A Toast to the Good Times - By Liz Reinhardt Page 0,44
as she opens the car door. “Why do I have a feeling that this is going to be one of those incredibly uncomfortable situations where I watch you get pulled across the bar and kissed by old girlfriends all night?”
Her smile makes me smile. “Didn’t I just get all sappy about how much I like you? If you see any one of them trying to sneak a kiss, you have my permission to go all psycho girlfriend on them.”
At the word girlfriend Mila inhales a hissed breath, but all her upset is gone by the end of my sentence.
“I’m so not a psycho girl type, Landry. How about this? If you really like me, you’ll find a way to wiggle out of having to kiss anyone else all night. And if you do manage, maybe we can kiss more later?”
She doesn’t say it to be flirty or sexy, and that may be exactly why it’s pretty much the most exciting offer I’ve had in my life.
“So is this like a bet?” I ask as I come around to her side of the car and take her arm, leading her in.
Before she can answer, we step into a den of pure and utter chaos. Dad hooked up the karaoke machine, unfortunately. By the end of the night, my ears will bleed anytime Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” gets decimated by another half-drunk hottie planning on giving her boyfriend a lead up to some Christmas nookie.
The dartboard is the focus of another huge clump of young, roaring beer guzzlers, and I predict the wall behind the target collapses from millions of infinitesimal holes pierced into every square millimeter of drywall.
The pool table is a wide open humping ground. Pretty girls are boxed in by eager guys, who can’t wait until the next shot so they can lean over and press into their dates in the guise of mentoring new moves.
As crowded as all these outlying locations are, it’s the bar that’s the showpiece of pure and total lunacy. I grab her by the hand, and glare at one of the old-timer regulars who’s sipping the last watery drips of a Jack and Coke.
“Ronald, the lady needs a seat.”
Mila’s eyes pop wide, like she’s either embarrassed that I just told Ronald to get lost, or not used to being called a lady. Or both.
From down the bar, my father frowns at me as he refills glass after glass of beer. He’s told me a million times that our regulars are the bread and butter of this bar, but this is Christmas Eve...and Mila. I need this to go well, and I don’t give a shit what my dad thinks.
All Ronald really wanted to do was ogle the girls gyrating to some young guy with a soldier’s haircut butchering Elvis’s “Blue Christmas,” and he can actually do it better from a vantage point across from his current stool.
“Of course, m’lady.” He dips a drunken bow and starts to totter away, but I grab his glass and pour him a refresher.
“Merry Christmas, Ronald.” I give him a quick smile and he raises his glass at me and shakes the ice before taking a long, loving sip.
“You have a gift, Landry-boy. A true gift with booze.” He stumbles closer to the dancers, and I gesture for Mila to hop on his vacated seat.
“That’s a girl.” I whip up two Tom Collins, working so fast it repeatedly seems like I’m a second away from dropping a glass or a bottle and smashing it all over the floor. But that’s the best pace to work at, in my opinion. Breakneck or bust.
I pass one her way and lift my glass to her, ignoring my father’s irritated call to me from down the bar.
“So, we were talking about me avoiding kisses tonight. How 'bout that goes for you too, and if we make it to the end of the night with no kisses on either side, we make out hot and heavy in my parents’ basement later?”
I raise my eyebrows at her and her laugh draws looks and instant smiles from across the entire bar.
Her laugh is a sound that I want to record just to playback when I feel like shit and need a reason to smile.
“Well, if those are the kinds of offers you’ve been giving girls all this time, it’s no mystery why you have to beat them away.” She picks up her drink and bats her lashes at me slowly. “I