“Do you think if we go up there they’ll stop gawking?” she asked, raising her chin in their direction.
I shook my head. “They’ll just stare at you up-close. Plus, do you really want to go up there?”
“Good point.” She shifted her attention back to me. “I’m Olivia, by the way. Olivia Nolan. Nice to meet you.”
“Davis Ridgeway.”
Olivia hesitated briefly after I said my name, and I knew what she was doing. I had seen it a thousand times before: She was trying to figure out why my name sounded so familiar. I could have saved her the brainpower and told her that yes, I had the same name as my father—Davis Ridgeway I. And yes, my father was the very same Davis Ridgeway of Davenport-Ridgeway fame, which meant that yes, my father was a billionaire.
But she’d figure that out later if she Googled me.
“Where are you from?” she inquired instead, which would surely be the first in a tactful string of questions to figure out who I was.
“Boston originally, but I just graduated from college in Connecticut. Heading to business school in the fall. What about you?”
“Springfield, Missouri, but I haven’t been back since I left for college. I’m a rising sophomore at Wash U.”
A rising sophomore. That meant she was only nineteen or so, if I had to guess. A bit young for me—not in number, but in other ways. She couldn’t even legally buy that drink she was sipping if we were back in the States. Although, it wasn’t like I had much basis for complaint. After all, I had never dated a girl my own age, let alone one a few years younger than me.
I mean, not that we were dating. Fuck, what a weird thought…
“What do you study?” I asked, hoping to keep the awkwardness that I radiated from infecting her. And sure, this was a decidedly unsexy conversation, but I hadn’t come down here to get laid. I was just here to quell a migraine and get rejected. I figured, it couldn’t hurt to make small talk in the process.
A grim expression passed over her face. “Accounting, at the moment. But it’s…”
“It’s the most boring thing on the face of this earth,” I filled in, quickly acknowledging the unspoken truth that lingered between us.
“Yeah,” she blurted out, exhaling as if she had been holding this back for months. “I figured it was a solid path because it’s lucrative and pays well right out of college. But, honestly, there are days when I think time has stopped because I’m so bored.”
“We didn’t have an accounting major where I went to school, but I took the classes that you need to get into business school. So, econ, stats, some accounting, and a lot of math. You could get away with taking some of the econ and stats stuff instead, and then if accounting doesn’t pan out you have options.”
Shit. It took me a few seconds to realize that I was literally in a nightclub talking to an objectively gorgeous woman about her motherfucking undergraduate course schedule. My brother was right; I really didn’t know what to do with a woman.
But again, Olivia surprised me by nodding eagerly. “Did you like econ?”
In response, I nodded back even more enthusiastically, like a golden retriever probably. “I majored in it.”
Olivia’s expression turned pensive. “The guys who take econ seem like such douchebags though,” she murmured offhandedly. “Is that true?”
“Well, I’m not a…douchebag.”
“You just hang out with them,” she filled in before glancing up at the balcony. “You see your friends up there? They’ve been texting you like crazy since you sat down.”
Surprised, I reached into my pants pocket and glanced at my phone. Olivia was right; I had at least twenty-two unread messages in our group text.
“Sorry about them,” I muttered, knowing that an apology wasn’t sufficient to make up for the sheer blast of entitlement emanating down from the second floor. I scrolled through the messages briefly, not bothering to read them. They were all bullshit and filth, to be honest. “They think you’re really pretty.”
“Pretty?” Olivia’s expression slipped into a soft frown at my comment.
“They had some other choice words,” I admitted, parsing for a non-fuckboy way to say it. “I was trying to, like, class it up, you know?”
She smiled at me, and she really did have the most amazing smile. Mellow and unassuming, like she was hesitant to show it. It was enough to make me fumble the button on the side of my phone that turned off the glow of my screen. “They’re the only ones who think so?”
I wavered, unsure what she was insinuating—which she seemed to pick up on easily.
“You don’t think I’m pretty?” she clarified before she reached out and placed her hand on my thigh underneath the bar. That simple gesture immediately made me feel like the ground was falling out from under me. My leg tingled where she touched me and I couldn’t focus on anything but that spot. Could she feel how nervous she made me? Probably. Hell, she probably thought it was amusing.
“I do,” I confirmed. “But just pretty. I didn’t have other choice words for you like they did. I swear.”
“Oh, so you don’t think I’m hot?” she inquired, moving closer—so close that I could see the gradations of green in her irises. “Sexy? Fuckable?”
“Holy shit,” I finally managed to utter under my breath, unable to look away from her. My heart was pounding, and I mean pounding. I could practically hear it in my ears. “I mean, I do. I do think those things, I—”
“I’m just messing with you,” she explained hastily, putting me out of my misery. “It doesn’t take much to put you in a tailspin though.” She leaned back and took a sip of her drink through the narrow cocktail straw, continuing to eye me smugly.
“It doesn’t,” I admitted, raising a shoulder. “Hey, look if I’m bugging you and all of their staring is ruining your night, I can go.”
“Ruining my night? I’m wearing the sluttiest dress I own and drinking alone in a nightclub. What makes you think my night wasn’t already ruined?”
“Oh. Do you want to talk about it?”
“Talk about it?” she repeated, wrinkling her nose. “Nice of you to offer, but it’s not interesting. The guy I came to Amsterdam with dumped me four hours ago, so I dragged my stuff to a hostel and realized that the club’s stamp from last night still hadn’t worn off.” As evidence, she held up the back of her hand, where there was a faded black stamp mark. “It was a choice between coming here or sitting on a bunkbed in a twelve-woman dorm, which is half-occupied by a group of girls on a hen night or a hen do or something like that.”
“It’s the British version of a bachelorette party.” A fact I knew only because my four friends had screwed a full set of bridesmaids while we were in Berlin. I, on the other hand, had naturally ended up holding the bride’s hair while she vomited into an ice bucket back at our hotel.
“Good to know,” Olivia replied with an air of sincerity that made me feel like less of a loser for having that answer at the ready, like a gigantic dictionary of European debauchery. “Well, anyway. What about you? Am I ruining your night with sad breakup stories and my unwillingness to accept cocktails from strange boys who look down at me from their fancy little VIP table?”
“No, I like listening to you talk.” As soon as I said that, I regretted it. Olivia got this weird look on her face—an intersection of surprise and amusement. “I’m sorry…” I began again, but she quickly shook her head.
“Please don’t be. That was…incredibly sweet. And wow,” she breathed out and glanced away before saying, “the bar is so low. Here I am, flustered because a guy said that he likes to listen to me. That’s so sad. Dating is so sad, isn’t it?”
I thought about lying and agreeing since I knew jack shit about dating. But instead I cocked my chin in the direction of the upper floor. “Do you want to go talk upstairs? Free drinks, better chairs, and it’s actually quieter.”
Her expression turned skeptical, but still playful. “Do you promise me that this isn’t a very elaborate, very successful scheme to get me upstairs so your creepy friends can leer at me up-close?”