by Amelia Stone
“All right, all right,” Antonio grumbled. “But if you get drunk, I’m going home with the bartender.”
“Yeah, her wife would love that,” I quipped as I turned toward the bar.
“She’s a lesbian?” Friend One once again looked hopeful. “You think maybe they would be down for a threesome?”
The last thing I heard before I walked away was Adam’s raspy chuckle. “You know porn is not real life, right?”
A little bit later, I was not holding my own, which I totally had not seen coming.
“I am sooooooo drunk,” I announced to the classy and elegant patrons of Wrestler’s, South Bay’s finest provider of libations and baskets of pretzels.
I mean, some of them were even honey Dijon. That was some fancy shit right there. But none of them had peanuts, because everyone was allergic to them now. That’s what Mindy told me, so I believed it. She had purple hair and her wife was nice, so she must be telling the truth.
“Yeah you are,” Adam replied, trying unsuccessfully to suppress a smirk.
Poor guy. It was supposed to be his bachelorette party, or whatever. How come he had to herd a bunch of drunken assholes around? Friend One and the other guy were at the bar again, and Antonio was grinding against the jukebox. And I had no idea where Ward was. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him, actually.
Someone really should have volunteered to be the DD tonight.
I waved my arms over my head as a good song came on. Well, I’d never heard it before, but it had to be good. It had guitars in it and a girl who was kind of mumbling. I liked mumbling, I decided right then and there.
“I’m having fun!”
Adam laughed. “Glad to hear it, buddy.”
“I need ’nother beer, though,” I told him, nodding my head seriously.
His smile turned into a frown like, really fast. “Yeah, I don’t think so, buddy.”
But I ignored that. “Just one more,” I told him. Then I made a beeline for the bar.
He followed right behind me, but I wasn’t worried. Adam wasn’t as tall as me, and he only had like, grape-cutting muscles. Not baseball muscles. I could totally take him if I had to.
Mindy rushed over to me, giving me a grateful look as she escaped the nameless guys.
She nodded to my empty glass. “Another?”
“How many has he had?” Adam asked me, laying a hand on my shoulder like he was trying to keep me in place.
That was probably a good thing. The room was kinda swaying.
“Are we on a boat?” I asked.
“No.” Mindy gave me a look. “This will be his third,” she answered Adam.
His eyebrows flew up at that. “You got skunked on two pints of Blue Moon?” He glanced at the neon beer clock above the bar. “In two hours?”
“I like the moon. And the stars.” I grinned at the blinking lights over the bar. “Stars remind me of her, ’cause she’s on my heart.” I patted my chest, right where my tattoo was.
“Okay,” Adam drawled. “How about I take that beer, and you have a Diet Coke?” He gave Mindy a pointed look as he intercepted my pint glass.
She shook her head as she poured me a soda. “I had no idea he couldn’t hold his hops,” she said. “He’s an athlete, I figured he’s got this.”
I wrinkled my nose as I took a sip of my Diet Coke. “I don’t like to drink,” I said. But for some reason I couldn’t remember why right then. So I ate a handful of pretzels instead.
Adam nodded. “I think you should stick to that policy, bud-”
He was cut off by a loud noise behind us, like something crashing, and we all turned to see what the commotion was. Antonio was sprawled on the floor, a broken chair all around and under him.
“Oops.” He blinked like he was dazed. He put a hand up to his head, and it was all bloody when he pulled it back. “I think I’m done with my drinking.”
Mindy turned back to us, her eyes narrowed. “I think all of you are done,” she said.
I nodded, feeling a bit more sober now, thanks to the not-peanuts and the shock. “Yeah, I think you’re right.”
“I am so sorry,” Adam shouted as he crossed to his brother. “I will pay for the damage.”
I shook my head. “No, I’m gonna pay,” I said. “I make more money than him.” I frowned. “Made more money.” I looked up at her. “I don’t make money anymore, because I’m retired.”
