Put Me Back Together(19)

I recited the list of drinks and he didn’t even bat an eyelash, just began setting out the glasses in a row. I wondered if he thought Em and I were drinking them all ourselves and I was going to clarify that there were five of us in all, but I didn’t get the chance. The show going on in front of me was far too distracting.

First he dropped the glass in his hand twice then nearly dropped a full bottle of vodka when he set it down too close to the edge of the counter. I placed my chin in my palm, frowning at him. As I watched, he put double the amount of rum in Anita’s rum and Coke and then accidentally threw a lime wedge into the glass when I was pretty sure it was supposed to go on the rim. Then he asked me to repeat the names of the other drinks because he’d forgotten them. While all this was going on he didn’t look at me once.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I asked with some amusement as he dropped yet another glass. They just seemed to be slipping right through his fingers tonight.

“What? Nothing!” he said as he finished the last drink—a vodka cranberry, for me. He’d put three cherries in it, which I was pretty sure also wasn’t right, but I didn’t mention it. I was just glad he hadn’t made it a triple by accident—I wasn’t much of a drinker.

As I handed him the cash for the drinks he glanced down at the floor and shook his head, as though he couldn’t believe the mess around his feet. I couldn’t, either. Was he drinking on the job? Was that allowed? In movies bartenders were always doing shots with the patrons, but I was pretty sure in real life it was a no-no.

When I thanked him for the drinks he finally managed to look me in the face again. He held my gaze there, his eyes darting between mine, his chest heaving as though he’d run a mile. When he broke the gaze to look down at the drinks in front of me, I felt a physical loss and cursed myself for it.

Bad news, out of my league, one hundred percent trouble, I repeated silently to myself.

“That’s too many for you to carry,” Lucas said, and before I could say a thing he was calling over one of the waitresses, a tattooed girl with severe eye makeup and bleached blonde pigtails. “Brit, can you help her carry these back to her table?”

Brit started collecting the drinks onto her tray.

“Try not to hurt anybody, okay?” I said to Lucas as we walked away, and I thought I saw him heave a sigh of relief as he smiled at me.

“Wow,” Brit said. She was expertly carrying the five drinks on a tray balanced on her palm. “I’ve never seen Lucas like that before.”

“Do you think he’s drunk?” I said to her as we maneuvered through the crowd. If that was the case, I was going to ask her to get him some coffee. I didn’t want him to lose his job.

Brit gave me a funny look. “No, hon,” she said. “I’m pretty sure it was the sight of you that had him tripping over his own feet.”

“What?” I said with a laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous!”

The girls grinned as Brit set the tray down on the table and they all reached forward to grab their drinks. Brit leaned in to talk into my ear while they were distracted.

“Girls shove their boobs in his face all the time and he doesn’t even react,” she said. “Trust me, I’ve been working with him three nights a week for months. Lucas has the hots for you, sweetie. You’d better watch yourself.” She winked at me as she picked up her tray and made her way back to the bar.

“What’s wrong, Katie?” Anita said. “I mean, besides the fact that these drinks are crazy strong!”

I let my eyes travel back to the bar where Lucas was pouring a line of shots. Lucas had the hots for me? Lucas was dropping glasses and acting like an idiot because of me? It was beyond comprehension. Guys didn’t fall all over themselves for me. They did that for Em, for Sally, for the flirts of the world, not me. Still, my stomach was doing all kinds of ecstatic cartwheels at the idea. I wished I could settle into that feeling, just for a minute or two, snatch back some of that happiness from two nights ago. But Brit’s last words—You’d better watch yourself—reminded me why I couldn’t. No matter how he felt about me, all I could do was stare at him from across the room and wish and dream and yearn. The dream of Lucas—that’s all I could ever have.

Except, that wasn’t quite true. I could also have the drink he’d made me.

“Cheers!” I said and downed more than half my cocktail in one gulp as the other girls stared at me, goggle-eyed.

“Oh yeah!” Sally cried, putting her arm around my shoulder. “Let’s get smashed!”

Oh, hell yes.



An hour later I was out on the dance floor with Sally, my head all kinds of fuzzy, Emily and the others girls nowhere in sight, and grabby male hands coming at me from every direction. If I’d had to write out the definition of a situation that was way out of my comfort zone, this would probably be it to the letter. As I watched Sally grinding up against the same beefy guy she’d met in the line, her skirt hitched up so high I could literally see half her ass, I felt another pair of hands gripping me by the hips and flung them off.


What it all came down to was bad decision making. My first bad decision had been agreeing to come out for Anita’s birthday in the first place, although I now seemed to recall that I’d given a noncommittal maybe and it was Em who had transformed my answer into a yes. My second bad decision had been imagining that actually coming tonight was in the realm of a good idea, that Em and her friends would create a little cocoon of safety around me, allowing me to avoid actually speaking to anybody but them, that I could actually let loose and get away from myself. And the third bad decision was the most obvious one. That decision was sloshing around in my stomach and making me lightheaded and would soon be showing itself to the entire dance floor if I didn’t get out of there really soon.