Well.
At least until recently.
I ended the call, then took another sip of my wine. I was thinking that maybe I should send her a text too – if she was mad at me, she might not have listened to my voicemail, while a text would be something she wouldn’t be able to ignore as easily – when a guy across the bar spoke to me.
“Fight with your boyfriend?” he asked.
“What?” I asked, startled.
“Your voicemail.” He indicated the phone sitting on the bar in front of me. “Sorry, I couldn’t help but overhearing.”
“Oh.” I thought maybe he’d been talking about the fight I’d had with Liam, but of course there was no way he could have known about that. “No, it was just a friend.”
“Ahh,” he said. “So you’re not in a fight with your boyfriend.”
“No.”
He smiled. “Sorry, that was my not-so-suave way of asking if you have a boyfriend.”
“No, I… I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“She said with hesitation.” He gave me that easy smile again, and his tone was light. I took another sip of my wine, giving myself a chance to regard him over the top of my glass. He was a few years older than me, maybe twenty-five, and he had the kind of good looks that came from having good genes – dark blonde hair, green eyes, his tan the kind that came from the golf course. He was wearing a navy polo shirt, and it stretched across his body. His shoulders were pushed back and he sat on the bar stool with a bottle of a dark beer on the bar in front of him.
He exuded money, but not in the way Liam did. Liam had an air of confidence about him that came from knowing he’d worked for everything he had. This guy’s confidence came from being born into it. You could just tell.
“No, I don’t have a boyfriend. I just broke up with someone.” I wasn’t sure why I said it.
“Oh, I’m sorry. He sounds like an idiot.”
“You don’t even know him.”
“He broke up with you. So he’s an idiot.”
“How do you know I didn’t break up with him?”
“Did you?”
“No,” I admitted, and he grinned.
I smiled back, enjoying the easy banter we were having. The bartender reappeared and set the chocolate dessert I’d been eyeing in front of the guy.
He caught me looking at it. “Feel free to have some,” he said. “There’s no way I’m going to eat this whole thing myself.”
“Oh, no, that’s okay,” I said quickly. I wasn’t sure if he was flirting with me or not. I wasn’t used to being flirted with, and my first instinct was to get up and walk away. Not because he was weird or creepy or anything, but just because I wasn’t used to it.
“Come on,” he said, wrinkling his nose up as he looked at my plate of fruit. “You’re in this amazing restaurant and you order fruit? Waste.”
“Is this restaurant amazing?”
He shrugged. “According to Zagat. Although they didn’t mention the cute girls at the bar.” He winked at me. Okay, he was definitely flirting. I started to tell him that I didn’t want any of his cake, because even though he was perfectly nice, my mind was somewhere else.
On Liam.
Screw Liam, I thought. He’d left me, he’d walked away like it was nothing, leaving me here by myself.
I felt like rebelling, felt like doing something I knew Liam wouldn’t approve of, knowing he wasn’t here to spank me or take me over his knee or bring me down to his basement lair and use his belt on me.
So I got bold.
“I don’t share chocolate with people unless I’ve known them for more than five minutes,” I said.
The guy nodded, as if his was fair, then reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, set the timer, and put it down on the bar.
“That’s fair,” he said. “But I don’t share chocolate with people unless I know their names.”
“Emery,” I said.
“Emery,” he repeated, and it reminded me of the way Liam had said my name that first night, and I felt my throat clench and my chest ache with missing him. “I’m Robbie.”
It was a nice, all-American name. Robbie. Robert.
“It’s nice to meet you,” I said.
“Nice to meet you to.”
We sat there making small talk about the casino and how much he’d been winning (nothing). He was happy enough to talk about himself, which suited me fine, since the last thing I wanted to do was talk about my life and what a mess it was.
“It’s been five minutes,” he said, pointing at the timer he’d set. He indicated the chair next to him and motioned for the bartender to bring another spoon.