On the Rocks(76)

I turned my attention to the man with the large diamond earring and the shaved head.

“Hi,” I said curiously.

“ ’Sup,” he answered.

“Sal works here,” Lara said. “He’s a promoter.”

He turned and smiled at me, revealing gold front teeth. He handed me a business card. “Nice to meet you. If I can ever do anything for you ladies, you just let me know.”

“Thanks. We will.” I planned to throw his card in the garbage as soon as he slithered away and started bugging someone else. But it was not polite to be rude to someone’s face. Even if the face is of a Cro-Magnon man.

Sal said good-bye and shook Lara’s hand, then proceeded to work the crowd at the opposite end of the bar. I ordered an Amstel from the bartender, and when he handed it to me, he leaned in and looked curiously at Lara. “Look,” he said quietly. “It’s none of my business, but you look like nice ladies. I would steer clear of Sal if I were you.”

“How come?” I asked. “He said he’s a promoter here.” I looked at the business card, which I admit was a bit strange. It said SAL, followed by a beeper number. It might as well have said, FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL. . . . Oddly enough, I doubted Sal was much of a good time unless you were under the influence of heavy narcotics and suffered from night blindness.

“A promoter?” The bartender laughed. “Girls, he’s a drug dealer. He’s shady, and judging from the looks of you two, I don’t think you’re really into his scene.”

Lara squealed in horror like he had just told her that Sal was a Bosnian war criminal. “A drug dealer?”

“Thanks.” I shook the bartender’s hand and gave him the card to throw away. I always thought drug dealers hung out in alleys somewhere. It never occurred to me that they circulated among the rest of the world, like normal people, in bars full of preppy guys and girls who thought that wearing Lilly Pulitzer was some kind of religious sacrament. But then again, I also knew for a fact that there were a lot of normal-looking people out there who turned out to be complete psychos, so it kind of made sense. “What brings you out?” I asked.

“After I locked up, I decided I needed a drink, so I came down here for dinner. I only got here a few minutes before you did.”

“You’ve been at this party for all of five minutes and you befriend the leader of a drug cartel. Well done,” I joked.

“It was fifteen minutes, and I did no such thing. How was I supposed to know?”

“The gold teeth might have given it away,” I suggested.

She sighed, disappointed that her judgment had betrayed her, and then said innocently, “I thought maybe he was a boxer.”

Well, she had a point there.

Grace arrived ten minutes later, a pack of cigarettes for Bobby in hand. “Hey,” she said to the bartender, waving her hand to get his attention. “Vodka soda, please?” She squeezed a lime in her drink, removed the straw, and threw it on the bar before taking a large gulp. “What did I miss?”

“Lara spent her first fifteen minutes here talking to a drug dealer, but other than that, you missed nothing,” I said.

Grace seemed completely unfazed by this. “Oh good, I’d have hated to miss all the fun. I don’t see Bobby anywhere,” she added as she stood on her toes and scanned the crowd. “Oh wait, there he is. He’s actually talking to some guys I know from work. I’ll be right back. I want to go say hello.” She wove her way through the throngs of partygoers to one of the couches in the corner of the room where a large group of guys were getting very drunk, very quickly. Paying $300 for a bottle of Stoli and the luxury of being able to actually sit down in a bar seemed really stupid to me. Especially when you consider that this was the beach and the bar stools were free.

Lara’s eyes followed Grace to the table, where she planted a kiss on Bobby’s cheek and shook hands with the rest of the guys in the group.

I pulled my iPhone out of my clutch and checked to see if I had any messages. There was one from Ben. I deleted it without reading it and immediately felt confident. Funny, all you have to do is take the power back from one * in your life and it does more for your self-esteem than a year spent in therapy or a salon-worthy hair day. Go figure.

I looked up and realized there was a very cute blond staring in our direction. The old me would’ve worried that I had something stuck in my teeth or one of my boobs had popped out of my shirt Janet Jackson Super Bowl style. Not the new me. The new me smiled and remembered that she was a babe. She was single. She had just deleted her ex’s text message. Ain’t nothing gonna break her stride. He smiled a toothy, perfectly straight grin and made his way over toward us. Lara was continuing to assure the bartender that she was not the type of girl who would court a drug dealer, not that he cared in the slightest, and was completely oblivious to the conversation that was about to start up directly next to her. This was probably better. I was rusty enough in this arena. Throwing Lara in the mix was like making a Molotov cocktail of lunacy.

“Hey,” he said as he slid up next to me. “Tom Marsh,” he said as he extended his hand.

“Abby Wilkes,” I said, feeling my face blush either from insecurity, booze, or, most likely, both.

“You look familiar, have I seen you around?”

“Didn’t that line go out in the nineties?” I figured it best to just throw the sarcasm Frisbee and see if he’d fetch; if not, there was no point in continuing this conversation. If I was going to take this dating experiment seriously, then it was important that I examine compatibility factors off the bat.