How to Date the Guy You Hate by Julie Kriss Page 0,2

back, away from him. She looked pissed, but she didn’t want to get close. One of her girlfriends moved up and touched her elbow, looking concerned.

Yeah, no. I put down the shot glass and walked into the crowd, letting the guy see me coming with my black security jacket. He just gave me a shitty glare and looked back at the girl again.

So it was going to be like that, then. I was okay with that.

The old Jason would have been uncomfortable right now. I could rush a guy on the football field, or do hill sprints for three hours like they made us do in the Marines, but straight-up hand-to-hand combat wasn’t my specialty. I was never the guy on the field who knocked the other guy out or tackled his ass to the ground. After all, my mother was usually in the stands somewhere, or my sister, or my teachers. Or my friends.

Jason, the nice guy, never did that shit.

I got between the guy and the girl and didn’t even look at the guy, which I knew would make him mad. Instead, I bent low to the girl so she could hear me over the pounding hip-hop music. “Is he bothering you?” I asked her.

She looked up at me, a worried look in her angry eyes, but her friend answered for her. “Yes,” she said to me. “This guy is bothering my friend.”

I looked at the girl again. She looked like a freshman, maybe five years younger than me. She was sober. Tough, angry, and backed up by a good friend. For a second I pictured my sister Holly in her place, stranded in some dark dance club while a douchebag bothered her, and that gave me a nice head of steam. Holly wasn’t this girl’s age, but she had been once. While I had been away, deployed, unable to get her out of situations like this.

I didn’t think Holly had been in situations like this. But how the fuck would I know?

I turned to the guy behind my shoulder. “Time to leave,” I said to him.

He rolled his eyes at me. He had longish sandy hair and a half-assed attempt at a scraggly beard. A backwards baseball cap completed the look. Dancers were crowding around us, the dance floor filling in as a popular song started. “Cool it,” he said. “She’s my ex-girlfriend.”

I shook my head. “Time to go.”

“We were just talking.”

“You want to leave on your own, or you want me to escort you out? Because I will.”

“Go away, man. This is none of your business.”

That made it easy.

I stepped behind him, yanked his elbows behind his back, and frog-marched him straight off the dance floor.

I learned that move in the Marines. I always knew it would be useful someday.

The guy was half drunk, and he yelled as I hauled him off. Dancers stopped to look. He kept yelling—something about calling the cops and pressing charges—as I marched him past the front vestibule, where the latecomers were paying their cover fee and a huge guy named Nate checked ID’s. Nate just looked up at me and nodded, then went back to checking ID’s again. He knew the drill.

I could have hauled Half-Assed Beard out a side door, or out the back to the parking lot. That would have been more private. But I wasn’t in the mood for that. Instead I dragged him straight out the front door, where at least fifty other college kids were congregated, standing in line, waiting to get in. Every conversation went silent as they watched us.

I gave Half-Assed Beard a good, hard shove toward the curb, where cabs were going by. “Here’s your advice for the night,” I said in a loud, clear voice. “Don’t bother chicks when you come to a club. If she wants you to fuck off, you just fuck off.”

He regained his balance after I let him go and turned as if he was about to come at me. Then he saw how big I was—I’m six four—and the crowd of onlookers ranged behind me.

“We gonna have a problem?” I asked him.

“Fuck you, man!” he spat in frustration.

I’d engineered it for maximum humiliation, and I could see I’d gotten it. “You won’t be let back in,” I said in my loud, clear voice again. “Not tonight, and not ever. We know what you look like, dude. Go home.” I turned and looked at the crowd. “Show’s over, folks.” Then I strode through them and walked back