Dropping my hand, Jarrod put his arm around me and tugged me into his side. “Was it that bad, baby?”
Shooting him a look that said it all, I decided he needed to know exactly how bad it was for me. “Maude was up there a while ago, and to numb the pain and embarrassment of it, I downed pitchers and shots. Then, Maya and I did some experiments on the speed of consumption via straws of the contents of pitchers. I was happily sloppy until I was taken on that stage and now I’m sober. Their skull cap wrapped penises sobered me up. To get over the pain I’ve just endured, I now need more alcohol, but I’m not sure there’s enough to get rid of the image burned into my retinas of construction socked cocks.”
Jarrod listened to all of this quietly, and when I was done he just blinked, then blinked again, then blinked again. I was just about to move around the table to where my seat was when he threw his head back and burst out laughing again, the cords in his neck standing out sexily as he did it. I vaguely noticed that the table had gone quiet as he did this, but I was enjoying this show too much to acknowledge why that might be.
When it left him, he tipped his head back down again, his face still holding a wide grin. “We should probably get you some alcohol then.”
“Sweet Jesus, that was beautiful,” Maude gasped, her hand shooting out to grab Tabby’s.
“Jarrod’s hot, but when he’s laughing like that, he’s seriously fucking hot,” she added, her eyes still on him.
Stunned for other reasons, Ren said to Cole, “Jarrod laughs? I thought he just did a smile or those little huh huh chuckles.”
Relieved that the focus wasn’t on my trip to the stage, I moved to my chair and then looked around for another one for him to sit on. Unfortunately, the place had been full before, but with the men here now it was definitely full, so there were no free seats to be found. Jarrod didn’t find this to be a problem, though, because he sat down and then tugged me until I was sitting on his lap, and wrapped his arms around me, holding me close.
“She needs booze,” he told the table, and the women all held their hands up at the same time to get the waitress’s attention.
The woman who’d been serving us all night did a skip walk up to the table and shot us all a huge smile. “What’ll it be?”
She was seriously the happiest person I’d ever met in my life. All night she’d been friendly and skippy, and I had no idea how she was doing it. If I had to deal with a bunch of women getting rowdy over guys ripping their clothes off, I’d be hiding in a corner praying for it to be over.
Gesturing for her to get closer, I laid out my order. “Ok, I’m relatively shy and I got carried up to that stage with a sloppy buzz going on after a lot of shots and pitchers – which were drunk by just me, FYI. So, I need enough replacement booze to numb the pain and embarrassment of socky cockies. Can you do that?”
The woman’s head jerked slightly hearing this, and then she looked at me wide eyed and nodded. “I gotchu, boo,” she assured me, and then skip walked away.
And indeed she did have me. Within minutes she was back with two pitchers with straws in them and five different colored shots that were in glasses slightly larger than the ones before.
Placing them down on the table in front of me and passing Jarrod a beer, she explained, “Got Larry at the bar to put double in the pitchers and the shots are what I call brain blasts. They’re double measures, too, but if you start from left to right and finish with the pitchers, you’ll be a new woman.”
Reaching into my purse, I pulled out a twenty and passed it to her. We were running a tab that we’d split at the end, but every time she’d brought us a round, we’d tipped her. “You’re a good woman, a good, good woman. You deserve fifty of those for what you’ve done for me here, but I didn’t bring that amount with me.”
I heard her say thank you and laugh, but I was already making my way through the shots. The first one burned, the second one stoked the burn, the third one added more kindling onto the burn so that it started to flame, the fourth one was like pouring lighter fluid on those flames, and the fifth one – which was cinnamon – turned it into an inferno. Because of that, I reached for the pitcher and took large pulls on the straws to put the flames out. Also, because of all of this, my sloppy buzz came back, left the building, and was replaced by a blottola buzz.