“Tease.”
I flipped him off with a playful grin, and his laughter followed me as I left. I was giddy with the kind of anticipation a girl with a boyfriend definitely should not feel.
* * *
“You doin’ okay?” Ally asked me as I handed change over to a customer.
My shift at Wilde’s Place had started two hours ago, and I’d worked my way around the bar pretty fast. I already had bartending experience, so it was no big deal, and the customers there were a lot more down-to-earth and fun to talk to than those at the college bar.
“Everything is going great.” I threw her a smile.
“Your boyfriend gonna be here soon?”
The thought of Gary caused a prickle of guilt. I’d technically arranged some kind of date with another guy. It didn’t seem like it at the time but giving myself distance from Michael made me realize how shitty what I’d done was. I’d flirted with another guy, and I’d arranged to see him again at my job. Yet, I couldn’t forget those butterflies or how I still felt them when I thou
ght about the stranger. I didn’t have those with Gary, as much as I cared about him.
But was Michael worth ruining what I had with Gary? My boyfriend had called me before my shift to tell me that Sully had a Saturday night free, so he was bringing him to Wilde’s Place to meet me. Sully was Gary’s best friend, but he was a cop and hadn’t had a lot of free time lately. He’d been with Boston PD for nearly two years so he was now only getting a regular shift pattern that would allow him to see his buddies more.
I was a little nervous about meeting him. Gary talked about him all the time. They’d grown up together, and while Gary screwed around a lot, Sully was always there to get him out of scrapes. From what I knew about my boyfriend, he’d definitely been the irresponsible one in that friendship. Until me, Gary had only been interested in casual sex, whereas he used to rib Sully for being a one-woman kind of guy. Sully had wanted to go to college to be a lawyer, but his family didn’t have the money to send him, so he took his police exam at nineteen, was a cadet with the Boston PD before he could apply for the police academy at twenty-one, and he became a cop like his old man.
Gary, on the other hand, had flitted from one job to the next, getting fired right, left, and center, until his uncle took him on as a mechanic. Since then he’d settled down. Including with me.
If Gary and his best friend knew what I’d done today, they’d hate me.
But I didn’t do anything, I argued with myself. Not really.
“Hey, gorgeous.”
My boyfriend’s familiar voice pulled me out of my guilt-ridden thoughts, and I handed over the beer to my customer. Gary leaned over the bar, grinning at me.
Smiling back, I leaned over to press a kiss to his lips. A couple of guys around the bar groaned in fake disappointment, and Gary smiled against my mouth before pulling back to shoot a grin their way. “That’s right, fellas, she’s mine, so back off.”
I shook my head at his nonsense. “You doin’ okay?”
“I’m supposed to be asking you that. How’s it goin’?”
“Good.”
He nodded and then turned to look over his shoulder. “I brought Sully. Told you he wasn’t an imaginary friend.”
I laughed because I’d teased him about that as more weeks passed without meeting this elusive Sully. Glancing past my boyfriend to smile at his friend as he stepped up to the bar, my smile stuck before it could widen my mouth.
Shock rooted me to the spot as I looked into familiar dark-brown eyes.
Michael?
Surprise momentarily flickered in his expression, but he was quicker at recovering than I was. He held out his hand and said pointedly, “Michael Sullivan, nice to meet you.”
Oh my God.
Sullivan. Sully.
Duh.
Well, didn’t this suck at the highest level? I swallowed my shock and disappointment and gingerly took his hand. My skin tingled at his touch, and his hand seemed to reflexively tighten around mine. “Dahlia.” It was hard to get words out, so they came out soft and uncertain. “Nice to meet you too.”
“Don’t tell me you’re going all shy on me,” Gary huffed.