The Deal (Off-Campus #1)(58)
Fuck, I want to kiss her again. I want to feel her lips on mine. I want to hear that throaty noise she made the first time I sucked on her tongue.
Wonderful. And now I’m hard as a rock, splat in the middle of a bar teeming with my friends.
“She’s amazing!” Logan shouts, sidling up to me. He’s grinning too as he watches Hannah, but there’s an odd gleam in his eyes. Looks a bit like…longing.
“She’s a music major,” is the dumbass response I come up with, because I’m too distracted by his expression.
Thunderous applause bursts out when Hannah’s song ends. A second later, Dean climbs on the stage and whispers something in her ear. From what I can glean, he’s trying to persuade her to sing a duet, but he keeps touching her bare upper arm as he works the charm, and there’s no mistaking the flicker of unease in Hannah’s eyes.
“That’s my cue to rescue her,” I say before threading my way through the crowd. When I reach the bottom of the low-rise stage, I cup my hands around my mouth and call out to Hannah. “Wellsy, get your sexy butt over here!”
Her expression lights up when she spots me. Without skipping a beat, she dives off the stage and into my waiting arms, laughing in delight as I spin her around. “Oh my God, this is so much fun!” she exclaims. “We need to come here all the time!”
As laughter tickles my throat, I study her face to gauge where she lands on my incredibly accurate drunk scale. One being sober and ten being I’m going to wake up naked in Portland with no memory of how I got here. Since her eyes are sharp and she’s not slurring or stumbling, I decide she’s probably at about a five—tipsy but aware.
And maybe it makes me an arrogant bastard, but I love being the one who got her to this point. Who she trusted enough to take care of her so that she could allow herself to let go and have a good time.
With another brilliant smile, she takes my hand and starts dragging me away from the tiny dance floor.
“Where are we going?” I ask with a laugh.
“I have to pee! And you promised to be my bodyguard, so that means you have to wait outside the door and stand guard.” Those mesmerizing green eyes peer up at me, flickering with uncertainty. “You won’t let anything bad happen to me, will you, Garrett?”
A lump the size of Massachusetts lodges in my throat. I swallow hard and try to speak past it. “Never.”
20
Hannah
I can’t believe I was ever nervous about coming to the bar tonight, because holy moly, I’m having a blast. At the moment, I’m crammed in a booth next to Garrett, and we’re involved in a heated debate with Tucker and Simms, arguing about technology, of all things. Tucker won’t budge on his position that young kids shouldn’t be allowed to watch more than an hour of TV a day. I’m totally with him on that, but Garrett and Simms disagree, and the four of us have been bickering about it for more than twenty minutes now. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I honestly didn’t expect all these hockey players to have articulate opinions about non-hockey-related matters, but they’re a lot more insightful than I gave them credit for.
“Children need to be outside riding their bikes and catching frogs and climbing trees,” Tucker insists, waving his pint glass in the air as if to punctuate his point. “It’s not healthy for them to be cooped up indoors staring at a screen all day.”
“I agree about everything except for the frogs part,” I pipe up. “Because frogs are slimy and gross.”
The guys burst out laughing.
“Sissy,” Simms teases.
“Aw, come on, Wellsy, give the frogs a chance,” Tucker protests. “Did you know that if you lick the right one you might get high?”
I stare at him in horror. “I have zero interest in licking a frog.”
Simms hoots. “Not even to get the prince?”
Good-natured groaning rings out.
“Nope, not even then,” I say firmly.
Tucker takes a deep swig of beer before winking at me. “How about licking something other than a frog? Or are you anti-licking altogether?”
My cheeks scorch at the innuendo, but the impish glimmer in his eyes tells me he’s not trying to be crude, so I respond with my own dose of innuendo. “Naah, I’m pro-licking. As long as I’m licking something tasty.”
Another round of hoots breaks out, but Garrett doesn’t join in. When I glance over at him, I notice that his eyes have flared with heat.
I wonder if he’s imagining my mouth on his…nope, not going there.
“Shit, someone needs to hog-tie that old dude so he stops monopolizing the jukebox,” Tucker declares when yet another Black Sabbath song blasts through the bar.
We all turn toward the culprit—a local with a bushy red beard and the meanest scowl I’ve ever seen. The moment the karaoke machine shut down for the night, Red Beard had raced to the jukebox and shoved ten bucks worth of quarters inside it, keying in a rock playlist that has so far consisted of Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath, and more Black Sabbath. Oh, and one CCR song that Simms claimed he’d lost his virginity to.
Eventually our debate turns to hockey talk, as Simms tries to convince me that the goalie is the most important player on a hockey team, while Tucker boos him the entire time. The Black Sabbath song blessedly comes to an end, replaced by Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Tuesday’s Gone,” and as the opening strains echo through the bar, I feel Garrett stiffen beside me.