I settled into the couch, chose Springsteen and made it through “Candy’s Room”, “Incident on 57th Street” and was enjoying “Thunder Road” even though my hangover had come back with a vengeance when I felt movement beside me on the couch and something pressed against my hip.
My eyes opened.
Hank was sitting next to me, his hip against mine.
Shit.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
For some reason, this made him smile and my stomach clutched.
He plucked the MP3 player out of my hand and turned it to look at the display. His eyes went lazy at what he saw but he touched it with his thumb and the mega-blast of music powered down to seriously un-rock ‘n’ rol levels.
Then, he leaned down, his fingers found the cord to the earphones which was resting against my chest, he tugged it and my right earphone popped out of my ear just as his lips made it there.
“You’re shouting,” he whispered
Goddammit.
I was such a loser.
“Though, Springsteen is worth it,” he finished.
“Don’t you have a job?” I asked, when his head came up and his hand went away from my chest and settled opposite my body on the couch by my hip, making him lean into me al the more.
I was trying to ignore the fact that although it wasn’t even noon, I’d made a fool of myself at a used bookstore in Denver at least half a dozen times.
“Came by to get coffee,” Hank answered.
“Oh.”
“Want to have lunch?”
“I’m having lunch with Uncle Tex.”
He looked at the coffee counter. I moved my head on the couch seat and looked too. There were four people in line and two people waiting at the end of the counter for their coffee. Uncle Tex was working the espresso machine like a mad man, banging and crashing like each coffee needed to be created with as much violence as possible.
“He might be delayed,” Hank said, looking back at me.
“I just had an ultra-sized cheeseburger meal,” I told Hank,
“I’m not hungry.”
His eyes drifted down my body then up to my face again.
It’d been a long time since I’d done it but I was pretty sure I was blushing.
“Then maybe you’l keep me company while I have lunch,” he suggested.
“I don’t want to be around food, it’l make me sick. I’m hungover. Probably too hungover even to have dinner. I haven’t been this hungover since Purdue beat IU at Ross-Ade my senior year.”
“Then we’l have a quiet night.”
He had an answer for everything.
Before I could say anything, he noted, “You’re a Boilermaker.”
“Hoosier by birth, Boilermaker by the grace of God.” It came out of my mouth by rote; I’d been saying it since I was three, nearly as long as I’d been saying, “Go, Cubbies, go”. I didn’t mean it to be cute, or flirty, or funny.