Mindy rolled her eyes. “I don’t care who pays. I just don’t need this coming out of my pocket. Again.”
“They would make you pay?”
She gestured to the general squalor around us as though that explained it. Which it basically did, to be fair. Wrestler’s didn’t exactly attract the yacht club set, so it wasn’t exactly surprising that its owners couldn’t afford to be model employers.
I raised an eyebrow. “You need ‘nother job.”
“Yeah, like there’s so many to choose from on this island,” she muttered as she pulled a first aid kit from behind the bar.
“So true.” I nodded in understanding, because I knew all about that. No one in South Bay wanted to hire me to play baseball.
“Besides, I have such a sweet gig here,” she quipped. “I get to run the place without actually being paid to run the place.”
“You could run me if you want,” Friend One offered.
“Hard pass,” she replied as she crossed to the scene of the crime.
I helped Adam pick up his brother and steer him to an unbroken chair. Then Mindy snapped on a pair of sterile gloves before tending to Antonio’s head wound.
“That looks really bad,” Adam fretted.
“It’s fine,” she replied. “It’s not even deep enough for stitches. Head wounds just like to put on a bloody show.”
“You sure?” Adam asked.
She gestured to the seedy bar. “We get a lot of head injuries around here.”
“Thank you, beautiful Mindy,” Antonio swooned. “It’s a shame you like girls, because I’m a manly man.” He made a high-pitched yelp as she dabbed antiseptic onto his wound. “Also I live in California.”
“And you’re a little young for her, bro.” Adam gave Mindy an apologetic look. “He just turned twenty-one last month. He can’t handle his liquor yet.”
She snorted. “You want to tell me what happened here, manly man?” she asked Antonio, gesturing to the splintered wood a couple feet away.
Antonio ducked his head. “I fell.” He peered up at her with sad, pleading eyes, like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “My dance moves were just too much for this little bar.”
“If that isn’t the truest thing I’ve heard all week,” Mindy sighed as she finished dressing his wound.
She disposed of the gloves, then grabbed a broom to clean up the chair mess. Adam and I attempted to help, but she waved the broom to shoo us. When she was done, she crossed to the jukebox, flipping it off.
“It’s just about closing time anyway,” she said. “I’m calling it a night.”
Adam’s thumbs flew across his phone screen. “We gotta round up the other guys and head out.” He looked up at me. “You don’t have a hospital on this island, huh?”
I shook my head. “We can bring him to the clinic, though. Dr. Stewart is always on call if you really want to have him checked out.”
He shook his head. “I think he’ll be good until tomorrow. Jess is going to flip her lid when she sees him, though.”
I frowned. “Why?”
Adam gave me a rueful look. “Photos. The wedding is in two days.”
“That’s what Photoshop is for,” a familiar dry voice said from behind me.
I whirled around, grinning when I saw the sexiest redhead on the planet standing just inside the door.
“It’s my Krista!” I ran over to her as fast as my feet could carry me, lifting her into my arms and smothering her with kisses when I finally reached her. She laughed, but her laughter faded when I groaned.
“Seth!” sh
e hissed. “Put me down, you’re going to hurt yourself.”
“For fuck’s sake.” My happiness soured as I set her back on the dirty pub floor. “I’m not an invalid.”
She huffed. “I know that.” She ran a hand through her hair, which looked messy and windblown. And she smelled like the sea, too. The scavenger hunt must have taken her to the beach. “But that doesn’t mean you can be cavalier with your health.”
My nostrils flared at her snappish tone. “I don’t remember asking you to play nurse,” I growled.
“And I don’t remember you being such a masochist,” she shot back, her eyes flaring with a fire I rarely saw from her. “Seth, you could permanently injure yourself if you’re not careful. You think you’re frustrated now? It’ll be nothing to how you’ll feel if you need a cane just to get from one room to another.”
“I’m not frus-”
“Please,” she scoffed. “You think I don’t notice how you growl and snap every time you’re reminded of your injury? Or when you’re faced with something you can’t do the same way you’ve always done?” She swallowed. “You think I don’t see the way you scowl at me when you think I’m babying you?”
