Dylan listened to the pair laugh as they made their way toward the bar, giving her a chance to lift herself out of the booth without anyone hearing her groan. By the time she managed to reach them, Neale was ordering while Stacy chatted animatedly with a guy who was obviously mistaking friendly for interested.
“Do you want a Rollercoaster or a Galactic martini?” Neale asked, eyeing her with that strange combination of expectation and judgment only a sister could level. The choice between amusement parks and space was an important one. Dylan needed to select carefully.
“Coaster.”
“Told you she had excellent taste,” Neale said, all smug smiles aimed at the bartender.
“You were right. With the sweater, I pegged her for a space drinker,” the bartender said to Neale before halting, one hand on the tap of whatever dispensed her drink. Looking at Dylan, he said, “You look familiar.”
Dylan tilted her head to the side, looking hard at the guy behind the bar. His baseball cap wasn’t helping her facial recognition much.
“Did we go to high school together?” Dylan asked, hoping the question would stall him long enough to give her mind time to retrieve his name. “Roosevelt?”
The guy nodded and stared at her. Dylan realized that he was tilting his head to mirror the way she held her own head. Glancing at Neale, who seemed bemused by the situation, she took a deep breath and prepared for the most charming apology she could manage in this den of regrets. He was Neale’s . . . associate or friend or something, after all. “Honestly, I remember your—”
“Dylan? Neale, I didn’t know your sister went to high school with us!”
“Well, you and I technically didn’t go to school together. I’m younger than you,” Neale said, as if that explained everyone’s lapse in memory.
“It’s CJ. CJ Rodriguez.” He gestured to his barrel chest with both hands.
“Oh!” Dylan said. She vaguely remembered the name and had the sense that she hadn’t enjoyed his company in high school.
CJ, on the other hand, seemed genuinely excited to see her. “Neale talks about you all the time. You look different. When did you get to be so awesome?”
“She was always awesome. You just didn’t notice.”
Dylan recognized Mike’s voice before she turned around to face him. He smiled casually at CJ, his weight shifting slightly onto his right foot. The first thing Dylan noticed was his gray button-down, which fit a little snugly around the chest and was made of some soft material that looked both unfussy and warm. She wanted to touch that chest, then amended the thought. This was a science-project sort of urge. Dylan could never pull off intentionally wrinkled flannel bedsheets in shirt form, but Mike sure made it work. She just wanted to know how.
“Thank you.” Dylan took her Rollercoaster from CJ, grateful for the neon glow, which masked the heat in her cheeks. Hell, she was probably blushing all over.
“Hey, man, how’s it going?” CJ said, reaching a jovial hand out from behind the bar to shake Mike’s. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”
Mike’s gaze swept over Dylan, causing another flush that she was positive not even the neon glow could hide, before turning his smile toward CJ. The pair engaged in the complex man handshake Dylan never fully understood. Her handshake analysis wasn’t doing much for the flush, but it did take her mind off the fact that whatever was in a Rollercoaster tasted a lot like Pine-Sol smelled.
“I’m good. How you been?” Mike asked.
“You made it,” Stacy said, turning her attention away from the guy she was talking to and clapping her hands like a kid at a birthday party. The disappointed guy wandered away after taking one long look at Mike. Dylan couldn’t say she blamed him. The guy was not about to compete with someone that appealing, and if he had thought he could, Stacy’s reaction cleared that up real quick.
“Yeah, I was able to wrap up dinner with my brother early, so this worked out perfectly.” Mike’s deep voice rolled over whatever music was passing as a reference to the bar’s glory days. “Do any of you need a drink?” he asked, eyeing Dylan’s precariously full Rollercoaster and Neale’s surprisingly empty one.
“You can get those in a pitcher,” CJ offered, grabbing a bar towel.
“I’ll get that. And a beer, please,” Mike said, glancing at Stacy’s drink, which was less full than one would have expected given the electric taste. Turning back to Dylan, Mike added, “If you all want to sit, I can bring ’em over.”
“Sounds good,” Neale called from her perch near the bar. She began her saunter to the table, ignoring that the question had not been addressed to her.
