The bartender looks like she approves of my choice. Silas orders a beer, and instead of interrogating him about it, I put one elbow on the bar and gracefully cross one leg over the other.
Except I somehow miss, wobble in the chair, and have to redo the whole thing.
“Cheers,” he says when our drinks come, clinking his glass against mine. “Here’s to not looking at Evan again back there.”
“I didn’t?” I say, then catch myself and clear my throat and hold my drink up. “I didn’t. Excellent work, everyone, mission accomplished.”
I take a long, delicious drink of water. Silas sips his beer. I do not notice the way a tiny line of foam clings to the slight stubble along his top lip and I most certainly do not notice the way he brushes it off with his thumb.
“We’re not quite there yet,” he points out, easy smile in place, his beer on the bar. “There’s a way to go between not looking his way every five seconds and the kind of on-his-knees begging I promised you.”
If the drinks didn’t already have me at maximum flush, I’d probably blush. To hide it I take another drink of my water and focus very hard on not spinning my bar stool at all.
“That’s negotiable,” I tell Silas, careful with the pronunciation. “I was a little… ruffled… when I told you that.”
“Ruffled?” he says, the familiar lines sinking into his face, like he finds this amusing.
“Sure,” I say, and adjust my glasses, and try to think of one of the colorful Southern phrases I’m always hearing Anna Grace use. “I had my dander up?”
“You were madder’n a wet hen,” he says, his twang suddenly pronounced, a grin on his face.
I suck my lips into my teeth so I don’t smile.
“They’re quite angry, I presume?”
“Lord, yes,” he says. “I sure wouldn’t cross one.”
“Then that’s how angry I was,” I say, definitively as I can. “Hence my statements about crawling and begging and knees and whatnot.”
“I don’t remember any mention of crawling,” Silas says, his eyes meeting mine.
Shit.
“Whatever terms I laid out,” I go on, each word careful. “I won’t necessarily hold you to the exact, uh, delineations of the accords to which we both peremptorily… what I said.”
I give Silas my most serious look, even though he’s clearly trying not to laugh at me.
“Crawling, though,” he continues. “That’s a new angle. You want him crawling to you, or away from you?”
“I regret everything,” I mutter.
“To, probably,” he muses. “So he can beg you to take him back, right?”
I glance away, at the wall about five feet to my left. The bar is L-shaped and he’s in the last seat before the wall, his back to it, away from the crowd so it’s just Silas and I and sometimes the bartender.
Slowly, it occurs to me that he did this on purpose: put us in the quietest spot in the bar, with the least eyes, the fewest people likely to overhear us or look our way. Where the crowd is in front of us, not behind us.
It occurs to me that I could kiss him again, right now. Hardly anyone would notice. I don’t think Silas would mind. I don’t think I would mind, and he’s right there with his deep blue eyes and his barely-there freckles and the hair that keeps falling on his forehead and his pretty, pretty lips.
I realize I’m rotating on the stool. I realize our knees are touching, and neither of us does anything about it.
“What happens then?” Silas asks, his voice suddenly softer.
My eyes jerk to his, my rambling thoughts derailed.
“Then when?”
“After he crawls to you and begs you to take him back,” he says. “You never did tell me that part.”