Page 18 of Him
Reluctantly, I shut the door. I cross the room, take the glass from her and pound it.
She slips the empty tumbler from my hand. “Now where were we?”
If I only knew.
7
Wes
“You know we just won the national title, right?” Cassel says for the hundredth time in the past hour. He wears the goofy, king-of-the-world grin he’s been sporting all night. Even before the four vodka shots he threw back.
“Yeah, I know.” My tone is absent as I sweep my gaze over the crowded, overheated bar we’d chosen as celebration headquarters. The drinks at the hotel bar are ridiculously overpriced, so we decided to venture somewhere else tonight. And according to Donovan’s Yelp search, this tiny dive bar has half-price drinks on Sunday nights and apparently they don’t taste like piss.
I don’t give a shit how the alcohol tastes, though. I’m only interested in the effects of it. I want to get drunk. I want to get shit-faced out of my mind so I don’t have to think about what a total fucking idiot I am.
Cassel’s voice drags me out of my bleak thoughts. “Then quit sulking like a bitch,” he orders. “We’re national champions, man. We crushed Yale tonight. We fucking shut them out.”
We did. The final score had been 2-0, Northern Mass. We’d wiped the ice with our opponents, and I should be happy about that. No, I should be goddamn ecstatic. It’s what we trained all year for, yet instead of savoring the win, I’m too busy bumming out about the fact that Canning has a girlfriend.
Yes, folks, Jamie Canning is straight. Shocker.
You’d think I’d have learned my lesson by now. I spent six years hoping that maybe the attraction wasn’t one-sided. Maybe one day a switch would suddenly go off and he’d be like, hmmm, I’m totally into Wes. Or maybe he would figure out he swings both ways and decide to take a walk on the dude side.
None of those maybes had panned out, though. And they never fucking would.
All around me, the guys laugh and joke and recap their favorite moments of tonight’s game, and nobody notices I’m not saying anything. My mind keeps wandering back to Jamie and his girl and the hook-up I’d interrupted last night.
“We need another round,” Cassel announces, searching the main room for our waitress.
When I spot her behind the counter, I abruptly scrape back my chair. “I’ll go order it,” I tell the guys, and then I dart away from the table before anyone can ask why I’ve suddenly become so charitable.
At the bar, I order another round of shots for the group, then rest my forearms on the splintered wooden counter and study the liquor bottles on the shelves. I’ve been drinking beer all night, but it’s not getting the job done. I need to be drunker. I need something harder.
My gut tightens when my gaze lands on a gleaming bottle of bourbon. My father’s drink of choice. But the bourbon he buys is a thousand times more expensive than the bottle on this shelf.
I shift my gaze to the row of tequila bottles.
Canning had been drinking tequila last night.
My gaze moves again. Jack Daniel’s.
Aw hell. It’s like every bottle in this fucking bar is full of memories.
Before I can stop it, my mind flashes back to that last day at camp, to the silver flask I’d passed Canning, and the mocking question I’d hurled his way.
“You think I’m too chicken-shit to blow you?”
He’d seemed to consider me for a minute. “I think it’s a bad idea to ever say that Ryan Wesley is too chicken-shit to do something.”
“True dat.”
He chuckled, but his eyes went back to the screen. Again, he let me off the hook. But I didn’t want to be let off. I wanted to get off. The longer we sat there discussing sex, the more certain I was. Touching my best friend was all I could think about. It wasn’t a dare for me, either. It was pure desire.
On the screen, the blonde was on her knees, sucking one of the guys while jacking off the other. Jamie took another sip from the flask before passing it my way. Beside me, he shifted his hips, and I had to suppress a shudder. My heart’s desire was sitting beside me.
And now he was horny.
His hand had moved, resting just above the waistband of his shorts. He gave the spot beneath his abs the tiniest of caresses, like he had an itch, but it was obvious he’d been hoping to do some strategic rearranging.
