Page 13 of Undercover
I shrugged and took a swig of my beer to buy a little time. I’d given this some thought before coming to meet him, but pretending to have a whole career I couldn’t back up with much felt like digging myself too deep. But I didn’t need to think of something to tell him. Giving myself three dimensions in his eyes could only help me in gaining his confidence. I forced down the fresh wave of shame that thought produced.
“Whatever I can find. I signed up with a temp agency today. They place people for construction, landscaping, stuff like that.”
“Yeah?” He sipped his wine and smiled. “I bet you look pretty good in a t-shirt, all sweaty and hot and lifting heavy things.”
He batted his eyelashes at me, and that sensation of wrongness crept up on me again. His flirtation had a fake, practiced feel to it. Just like at the bar.
I’d have to go along with it. I needed to, even though it made me feel like a fucking creep. What I really wanted to do was shake him out of it. Surprise him. Make him show me somethingreal, damn it.
Instead, I needed to get him to take me home, and then hopefully leave me alone long enough to search a little. I could get him into the shower if I fucked him first…and not going there. I shifted uneasily on the booth’s bench, wincing at the squeak of faux-leather.
“Sweaty and hot, huh?” I tried a friendly leer. “I could give you a demonstration. Somewhere a little more private, where I won’t get arrested for taking my shirt off.”
Gabe just stared at me for a long moment. And then he swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing distractingly, and knocked back the rest of his wine like a shot of tequila. “Maybe this was a bad idea,” he said faintly, setting the glass back down on the table with a soft thump. “I don’t—I think this was a bad idea.”
He didn’t sound pissed or worried. He sounded resigned. Like that was that, and our date had ended.
And fuck no. No, no, no, because I needed a lead, and I needed an informant, and I needed…not to let Gabe get up and walk out of here, like he looked about to do. He’d started edging his way to the side of the booth, making the subtle motions of someone both literally and figuratively on the way out the door.
Screw it. I’d struck out on a lot of dates. My sister had always told me toJust be yourself, Alec. You’re likeable sometimes when you relax a little.Which…not so complimentary, maybe, but it was also shitty advice, because I had trouble being anythingbutmyself, and I wasn’t, it turned out, all that likeable. Shitty advice all around.
And yet, it was all I had.
“You know, I wasn’t actually planning on fucking you tonight,” I said into Gabe’s awkward, fidgety, trying-to-get-away silence. “Obviously that’d need your buy-in too. I’m just saying—if you offered, I’d say no. You were flirting. I was trying to flirt back. I’m bad at it. Even more obviously.” I cleared my throat awkwardly. Gabe’s gaze had flicked back to me after my first few words, and his eyes had widened impossibly, his lips parted. God, he was fucking beautiful. Even with the hair and the piercings. Maybe especially with the hair and the piercings, and didn’t that show me just how screwed I was. “Look, no pressure, but do you want another glass of that? I’ll get another beer.” I shouldn’t. Three meant starting to veer into lowered-inhibitions territory. But I would, for the chance to stay and get this right, or at least a little less wrong. “But I’m not going to hit on you, and if I take you home, I’ll walk you to your door. That’s it.”
“Okay,” he said at last, drawing the word out into three syllables. “Okay. Um. That—I’m having the malbec?” He didn’t know what he’d ordered? Or was he simply so nervous his voice had started to waver? “I’ll be right back. In a minute. Right back, I promise,” he added in the tone of someone lying through his teeth.
With that, he slid out of the booth and escaped, slipping through a gap between cocktail tables and disappearing into the back of the bar, where he no doubt knew where to find an exit if he wanted to. A bathroom, too, but I’d give it fifty-fifty.
I replayed what I’d said in the slightly less embarrassing privacy of my own mind. Yep, I’d been myself. I sighed. More like sixty-forty, and not in my favor.
I flagged down a server and ordered myself another beer, along with a glass of malbec I doubted Gabe would come back to the table to drink.
I wasn’t actually planning on fucking you tonight.That couldn’t have been more presumptuous and rude if I’d tried.
Jesus Christ. Seventy-thirty. At best.
5
Gabe
The bathrooms at V and V didn’t have the same seedy, dingy, paper-on-the-floor vibe as the clubs I usually visited on my evenings out, but a bar bathroom was, in the end, a bar bathroom. My face looked faintly orange in the mirror over the sink, some quality of the lightbulbs people always used in fixtures like these. Stupid noble gases. Not one of them managed to cast a flattering light.
And contemplating my annoyance with a whole group of chemical elements wouldn’t get me any closer to figuring out whether I ought to bolt out the back door, risking setting off the alarm in order to escape from the most unsettling date of my life.
Alec seemed different tonight. More polished, less frightening.
Or he had, until he’d sliced right through my practiced flirtation with a direct come-on that felt too heavy, too out of place in a venue like an upscale wine bar. I’d have expected it from someone hitting on me at a club. But not here. And not out of the mouth of a guy who’d otherwise been making obvious efforts to be polite and put-together this evening.
Everything about him felt slightly off.
And I’d still wanted to take him home and jump him, take his come-on and run with it until he had me pressed up against a wall just like he had the day before, only this time with the clothes coming off.
But for once, I’d listened to that little voice in my head that saidYou’re better than this. Hadn’t I been thinking about how empty my hook-ups left me? I deserved better. I deservedmore. And I wouldn’t be getting it from Alec.
On the other, other hand, I really wanted what I might be able to get from Alec. I’d regret it in the morning, but I wanted it now.
And then he’d done an about-face, maybe because I’d looked like I might be shooting him down. The typical move of a guy who couldn’t deal with rejection: reject me first.
