do you?” I giggle, thinking back to just five minutes ago when he was ragging on my lyric skills.
“Doesn’t matter. I love the way it makes me feel, and I say what I feel in the right moments.”
I pull away, putting all of the blurry pieces together. Mostly the ones that sounded like “Don’t let me be alone, it’s tearing my true blue heart…”
“Tell me your dark secrets, Jags.”
His thumb sweeps across my cheek as he stares hard into my eyes. “We’ll save that for a sober night,” he says. This reminds me that I’m drunk and don’t normally know how to have this much fun. It also means he has dark secrets, which I kind of guessed. He’s twenty-eight, moving around and living like a nomad.
“Fair enough,” I tell him.
I look over Jags’s shoulder to see where Cali went, and I find her at the bar with one hand holding her cheek up and her other hand showing her phone keyboard who’s boss. I was a bad friend to her tonight. I know she’s going through a lot, and I was hoping by us going out, she’d be able to clear her mind a little, but it looks like I’m the only one who cleared my mind. So well, in fact, that I have done ridiculously stupid things tonight. Like…invite Jags’s face between my legs, in a public restroom, nonetheless. No one has ever been down there, never mind in a restroom. Not saying I’d want it to be the last time I let that happen, but maybe a bed might be nicer.
Jags looks over at Cali too. “We should probably take off soon,” he says.
“Wait, where’s Tyler?” I ask, finally coming to some of my senses.
“With a sitter,” he says.
“Who? What sitter? How do you know a sitter?”
“Cali sent me her sitter’s name when she saw you dancing with another dude.” That’s my Cali. She’ll always let things go just far enough but not too far, with me anyway. She sets the bar a little higher for herself and does way more than I’d ever do.
“So this was your plan all along?” I ask him, feeling my mind open up a little more to a cognitive thought.
“No,” he tells me. I think there’s honesty in his voice, and now I’m not sure if I’m angrier that he’s being honest or angrier that it wasn’t his plan.
I shake the mixture of anger and drunken chipperness from my mind and look back at a sulking Cali. “Cal,” I shout over. “Want to go home?”
“I told the sitter I’d pay her until midnight,” she drones.
“Wait, you knew you were calling the sitter?” I ask her. I’m so confused by these hidden plans.
“I assumed,” she says.
“Thanks for your trust, Cali,” Jags says.
“You earned it,” she says, cheering her beer mug toward us. She’s pissy. Probably because she hasn’t gotten laid in four days now.
“Hey, this song isn’t from the eighties!” I shout, listening to the words for a minute. “Oh my God—The Righteous Brothers…You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling. Don’t even tell me…is Top Gun your favorite movie of all time?” I ask Jags.
“That’s very bold of you to assume,” he says, grinning like a fool. “But, yes, yes it is.”
“It’s because you’re a sailor, isn’t it?” I say through laughter.
“Maybe,” he shrugs, obviously trying to hide his infectious smile.
“So you know all the words to this song?” I ask.
“Noooo,” he replies quietly, backing away toward the bar where he grabs a beer bottle.
“But baby, baby I love it!” he belts out. “Whoa, that’s the loving feeling’. You have lost all that lovely feeling.’” Jags is full out serenading me right now—wrong lyrics and all. He’s got one foot up on the bar stool and the top of the beer bottle pressed to his lips. His eyes are closed, and he’s singing out each word. I might be more than a little tipsy, but he can totally sing, in tune, and everything. The smoothness of his voice makes my heart flutter, or maybe I have those butterflies in my belly that everyone talks about. Jags’s hand gently wraps around my arm, and he pulls me over to him so he can continue singing to me at the top of his lungs. Just as I think this can’t possibly get any better, five other unsuspecting men from the bar join in while Jags gets down on one knee and reaches for my hand. And I’m totally eating this up, red-cheeked and all.