Anger flared in me once again. How dare she throw this shit in my face? And right now? Really?
“You think this is easy for me?” I took a step forward. “I lost everything I had, Krista! My career, my team, my purpose in life. I lost the one thing in the world that I loved.” I ran a hand through my hair. “Without baseball, I have nothing.”
She blinked once, twice. Over and over again. “Nothing, huh?” Her voice was shaky, and her dark blue eyes were glassy in the dim bar lights.
Fuck.
I ran a hand over my face. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”
She shook her head, her eyes darting away. She nodded at someone, and I glanced over to see Adam standing a few feet away, frowning at us.
At me.
“It’s okay,” she said, though I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or him.
“No. It really isn’t.” I took her hand in mine. “I didn’t mean it like that, you have to know that.” I ducked down, chasing her lips until she let me kiss her. “It’s just that I have no idea what to do with my life. I’m a college dropout, for fuck’s sake. I’m not qualified for anything but hitting home runs.”
“But you dropped out to enter the draft,” she countered. “You could go back, if you wanted.”
I frowned. It was true that leaving Vanderbilt in my junior year had led to me getting drafted by San Francisco in the first round.
But what I’d never told anyone was that I’d been just one more midterm away from failing out at the time. The draft hadn’t been a choice; it was the life buoy that had saved me from drowning.
“Or you could start a business,” she added, when I didn’t answer. “You have all this money now. You could do anything you wanted.”
“But I have no idea what I want to do,” I admitted.
She laid her hands on my chest. “You’ll figure it out.”
I lifted a shoulder. “I hope so.”
“You will.” She gave me a rueful smile. “I’m sorry I was so crabby. I didn’t come here to pick a fight with you.” Something flashed in her eyes that I couldn’t quite read, but it was gone in a second. “It’s just been a weird night. Weird couple of days, I guess.”
I hadn’t meant to fight with her, either. But my temper had been building all night, until the slightest shift in her tone of voice had set it off.
“I’m sorry too,” I muttered, resting my forehead on hers. I breathed in her scent, coconut and salty sea air and Krista. I felt her shoulders relax, and I let out a sigh of relief. “Why did you come here, anyway?”
She extended a finger toward something over my shoulder. “I needed to find a skeleton.”
I turned to see what she was pointing at, and a laugh escaped me. There was a deer head mounted to the wall, but it was made entirely of driftwood, seashells, and other found objects someone had obviously picked up on the beach. It was utterly out of place at Wrestler’s, which was more grubby biergarten than kitschy seaside watering hole.
“Does that even count?” I asked.
She gave me an impish smile. “It’s my game. I get to make the rules.”
I laughed. “Cheater.”
She shrugged. “I’m okay with that, because it means I win the scavenger hunt,” she said.
I raised an eyebrow. “Oh yeah?” She nodded. “Who’d you beat?”
“Well, Jenny was my biggest threat, but she tapped out a couple of hours ago. Lindsay and Kelly also went home early.”
“Pregnant women,” I groused. “They just can’t hang.”
She chuckled. “Or recently pregnant. Jenny did just have a baby six weeks ago.”
“True.” I nodded. “So who did you beat?”
She grinned. “Well, it was a free-for-all there for a while, but in the end it was between me and-”
“Aw, damn it.” Willow stood in the bar’s doorway, staring at Krista in dismay. “I was hoping no one else knew about that thing.” She chucked her chin in the direction of the driftwood deer head.
Krista reached over and patted her cousin on the shoulder. “You’ll get ‘em next time, champ.”
Willow tossed her long blonde hair over her shoulder. “Fine. But you’re buying me a drink to make up for this.”
“I’ll buy you a drink,” Friend One said, materializing out of nowhere. He was practically drooling on Willow.
“No thanks,” she replied, giving him the hairy eyeball.
