“You’re trouble,” he tells me, but lets me hold his hand and doesn’t fight it.
Dick’s Place looks like an old West saloon from the outside with a little boardwalk out front, the building painted stark white, with peeling paint, the name done up with gold lettering on the windows.
It’s surprisingly busy, and the kind of dive bar that tourists seem to love. It’s hard to tell who is who in here, but I guess we’re lucky to get two high chairs over a barrel in the back.
The blues blare from the speakers and a grizzled looking man with a beard comes over, asking us what we want to drink.
“Two dirty martinis,” I tell him.
He frowns, making a gruff sound, and then walks back to the bar.
“Dirty martinis?” Max asks me. “Really?”
“There’s a little picture of a martini outside. I bet they’re really good. Also, he didn’t even ask me for my ID, so that’s a win for me.”
He sticks a toothpick in his mouth. “I suppose if I were being responsible, I shouldn’t be letting you drink.”
I give him a loaded look. “You’re not letting me do anything, Max. You’re not my babysitter. And I’m an adult. I can do what I want.”
“Don’t have to tell me twice.”
Hmm. Usually I get a bit of pushback.
“I like that about you,” I tell him.
He moves his attention from across the room back to me. “What?”
“That you treat me like an adult.”
“Because you are an adult.”
“I know but…everyone else, they seem to think I’m eternally fifteen.”
“Well, I’m not everyone else,” he says. “And you’re not fifteen. I was there when you were. That was almost five years ago. You’re not the same person. No one stays the same, even though others might want to put you in a box in the hopes that you will.”
“When did you get to be so wise?” I joke.
He grins at me. “Somewhere around the fifteenth century.”
Wow. Sometimes I totally forget about his history, and then he reminds me, and it feels even more unreal. “How are you not the smartest person alive?”
He laughs, loud enough to carry above the music. “Well fuck, Ada, I don’t know. I can only work with what God gave me.”
This is the first time I’ve heard him mention God with a capital G.
I wonder if he thought about where God went when he was trapped in Hell. But that seems like a conversation for another time, not in this dive bar in California. Or maybe this is the perfect place for that.
“Well, God gave you the ability to be immortal,” I say.
“Someone did, anyway,” he says as the bearded waiter comes by and brings us the dirty martinis. They look cloudy with extra olive juice and when I take a sip my eyes roll back in my head, it’s so orgasmically good.
I glance at Max, who has the glass to his lips, watching me with a strange look of heat in his eyes, and it’s not of the dancing flames variety. “I take it it’s good?”
“Fuck yeah,” I say as he takes a sip.
He blinks, then coughs, pounding his fist on his chest. “This is fucking pickle juice with a splash of vodka.”
“So good, right?”
“I’m ordering the next drinks,” he says between coughs, eyes watering.
I laugh and pull an olive off the plastic sword with my teeth. “Sorry. I’ll drink yours if you want.”
I make the motion to take it from him but he pulls his away. “I’ll get used to it.”
“So,” I say, munching on the olive, “back to the whole someone giving you immortality thing. Do you know who that is?”
He shakes his head. “Hence why they’re a someone. Or a something.”
“But it’s not God? Because obviously you believe in him. Or her. They. It. Or maybe it’s the big dude with the pointy horns.”
“No small talk with us anymore, huh?” he muses, having another sip of his drink, bigger this time.
“Small talk with you goes to waste,” I tell him. “You’re the most fascinating person I know.”
He shoots me a dry look. “Ease up on the flattery there, sweetheart. You’re making me nervous.”
“I’m serious.”
He has the nerve to roll his eyes when I try to pay him a compliment.
But when he brings his eyes back to mine, flames are burning in them just as the hair at the back of my neck stands up.
“Someone’s here,” I say, quickly looking around the bar. It’s still busy, a mix of biker dudes, middle-aged couples in khakis, a group of young girls, the table of guys next to them trying to hit on them, a few scattered couples. So far none of them look like the demon kind.
I look back to Max, but the flames are dying out. I can feel it too, like my nerves are easing.
“What was that?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he says, sitting up straighter and looking around the bar. He’s probably the tallest person here, plus being up on the high seat, he really does have the eagle’s view. “Maybe they just passed by outside.”