Charles Street, and I look up and down the road. “Where to?” he says.
I shrug. “I don’t know. It’s not like I’ve gone out to . . . you know, before.”
“You’re telling me you’ve never gotten shitfaced before?”
I shake my head.
“Well. I live to be shitfaced. So . . .” He looks up and down. “Let’s go.”
I follow after him. “Where are we going?”
He shrugs and points behind him. “Somewhere without them.”
I look over my shoulder and realize there are cameras following us, though on the other side of the street. He picks up the pace and grabs my arm suddenly and pulls me into an alley. “You seem to be awfully good at evading people,” I note.
“Yeah. Well.”
He doesn’t say more. But funny, even if he is a thug, even if he’s stolen from half the people in Atlanta, I still feel safe with him.
After we leave the alley, I don’t know where we go—a bunch of rights and lefts—but eventually we look behind us and the cameras are gone. Straight ahead there’s a tequila bar I’ve never seen before.
We go inside. It’s a crowded, dark hole-in-the-wall. My pulse skitters as we sit at a long bar. “Is this like your bar? Back home?”
He smirks. “Shit, girl, this is the Ritz compared to my place. My bar’s a dump. Tim’s used to be a nice place when my grandparents were running it. But it’s falling to shit now.” He drums his fingers on the bar. “What’ll it be?”
“Oh.” I study all the liquor bottles, confused. “Margarita?”
“I thought you wanted to get shitfaced? None of the fruity shit.”
“Then what?”
“Cuervo,” he says. “Two.”
The bartender pours two shot glasses for us. I lift it and stare at the amber liquid. I stick my tongue out to taste it as he watches me, a small, amused smile on his face.
“You ever do a shot?” he asks.
“No. Is it hard?”
He shakes his head, scans down the bar, and finds a couple of lime wedges and salt. “So just do what I do. Lick, sip, suck.”
He licks his hand below his index finger, pours the salt there, and lets me do the same. Then he licks his hand, lifts the glass, drains it easily, and stuffs the lime wedge into his mouth. “Now you.”
I lick the salt, but the liquid burns my tongue the second it touches, and it keeps burning all the way down. Somehow I manage to get it down, tears pouring down my face. He quickly hands me the lime, and I suck, feeling like I’m going to gag because my throat is on fire. “Oh god,” I choke out when I catch my breath.
“Bad?”
“No. Different.”
“Okay. You need to pace yourself. One is probably enough for you if you’ve never—”
I slam my fist down on the bar. “Bartender! Another round.”
Luke stares at me. “Hey. Wait.”
The bartender pauses, but I urge him on. “I don’t want to wait.”
The bartender pours the drink, and I hold it in my fist, feeling brazen now. “Why’s your place not doing so well now, you think?”
He lifts the shot glass, contemplating that. “Part of it’s that my grandfather mortgaged the place to the hilt and didn’t tell anyone until the banks came knocking down my door six months ago. But a bigger part of it is that I’m just a shitty manager, probably. I was a high school dropout. Lots of shit goes right over my head. Even with my granddad’s help, I don’t know much of nothing.”
Oh, gosh. He’s so wrong. I rush to correct him on that.
“That’s not true. A lot of what I learned in school is knowledge that’ll never have any practical application outside the classroom. I think you have something better. You understand how things in the world work. You know how to talk to people. To make people like you. What do I have? A title and a bunch of worthless degrees. I’m not equipped to handle anything outside the walls of my university.”
I motion for more lime wedges.
He gets them without removing his gaze from me. I can tell he’s trying to figure me out. “This has to do with your old man, huh?”
I nod. I lick, sip, and suck. This time it doesn’t burn nearly as much as it did the first time.
I motion for another.
“Hey. Doctor. I don’t want you leaving here on a stretcher,” he says, downing his drink without the lime this time. “What’s the deal?”
“Oh, nothing. Same old thing. Haven’t seen him in years, and