“Um.” I scratched the back of my neck, giving them both a sheepish smile. “I don’t know if anyone can buy you a drink. I think we might actually be getting kicked out.”
“Okay.”
Mindy’s strong voice cut over the conversation. I turned to see her steering a heavily bandaged Antonio toward us. Friend Two was close on their heels. Adam and I stepped forward, and between the two of us, we managed to keep Antonio upright.
“Which one of youse wants to settle the tab?” Mindy demanded.
“I got it,” Adam immediately replied. He reached into his pocket for his wallet, but I held a hand out to stop him.
“No, it’s okay,” I said. “I got it.”
He shook his head stubbornly. “No way, man. This is my bachelor party, it’s my responsibility.”
“Technically, it’s supposed to be the best man’s duty to pay for the bachelor party,” I countered. “But he’s a little battered right now, so we’ll give him a pass.”
Adam frowned. “Yeah, but the best man is my little brother, which means it’s my responsibility to cover his ass when he messes up.”
“Yeah, but like I said earlier, I have more money than you do.”
“It’s not like I’m hurting, though, so-”
“Oh, enough!” Willow shook her head. “If we’re going to start whipping them out to prove who has the biggest-” she wiggled her eyebrows, “bank account, then you’re both going to lose.”
I frowned. “Look, it’s awesome that your book hit the bestseller lists and everything. Congratulations. But it’s just one book. I played professional baseball for seven years, and I had a really good agent.”
Even if she wasn’t currently returning my calls.
“I’m pretty sure I’ve got you all beat,” I concluded.
“I’m not talking about me,” Willow replied. “Though for the record, my book has been sitting pretty at number one on the New York Times young adult list for forty weeks, which puts me pretty damn close to your financial neighborhood, thank you very much.”
I raised my eyebrows. Forty weeks was impressive, I’d give her that. But still.
“I’m confused. Who the hell are we talking about?” Adam asked.
A throat cleared behind me. “That would be me.”
I turned to see Krista standing at the bar. She pushed a pen and a receipt across the scarred walnut bar top. Then
she slid a credit card into her wallet and dropped it into the little purse slung across her body. She must have snuck in to pay the bill while Adam and I were arguing.
“Shit,” Adam said. “I’m sorry, sis. I’ll pay you back.”
She shook her head. “It’s okay.”
I frowned. “No, I will pay you back,” I said. I wasn’t comfortable with her paying for this, not at all.
Also, since when did she have more money than me? And more importantly, why did that bother me?
“You don’t have to, though.” She smiled tightly. “And anyway,” she said quickly, when I opened my mouth to object. “I don’t want to argue about it anymore. I’d just like to go home now.”
Adam sighed. “Me too. Where’s my wife?” He looked around like Jess was about to pop out from behind the bar.
“I left her at the library with your sister and the other girls,” Willow said. “We can walk there from here.”
I nodded. “Okay, cool. We’ll meet you guys up there, though. I need to hit the little boys’ room first.”
Adam tipped his head back, his mouth popping open in horror. “But you mustn’t break the seal,” he intoned solemnly.
I laughed. “Yeah, but if I don’t, I’m pretty sure I won’t make it home.”
He grinned. “Fair enough. Maybe you’ll find your buddy in the toilet, too.”
“Who, Ward?” I scoffed. “He probably bailed. No one was stroking his ego, after all.”
Adam chuckled. “Or anything else,” he quipped, nodding his head toward Mindy.
We shared a laugh, and then everyone said a final goodbye, leaving Krista and me in a nearly-empty bar. Mindy was nowhere to be seen, probably in the stock room, and there was just one old guy left at the bar. He dropped some cash to settle his bill, then saluted me as he trudged toward the door.
When he was gone, I turned to Krista. “Wait for me?” I asked.
She nodded. “I’m going to get some water,” she replied. “We walked all over this island tonight.”
I smiled. “Maybe you should skip your run in the morning.”
“For sure.” She nodded. “And I’m going straight to bed tonight. I’ll probably crash the second I hit the mattress.”