“Thank you,” Stacy said, grabbing Dylan’s forearm and weaving her way back to the duct-taped booth, leaving enough time for Dylan to smile and mouth, “Thanks” over her shoulder before focusing her attention on keeping her drink from sloshing on the floor. Not that it would have mattered to anyone, but Dylan was rather keen on not adding additional safety hazards to the space.
Releasing Dylan’s arm, Stacy sidled into the booth, where Neale was already at home, and leaned in conspiratorially. “Oh my God. Dylan, he’s into it!”
“Please. Based on what? The fact he’s buying all of us another round?” Dylan made a small circular motion with her glass to indicate they were receiving the exact same benefit. Noticing the potential for spillage, she took another sip.
“Or the fact that he was checking you out. Get it!” Neale said, bouncing up and down and shimmying her shoulders.
“Okay, stop. I saw no such thing, and I was there.”
“Of course you didn’t. You dated that tool for how long?” Neale took a break from her shimmy to sip her drink, then yelled, “But not anymore.”
Dylan used Neale’s return to dancing as a moment to think. Mike was always flirty. She figured he did that with everyone. The stay-at-bat theory or whatever. But maybe Stacy and Neale were right? She might not have been completely honest with herself when it came to Mike’s intentions. Now that she thought about it, she wasn’t sure that she could say the same about honesty and her intentions either.
“I’ll bet he does a lot of squats,” Stacy said, leaning outside the booth to get a better look at his backside. The obviousness of Stacy’s act pushed Dylan’s self-reflection to the side of her mind.
“Probably the kind with that bar thing over his shoulder.” Neale nodded, trying to lean over Stacy for visual confirmation of their theory.
“You two, stop. Don’t be creepy,” Dylan hissed, taking a bigger sip of her drink, hoping it might wash away whatever humiliation she felt stuck to the back of her throat.
“We’re not creepy. You’re a prude,” Stacy answered, leaning back into the booth, forcing Neale to sit upright. “It is really unfair, you know.” She stopped and adjusted her T-shirt before continuing. “I don’t think you should be allowed to be that good looking and have a PhD. You can either have brains or beauty, like everyone else.”
Neale nodded in vigorous agreement and took a sip of Dylan’s drink, as if she didn’t have the dregs of her own sitting right in front of her. Taking her drink back, Dylan conceded, “People like him exist to remind us that we did not win the genetic lottery.”
“To think, in some backwoods part of the world, someone hates him for being a successful minority with two moms,” Stacy said, leaning into her palm and staring at the back of his head. Dylan wondered if he could hear them.
“Nope,” Neale shouted, confirming Dylan’s fears. “Nope, if they ever saw the guy and read his résumé, they would love him.”
“True. But you are assuming someone that backward can read.” Stacy giggled into her glass.
Dylan opened her mouth to say something about the folly of making assumptions around literacy and social values, when Stacy straightened and hissed, “He’s coming back.”
A surefire way to let someone know you are talking about them is to go dead silent as everyone turns to look at the person. Dylan chastised herself for being too addled to fac
e forward, make up a conversation, dig in her purse, or touch the sticky stuff on the walls. Anything would have been less awkward than watching the guy walk over, beer in one hand, Rollercoaster pitcher in the other.
“Hey, Dylan, can you scoot over?” Mike asked. If he had noticed the awkward staring, he was too polite to react to it.
“Of course,” she said, beginning a hop-slide to the end of the booth, her muscles stinging with each pop up.
“Perfect timing. We were just about to hit the celebration phase,” Neale said with a shake of her shoulders before draining what was left in her glass. Next to her, Stacy mimicked her actions, but with considerably more bounce.
“What are we celebrating?” Mike asked, setting the pitcher in the center of the table, then lowering himself into the space Dylan had made for him.
“Dylan’s breakup! It was fantastic. I wish you could’ve seen her in action,” Neale said, smiling at her big sister like she had won the Fields Medal in applied mathematics.
