The Reason I Stay (15 page)

“No thanks,” I reply.

Lexie’s lips flutter into a hint of a smile as she sets the bottle and glass over the counter and shakes her head to the redhead. With a pout and a last lingering glance my way, the woman walks out of The Jukebox.

Even though I’ve offered Lexie almost as many drinks as the redhead offered me, and she’s refused them all, I can’t resist offering one more. “Are you going to make me pout and walk out like she did, or will you let me buy you a drink? Last chance.”

“Working.” She points her chin to the table with the douchebags, seriously tempting me to go over and kick their asses for no other reason than being here.

I sigh and fidget in my seat, convinced that I took my be-an-asshole-until-she-admits-she-likes-you plan a little too far, and lost her interest in the process. I hate myself for it, but what I hate even more is that instead of saying “fuck it” and running after the redhead, I’m sulking and wondering why she can’t ask Jen or Anna to handle those dicks so she can finally talk to me.

It’s official. I’ve turned into a fucking girl.

Decided to stop this pathetic behavior and save whatever self-respect I still have left, I take a breath and stand up. When I look at Lexie to say good night, she’s got a deep frown and wide eyes.

“Are you leaving?” She looks from me to that table, and then back at me. “I thought you were gonna stay a while.”

The disappointment in her voice brings me an immeasurable amount of relief.

I cock a brow at her. “Should I? You haven’t paid attention to me all night.”

Lexie shakes her head as if she’s frustrated, and without replying, bends over to pick something from under the counter. When she straightens up again, she places a sheet of paper in front of me, and taps her finger over it a few times. My eyes drift toward it as she walks to the register at the back of the bar without saying another word.

The paper she gave me is a spreadsheet. It seems like the shift and duties division for the week. I look at the box that says “Thursday night” and see that Lexie and Anna are listed as working the tables and Jen as working the bar.

As soon as it sinks that she switched duties so she could stay close to me, my eyes bounce back to her. She smiles and winks at me as I drop my ass back on the barstool. I have no doubt that this is the day hell froze over. After all, a woman is being smoother than I am—which has never happened before in my life—and I have a fucking case of the butterflies. This just isn’t right.

From my seat I watch her talking to those ass-clowns. One of them, a dude with a bulldog’s face and black hair, keeps trying to grope her. My fists clench involuntarily. I consider jumping up and going over there, but Lexie slaps his hand and points at the door. The vein popping in her forehead makes me remember last Saturday, when I was on the receiving end of her rage. That’s not a welcome memory, so I push it aside, and focus on feeling proud of her for standing up for herself.

Lexie shakes her head as she walks over to where Jen is mopping the floor. My eyes, however, remain with the idiots. They seem to argue for a while. A tall man with sandy hair does most of the talking; he looks from Lexie to bulldog-dude a lot, before slapping some money over the table and guiding the group out.

When I return my eyes from the door to Lexie, she’s making her way over to me. Her hair and dress sway around her, making her look like an angel, and in that second I’m completely convinced that I’ve never seen anything as pretty as she is. Our eyes stay locked together until she’s seated in the barstool next to me. Her body is turned toward me, and her crossed legs demand my attention. She’s got the most beautiful legs I’ve seen: long, silky and perfect.

“Do you mind drinking from that one?” Lexie asks, calling my attention back to her face.

She’s holding the bottle of Jack she left over the counter earlier, and points at my used tumbler. I shake my head. “Not at all.”

With a smile, she pours me a double and another for herself in the clean glass she left beside the bottle. We both pick up our glasses.

“What are we drinking to?” I ask.

“I don’t know. You’re the one buying it, so you tell me.”

I arch a brow at her. “Okay, here’s to you finally being off work and accepting my drink.”

She laughs and clicks her glass with mine. We both take a swig of our drinks. Her face twists, and she lets a throaty groan that does things to my body as she swallows the amber liquid. That sound is almost as sexy as the sight of her drinking
my
drink, one most women can’t handle. I decide then and there that this won’t be the last time we drink together.

