Her Four Cowboys

“You okay there?” Adam asked, and I looked over at him to see him raising an entertained eyebrow at me.

“I’m great,” I said, the words coming out short and thin. At first, I was amazed that my little brother, who always wore his heart on his sleeve, looked as though he was barely affected by her looks.

That was, until I realized that there was more color flushing his cheeks, and that he’d been biting down on his lip steadily since we’d gotten to the bar.

He was affected by her; of course, he was. There went any residual hope that his feelings for her might not be as strong as my own.

Lucy was looking around the room, her eyes skating over us a few times before finally landing on our table. I saw her blink a few times as if in surprise, and there was a moment when I wondered why before remembering that Adam had texted her simply asking her to meet up.

He hadn’t said anything about me being there too.

My heart started to pound in the fear that she would clam up and leave at the sight of me, having decided that the kiss we’d shared on New Year’s Eve had just been brought on as a result of too many drinks and the simple fact that there had been no one else that she’d been able to kiss at midnight.

All those thoughts came crashing to a halt when I saw the smile begin to spread across her face, and suddenly, I felt a very different kind of cramping around my solar plexus as I saw the way that her eyes lit up. Without another second’s deliberation, she started to walk up to the table, each of her steps filled with purpose, and pulled out the chair, setting her coat over the back of it and sitting down fluidly.

“This is a surprise,” she said, looking over at me. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here, Andy.”

I looked at Adam quickly before swallowing hard at the lump in my throat. “Is it the… bad kind of surprise?”

“Not at all,” she said, reaching forward to put her hand on mine. “I just wasn’t expecting to see the both of you guys, but I’m happy you’re both here.”

“Good,” Adam said. “I think I can speak for both of us when I say that we’re both happy to see you too.”

She blinked, looking between me and Adam several times.

“What do you want to drink?” Adam asked. “A Stella?”

She nodded. “Thanks.”

Adam went up to the bar to get Lucy’s drink, leaving the two of us to sit there together, simply taking each other in.

“You haven’t texted,” I said, looking at her straight on, not lifting my hands from my lap so that she couldn’t see how much they were sweating.

“Neither have you,” she returned, leaning forward and setting her chin in her hand as she traced small circles on the table with her fingertip.

“You know,” Adam said as he came back to the table, setting the green bottle in front of her before taking his own seat once more, “it’s crazy drinking with you now that we’re actually able to drink legally, and we don’t have to get Austin or Aaron to buy our shitty cheap beers for us.”

Was I imagining it, or was there a strange tightening to her lips when our older brothers’ names were mentioned?

It barely lasted a second, though, and then she was taking a gulp of beer as she looked back at him with a smile that rivaled the first one she’d given us when she’d first walked in. “Oh God,” she said, laughing with a sound that was deeper and throatier than I’d been expecting. “Do you guys remember that time that we’d been studying for that chemistry midterm sophomore year, and Andy, you were working on an essay for English class—”

“And Molly came over to ‘study’ with us,” Adam added, lifting up his hands to illustrate the air quotes, “even though we weren’t in the same class, and she had literally no intention of doing any homework?”

“Wait a minute,” I said, feeling the smile starting to spread over my face, “I think I remember this.”

I did. Molly had said that we’d been working far too hard for far too long, and that it was time for us to finally take a break. At that point, both Adam and Lucy had been red eyed from studying, and I’d been staring at the pages of The Great Gatsby for so long that I was starting to feel cross-eyed with effort. Once Molly had gotten to the house with that look in her dangerous brown eyes, I’d known that there was about to be a massive amount of mischief that would be made.

She’d made a decent argument for cutting loose a little bit, knowing that we’d all been working hard. She’d been at practice all day, and she deserved a little bit of fun too, so she’d convinced me to drive us to the Seven Eleven two towns over so that I could try to get a box of Coors Lights with my shitty fake ID.