“Nice to meet you, Sam,” I said, reaching over to shake his hand.

“Likewise,” Sam said. “So you’re the reason why Logan came in here hours ago asking us to turn on college football, of all things—”

“Sam—” Logan tried to interject again, but Sam just kept talking.

“—if you’d told me that Logan would ever be that desperate, begging to watch a football game, I would have laughed in your face.”

“I was not begging,” Logan said, his cheeks going red as he gave Sam a look.

My chest felt fizzy hearing Logan try to downplay it.

I fucking loved this.

“So you really did want to watch me play, huh?” I asked Logan, letting myself tease him a little bit.

“And he was enthralled watching you, the whole game,” Sam said, grinning at me.

My cock perked up under my pants.

Down, boy, I thought. Just because I liked the idea of him watching me play didn’t mean I had to get hard about it.

“We had to Google what half of the plays were,” Danielle said. “Logan and I don’t really know much about football, if you haven’t figured that out.”

“I’ve got to go help some other customers,” Sam said. “But it’s nice to meet you, Brody. Logan was right about you being a hottie.”

As Sam walked away, Logan was even redder than he had been before. Holy shit, it was cute. I wanted to put my arms around him and tell him everything was going to be okay, but I also wanted to take all of his clothes off and hop into bed with him, too.

Logan was hanging out in a gay bar, and he definitely wasn’t on a date. And joking or not, he had apparently told his cousin that I was attractive.

It was pretty clear that he probably wasn’t straight. And now my mind wanted to run wild even more than it had been before.

“I’m so sorry about him,” Logan said, his eyes still wide like a startled deer. “Sam is a little bit… chaotic. He didn’t even take our food orders.”

“He seems fun,” I said.

A small smile appeared on Logan’s face. “He definitely can be.”

“If you guys are about to order some food, do you want to come join me and my friends?” I asked. “We’ve got a big booth in the corner, and we just started ordering beers.”

“Hang out with you and your teammates?” Logan asked, as if I’d just suggested hanging out with space aliens. But Mike and Vance were good guys. I knew Logan would have no problem getting along with them.

Logan and Danielle looked at each other, communicating with their eyes the way only best friends can do.

“I don’t want to impose—” Logan began to say.

“Yes, we’ll absolutely join you!” Danielle said, smiling. She grabbed Logan’s arm and he stood up, grabbing his shoulder bag from under the bar.

“Okay. Sure,” he said.

We walked back over to our booth and I introduced everybody. Logan slid into the seat right next to me, and Danielle took the end, on the other side of him.

“So what are we drinkin’ tonight?” Vance asked, smiling at Logan.

Logan still had a vague look of overwhelm in his eyes. He pored over the drink list on the table as if it were written in Greek.

“Um,” Logan said.

“He doesn’t really drink,” Danielle chimed in.

“No, no,” Logan said. “I’ll have a beer. One of the autumn harvest lagers.”

Danielle raised her eyebrows high, watching Logan like hell had just frozen over.

“Hell yeah,” Mike added. “We were already drinking that. Let’s just get a couple of pitchers for the table.”

“Did I hear the word pitchers?” Sam said, coming up alongside the table to take our order.

“We’re going to have some more of the autumn lager,” Logan said.

Sam gawked at him. “You’re drinking?”

Logan cut him a glare that clearly meant shut up.

Sam suddenly had a look of pride on his face. “All throughout our road trip this summer you wouldn’t party with me and now look at you. All grown up.”

“I’m going to barf,” Logan said, but a small smile appeared on his face.

“Two pitchers coming up shortly, friends,” Sam said as he bounced off to go grab them.

Mike, Vance and Danielle broke off into a conversation about which songs they were going to put on the jukebox. Danielle seemed awesome, already getting along with my friends. She wasn’t as shy as Logan, even if the two of them seemed similar in a lot of ways.

I leaned over toward Logan, whispering in his ear.

“You sure you want to drink?” I asked. “You don’t have to just because these idiots are, y’know. And you definitely don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

He smelled really fucking good again, like fresh laundry mixed with his usual faint vanilla scent. Like a cozy pile of blankets I wanted to dive right into. I’d moved in this close to him and now I didn’t want to move away.

Tags: Raleigh Ruebins Red's Tavern Romance
Source: readsnovelonline.net