“Technically I’m still on the clock, so I’m only taking this one. I gotta clean the tables and the bar before I’m officially off-duty,” she tells me, and takes another sip. “But at least now we’re alone. No people to gossip about how I’m accepting drinks from a patron during work hours.”

I take my eyes away from her for a second to look around at the completely empty room. Even Jen is nowhere in sight. I like it.

“I’ll help if you drink another.”

She angles a brow at me. She does that a lot. I’m starting to understand the nuances in that expression. So far I’ve been able to identify two different types of arched brow: the one that rises all the way up is always paired with a grim line in her lips, and is a clear sign that I’m being a jerk; and the one that goes halfway up, just enough to accentuate the soft curve and bring more attention to her green eyes . . . I’m gathering that this second type, the one I’m looking at right now, is related to flirting.

With a ghost of a smile on her lips, she asks, “You want to help? Like, help cleaning?”

Actually, what I want is to spend more time with you than just one drink
. “Sure.”

She tilts her head at me and narrows her eyes, as if she’s not buying it. “You know I’m not sleeping with you, right? Trying to get me drunk won’t help with that.”

I’m glad I swallowed my last gulp before she said that, otherwise I’d have spat whiskey all over her because I belt out a laugh. I can’t help it.

When my outburst ends and I open my eyes, she’s staring at me with Arched Brow Number One. “Is the idea of sex with me laughable, Mathew?”

I fight the urge to laugh again. “It’s Matt. And absolutely not, but the idea that I’d have to get you drunk for that is.”

The moment those words exit my lips, I know I said shit. I close my eyes, trying to come up with a way to fix it, but a coaster hits my forehead, demonstrating I’m past the point of salvation. The words that follow prove that point further.

“So you’re calling me easy?”

I laugh again, but this time it’s due to my fucking nerves. And once more I wonder what the hell is wrong with me. I don’t get nervous like this.

“No, you’re the opposite of easy. Actually, you’re the hardest woman I’ve ever met, which I really like. I just know how persuasive I am.”

A smile dances on her lips, and she takes another sip of her drink. “So why do you want to help me clean a bar?”

I shrug, trying to look nonchalant. “There are a lot of reasons why.”

“Like?”

“Like needing some good bar karma, and wanting to buy you one more drink,” I counter with a low tone and a side-smile. “Maybe I’ll even convince you to dance a song with me.”

We stare at each other in silence. I take a sip of my drink, and she smiles as her eyes drift down to my mouth. Her pupils dilate. The sight makes my body shiver and tighten. I drink slowly, reveling in the blush that creeps up her neck and cheeks. It’s hard to explain how much I like her reactions to me. She can keep her shit together better than me, and as weird as it sounds, it drives me a bit further into Crazyville.

After a while, she parts her lips and takes a breath, making my eyes drift to her mouth, which is now moving. I force myself to focus on her words. “. . . do you need good bar karma?”

In a sliver of second, my brain goes from being filled with thoughts of her lips and my lips and the fun they could have together to being flooded with memories that never bothered me until now.

I shake my head, forcing the thoughts and the frown I feel forming between my eyes away. “I’ve participated in the wreckage of four bars since I turned twenty-one.”

Lexie narrows her eyes but keeps a smile on her lips. “C’mon.”

“I’m not proud, but it’s true.”

She peels her eyes from me and looks down at her glass. “What was it? Fighting?”

There’s very little in life that makes me uncomfortable in an emotional way. I’ve been naked in public, I’ve been caught having sex on a couch that wasn’t mine, and I’ve had people talking good and bad things about me, but none of those things has ever made me uncomfortable or fidgety. This subject does. Discussing it with Lexie, a woman who is good and the absolute opposite of me, makes me even more so. However, there’s something about her that makes me open my mouth.

“Mostly, yes. Every bar has a girl with wandering eyes, and a boyfriend. That shit never works out for anyone. But usually it’s just guys being too drunk and stupid. I’m good at keeping my shit together when I’m drinking, but not always, and my friends back home . . . well, they tend to get a little out of control.”