For a brief moment, Dylan fully understood what the phrase sororicidal tendencies meant. Stacy readjusted her posture with such force that Dylan was surprised she didn’t hurt her neck trying to look at her. To Mike’s credit, he was considerably more smooth about adjusting his torso, his broad shoulders angling toward her. Mike’s well-shaped eyebrows had managed to quirk up, accompanying the tell-me-more expression on his face.
“I’m not sure we were actually celebrating,” Dylan said, finishing her drink with less panache than either Neale or Stacy. She willed her pointed look to convey the shut the hell up she was thinking to Neale, who ignored it.
“I’m just saying you told him about himself in public and drove over a median to get away from the guy when he blocked your car.”
“It was technically a sidewalk with a flower bed,” Dylan said, as if the specifics of what she’d driven over made the story more reasonable. For a small second, she considered melting into the floor, preferably before Neale started quoting the exact language she’d used. At least until she remembered the state of the floor. Dylan really liked the sweater she was wearing. It was cashmere.
“He sounded like the worst,” Stacy said, reaching for the pitcher and pouring some for the three women.
“How was he the worst?” Mike asked, turning the full weight of his gaze on Dylan before swallowing his beer.
“He wasn’t the worst. He just wasn’t . . .” She shrugged under the intensity of his look. How could she explain Nicolas? For years, his behavior had seemed logical, in a way. Nicolas’s rules for their life together provided a kind of structure at a time when it seemed like she never had any. “He was kind of . . .”
“He steamrolled people. And he wasn’t nice to me,” Neale said, winking at her sister.
“How could anyone be mean to our Neale?” Stacy asked, sounding like someone’s tipsy aunt.
“Good riddance. You are too good for someone who is unkind,” Mike said, an easy smile running across his face.
“He is worse than unkind—” Stacy started, and Dylan began to wonder how quickly demons found new hosts to possess, when Mike cut her off.
“Right, maybe let’s call him a transcendental asshole?”
Stacy began cackling, while Mike snorted at his own joke and eyed Dylan as she unclenched her jaw. A snort-laugh was something she deemed goofy. Yet it was having a catastrophic effect on her heart rate, which had spiked since Mike had strolled in wearing that sexy bedsheet shirt. Dylan forced her heartbeat to steady and took another sip of her drink. It tasted less like industrial cleaner now.
“Mind if I have some?” Mike pointed to the pitcher.
“Of course! You bought the thing,” Neale said, picking up the pitcher and pouring some directly into Mike’s beer glass. Noticing Mike blanch at the combination of Roller-Whatever and beer foam, Neale added, “You won’t be able to taste beer anymore. Trust me.”
The clean freak in Dylan gagged as Mike shrugged and picked up the glass, eyeing it dubiously before taking a sip and wincing. “Oof. I won’t be able to taste anything after that.”
“It grows on you,” Neale said.
“Does it? Because I’m not convinced,” Mike said, sucking air in through his teeth. He set the glass down. “So, Stacy, what’s new? I hear you may be going back to school?”
“Yes,” Stacy said, straightening up in the booth, her posture implying seriousness. “I want to be the kind of person dentists look at and go, What do you think? You know what I mean?”
“Makes perfect sense,” Mike said, taking another tentative sip of his drink, this time without choking. “So what goes into this program? More clinical work, I assume.”
If it was possible, Stacy perked up even more. “Yes. It is a lot of clinical work; basically you become a dental therapist. I want to continue working with children.” Stacy drained her glass, looking over the rim of it as she smiled. “Dylan is actually writing my character reference.”
“Sure am,” Dylan said, feeling her gut drop a fraction of an inch. She still hadn’t looked at the paperwork Stacy had given her, but it would go on the top of tomorrow’s to-do list.
“Glasses are empty,” Neale announced, as if it were new information to everyone at the table. “Dylan, there is a little left in the pitcher; why don’t you finish that? Stacy and I can get more.” She began pushing at Stacy’s thigh for her to let her out of the booth, like Stacy was also a Delacroix sister. Which, in a way, she was.
“Oh. Right. Okay,” Stacy said, grabbing her purse and jumping off the bench.
“Be right back,” Neale said, bouncing down the vinyl seating after Stacy.
