Not Your Fault

“Whoa,” Kris’s deep voice crushes through the sounds of arcade games and drunken laughter. “Unless you’re magic, you can’t float in the air.”

“I’m sitting on the stool,” I mumble, reaching behind me for that damned barstool, but feeling nothing. I’m vaguely aware of his hands gripping my elbows, until I take a deep breath and smell his colo

gne. Then I’m very, very, horribly aware of his hands touching me. He’s holding me up, preventing me from drunkenly stumbling to the floor in search of a barstool that is not there.

My hands grab his biceps as I let him steady me, bringing me back into a standing position. I look into his eyes. They’re blurry. “I think you want this,” he says, nodding to an area about three feet away, where that traitorous piece of furniture sits, mocking me.

I think I say thanks, but I’m not sure. When I look in his face, I see a grown man with chiseled features and a five o’clock shadow; a man who is a stranger to me. But when I slip up and look into his eyes, I see Kris. The boy I grew up with…the boy I loved. Beautiful auburn eyes don’t change with age—they stay just the same as you remember them, filled with memories of things that used to be.

His voice lowers until I’m certain only I can hear him. “Let’s take a walk.”

I nod.

Chapter 10

I shouldn’t have glanced back when Kris led me out of the adults’ only section and into the arcade room. Then I wouldn’t have seen the curious look of jealousy on Susan’s face and the smug look on Koby’s face as he nudged Geoff and pointed in our direction. Now everyone no doubt thinks I’m trying to bang the new boss, and they couldn’t be further from the truth. I don’t even know why I’m walking with him.

We come to a stop in front of these brightly colored ATM type things that dispense cards instead of cash. Kris loads up a card with one hundred virtual tokens and holds it up, wiggling it between his index and middle finger. “Skeeball?”

Okay maybe it’s just the alcohol—no wait, it’s definitely the alcohol—because I’m kind of sort of thinking that maybe Kris and I can be friends. You know, in a strictly professional boss-employee type of friendship. The alcohol also makes me smile, yank the card out of his hand and say, “Can’t believe you remembered that Skeeball is my specialty.”

I run the card through the slot on two Skeeball machines and Kris and I play against each other. We don’t talk. And that’s fine with me. This is, after all, earth-shatteringly awkward. I mean, I hate Kris. The sober Delaney hates him with all of her being. But the drunk Delaney is just going with it. We play a dozen games of Skeeball and by the end of them, I’m telling myself the only reason I’m laughing and smiling with this asshole is because subconsciously I want him to feel guilty. I want him to know that I don’t care that he left and I don’t care that he came back.

The scoreboard lights up above our games, displaying in big neon numbers that I’ve beaten him by over fifty thousand points. He shakes his head and removes the long strand of tickets from my machine, and then the measly strand from his. “It’s been a long time,” he says, almost under his breath but definitely loud enough for me to hear.

My drunken smile falters. I don’t know what to say. I glance around and find a whack-a-mole machine and swipe my card through it as a distraction. Kris takes one mallet and I take the other.

“So,” he says, dragging out the word like talking to me is the hardest thing in the world. I feel like telling him that no one freaking asked him to talk to me. After his pause lasts about ten seconds longer than any pause should, I slam my mallet over an unruly mole and look over at him.

“What?” I ask, but it sounds more like a pissed off mother having heard “Hey mom!” too many times in a row.

“Whoa,” he says, lifting his mallet in surrender. “I was just trying to make small talk.”

“Well I’m a little too drunk for that,” I say, allowing my words to slur naturally because I’ve depleted all of my pretend to be less drunk than I am energy.

He smiles. But it’s not a normal smile or even a snort or a laugh. It’s a Kris Payne smile. Which means his eyes squint up on the sides and kind of twinkle in the way that only light brown eyes can do, and his lips don’t form a crescent-shaped smile, they kind of lift up on one side and press down on the other. And his head tilts ever so slightly to the left.

That is a Kris Payne smile.

“I guess that makes me a cool boss,” he says, lightly tapping a mole on the head. I slam the moles on my side of the game, the alcohol in my veins making me uncoordinated and rougher than usual.

“I guess,” I say as if I don’t believe him at all. And I don’t.

“So, anyway,” he says that word again, this time scratching his elbow. I wonder if he’s this awkward when talking to his supermodel girlfriends.

“So, what?” I ask, daring to look at him again just to see if the knots still twist in my stomach. They do.

“So,” he begins again, saying the words with a deliberate slowness, “Do you have a significant other?”

The question sobers me in a heartbeat. The toy mallet almost drops out of my hand as I stare at him, ignoring the bobbing moles on the game in front of us. I actually have to think about his question, replay the words over in my mind a second and third time, because I just can’t fathom why he would be asking me what I think he just asked me.

He lifts an eyebrow waiting for a response. A tiny bit of guilt flows into me as I smile innocently. “Oh you know,” I say, my voice light and mysterious. “They come and they go.”

He nods, pressing his lips together. “Same here.”

Of course, I think with sarcasm that feels like bile in my stomach. Of course your significant others come and go. You can’t be that gorgeous and date just one super model. They’re like Pokémon. You have to date them all.

I don’t say any of that aloud, even though I want to. I seem to hold back a lot of thoughts around him. I may be stupid for thinking the thoughts, but I’m not stupid enough to let him know that. After whack-a-mole, we play various games until we’ve used up all one hundred tokens on the card. Kris’s back pockets are full of tickets and I enjoy how it makes him look slightly less cool and laid back and more like some kind of man-child hoarding tickets to cash in for prizes.