I’m ready for her to look at me with judgment in her eyes, or to swallow the remains of her drink and tell me to go away, but she does neither. She looks back at me with a kind gaze and a barely there smile. “I’m thinking you may need something a bit more extreme to fix your karma. Cleaning the men’s room, perhaps?”

I look at her with wide eyes that scream
hell no
—or at least, I hope they do—and slowly shake my head.

She laughs. Then her gaze drifts someplace behind me. Her hand and tumbler move in a circular motion, and it’s like she’s lost in thought. “Has
sugar
been involved in these bar wreckages?”

Inside my mind I’m yelling, “I knew it!” But on the outside, I nod. I’ve been waiting for this exact moment, the epitome of my plan, since my phone rang earlier. I knew she’d heard my conversation, at least a tiny bit of it, and in all honesty I’ve been bummed that she didn’t seem to care. But she does, and knowing it forces me to hide the smile on my lips behind another sip.

“Yeah, but not so much in the past couple of years. Caitlyn was a big game-changer.”

Lexie’s eyes pop open so wide that there’s a full band of white around her emerald irises. “Please tell me you don’t have a kid.”

I take another sip. “None that I know of. And Caitlyn is hardly a kid. She’s twenty-one.”

“Girlfriend,” she mutters, her eyes look down and away.

I nod, and as much as I like how obviously jealous she is, I’ve made my point and now it’s time to end things. I pull my phone from my pants pocket and scroll through the contacts. Before I find the one I’m looking for, she asks. “Is she bi or something?”

And that does it; I start to laugh. I finally find the entry entitled “Sugar” and press on it before putting the device down on the counter. I push it toward her and reply, “Opinions vary on that, but I don’t think so.”

Lexie lowers her eyes toward my phone. I take another sip of Jack, and watch as she blinks a few times. Then she takes it in her hands for a closer look. Her brows pull together tighter as she looks at it for a few seconds more before returning her eyes to me.

“You said sex with me wasn’t a laughable notion, which means you’re not gay. So explain, because either you’re calling a man sugar, or you have some weird fetish for really ugly females with stubby chins.”

Struggling not to give in to laughter again, I raise a brow. “Sexy lingerie, high heels and some light bondage. Those are my fetishes. No facial hair whatsoever.” She blushes again, and I love it. I point at the phone. “That’s my best friend and roommate, Fitz. Caitlyn’s boyfriend, and the man I call sugar.”

Silence stretches for a few seconds as Lexie breathes heavily and looks from me to the phone to booth nine. And then she points a polished finger at me. “You used a
date
with a seven year-old and her grandparents, and a
man
to tease and torture me all night?”

Don’t laugh. Don’t laugh. Do NOT laugh.

“Yes, but I didn’t intend to tease or torture—though I’m happy you felt that way. All I wanted was to prove a point.”

“Which is?” she asks with a raised brow—the first type.
Crap.

I look straight into her outraged eyes, and with a smile, reply, “That you like me.”

Lexie’s mouth opens and closes a few times. The world finally makes sense again when I keep my cool, and she starts to stammer in a high-pitched voice. “That is . . . You’re . . .” She taps a finger over the bar. I tuck my hair and she smiles. “You suck!” She throws another coaster at me.

I shrug. “Yet, you like me.”

“Well . . . you like me too.”

“I never said I didn’t.” I wink and finish my drink. “Now that we have that settled, how about we go finish your job so we can have that other drink?”

She shakes her head, but her lips maintain her smile. “Okay.”

We join forces cleaning the tables. Lexie sprays the product and I wipe. We talk about Fitz, and drinking whiskey, and how my date with Kodee happened, and why she loves chocolate-chip pancakes and how I’ve never had them. Our time together is fun, uncomplicated, and completely devoid of any thoughts about Seattle and the reasons why I ended up here. It makes me think that one day I could forget it all. I could forget what I do, what I did, who I was, and then I could be the person I am when I’m with her. I could be a man that is kind and calm and doesn’t do stupid crap. A man who deserves a woman like her. I think I’d like that.