“Do they need another pitcher?” Dylan frowned as the pair giggled their way to the bar, each of them occasionally looking back at the two they had left behind.
“Do either of them have to drive anywhere?” Mike asked, looking over his shoulder.
“No. They don’t. Let them have all the disgusting liquor they want, I guess.”
“God, it’s gross, right? I was worried I was the only person who thought so.”
“So gross. But it’s on sale, which makes it seem like a lot better deal than it is.” Dylan shrugged one shoulder. Her skin prickled where Mike’s glance landed, and she forced herself to stop noticing the sensation.
“Sometimes cheap is just cheap. When a drink tastes like this, I’m not sure free would be considered a good deal.”
“Ugh, and they are bringing more. We need a plant or something to dump it into,” Dylan said, then added, “The floor is pretty sticky; maybe we put it there.”
“This doesn’t seem like the kind of place where you need to be concerned about safety,” Mike laughed, poking at a hole in the duct tape patching the booth.
“Tell me, how’s building the experiential-learning room going?” Dylan said, feeling herself relax at last.
Mike sighed heavily, leaning his full weight against the booth. “My vision has stalled.”
“Stalled how?” Dylan asked. Placing her elbow on what looked like a clean patch of table, she rested her head on her hand and leaned toward him. Mike had a gravitational pull that was difficult to resist. Worse, she wondered if she even cared to fight gravity when Mike pulled himself out of his slump and turned to face her. She stopped short. Mike was a bad idea. Gravity or no, he was still a Robinson.
“I’m having trouble finding funding. Even with that stock-gift guy you connected me to. The problem is, our donor base is too small to take advantage of something like that. You may have noticed that Crescent’s pockets aren’t exactly deep.” Mike’s smile barely masked the sting of his honesty. “We’ve gotten a couple big meetings. No bites yet. Lots of ‘Let me know if you secure some funding; then I’ll pitch in.’ Which is another way of saying no.”
Dylan laughed, leaning in a fraction of an inch closer. “How are you pitching this to people?”
“Mostly with a lot of enthusiasm and crappy drawings that an intern put together. Another issue is that I’m aski
ng people to imagine a thing that doesn’t exist. I just—” Mike stopped short and cocked his head to the side, his eyebrows drawing together as he looked out the window.
Glancing over her shoulder, Dylan sat up quickly. Stacy and Neale were on the other side of the glass, looking like two dogs caught chewing on a shoe. The pair had been huddled together, trying to sneak back to the Delacroix house, when Mike had noticed them. For a moment the four of them blinked at each other. Then Stacy waved, causing the duo to devolve into a fit of laughter as Neale pulled out her phone and texted someone.
“What the hell?” Turning to face them fully, Dylan threw up her hands as Mike began to laugh behind her. Neale held up her phone and untangled her arm from Stacy’s just as Dylan’s phone buzzed.
You too were good without us, so we leave. Can you bring me coat home?
Suppressing the urge to laugh at her sister’s drunk typos, Dylan looked up to find Neale gesturing to the coat on the other side of the bench. She had just enough time to give the pair a dirty look before Mike stood up and snatched the coat up, putting his considerable wingspan to good use, then gave Neale a thumbs-up. Looking down, Dylan typed out a message and pointed to her phone.
Real smooth. Assholes
Neale smirked and showed the message to Stacy, who doubled over with a fresh fit of laughter. Waving her thanks, Neale pulled Stacy upright and began to strut away, her head held too high to be considered sober or respectable.
“Guess they aren’t bringing those drinks, then,” Mike said, a wide smile on his face. “Really, it’s for the best. We were just gonna dump them on the floor.”
“I should’ve known they’d skip. Since when does Neale buy pitchers?” Dylan laughed, shaking her head.
“Well, unless you want something else, do you want to get outa here?”
Dylan knew exactly the kind of “outa here” he meant, but her blood still stopped running for a long second. She imagined his sheets felt a lot like that shirt looked, and she wouldn’t mind being in them, as long as he was there too. Without that shirt. She shook her head, putting a halt to her racing thoughts. “Two of these are more than enough for me.”
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