head.
“What did you think?” a voice said behind me as a warm hand lightly touched my back to tell me that he was here.
I froze and didn’t answer, instead concentrating on trying to get one of the bartenders’ attention.
“You seemed to, ah, like it,” he said, removing his hand, but he was still close. The fact that the bar was so packed could have been responsible, but I didn’t think it was.
The bartender was completely ignoring me, and I had to get away from Lucas Blaine if it was the last thing I did, so I whirled around so fast, I nearly knocked him completely off balance and announced, “I have to pee.”
There were worse things I could have said, I suppose, but the way he smiled in response to my declaration morphed his irresistible face into something that was somehow even more irresistible.
Abort, Abort! I needed to bail, so I shoved him aside and headed for the ladies’ room. I swore I heard him chuckling behind me.
Of course there was a line at the ladies’, so I was stuck standing behind two girls that were trying to prop each other up and doing that whisper-yell thing that drunk people do.
I really didn’t want to break the seal and be peeing all night, but I had no choice. Once I was done, I snuck a peek back at the bar before I walked back to my table. No sign of Lucas Blaine. My eyes did a quick sweep of the rest of the room and found him in a worse place than at the bar.
He was standing next to the table I had vacated a few moments ago, smiling and clearly flirting with all of my friends.
They were all smiling and laughing at some joke he’d probably made and it was all I could do not to grab a pitcher of beer from the next table and pour it on his head. He probably would have loved that.
“There you are! I thought you’d fallen in,” Marisol said when I finally made my way back to the table. I had no choice.
Lucas’ eyes swept up and down my body, as if he’d just seen me for the first time instead of staring at me for hours.
“Nope,” I said and moved to get back in my chair, which Lucas just happened to be standing next to. I went to pull the chair out, but he did it for me.
“Need a boost?” He was making fun of me, the jerk.
“No, I’m fine,” I said as I used the bar attached to the legs of the stool to vault myself into it. Doing so was none too graceful, but I had short legs and I was not accepting help from him.
“So Lucas was just telling us all the reasons you should hire him. I swear, if you don’t want him, I could use an assistant,” Sloane said, looking at Lucas like she was going to lick him up and down. I gave her a death glare that he couldn’t see, standing on my other side, and she kicked me under the table.
“You have an assistant,” I said, because it was true. She had plenty of college students that would work for nothing just for the chance at making it in the fashion world.