Chapter Two

Nate

Carlos got no less attractive as the night wore on. In fact, he seemed to get more and more attractive. I did not know if I could rest that on the fact that he kept talking or the fact that we kept drinking. Either way, I was deeply enjoying his company.

“I can’t put my finger on it, Nate, but I feel like I’ve known you for a long time.” He said to me when we had emptied our first glass together. He signaled to the bartender, who had been watching us with some amusement, to refill our drinks.

“You know, Carlos, I get that feeling too.”

I did. It was true. There was something about the beautiful man before me that was incredibly familiar. It felt like I really did know him, though we had never shared a moment any more intimate than our introductions to one another at that point in time.

“Here you are.” The bartender said as he placed our replenished glasses before us. He looked like he had been about to say something when one of the female bartenders called him from the opposite end of the bar. His name was John. I wondered absently what he had wanted to say but Carlos broke me out of that reverie.

“So, you really just decided to celebrate being alive for another day?”

“I mean, it seems like a fairly good reason to celebrate, right?”

Carlos smiled, dazzling me with teeth and dimples. His eyes crinkled around the outer corners whenever he smiled, the brown of his eyes seeming to brighten. If I looked at them for too long, I thought that I could see gold in them. “It most certainly is one of the best I’ve heard, I’ll give you that.”

Over the course of the evening, we had ended up moving closer to one another. Our body language was leading the way. Considering the fact that it was all so new to me, I could not help but notice it. It was involuntary, for the most part, but the warmth of his outer thigh against mine was impossible to miss. The way that his fingertips grazed my bare bicep whenever he laughed, particularly if it was at something that I had said, was pretty hard to miss too. Soon we were both angled slightly, our thighs and our forearms touching, our heads bent toward each other as we spoke and drank.

“What do you do, Nate?”

“To be honest with you, Carlos, I don’t do very much at all.”

“What about work?”

“I work in freelancing, mostly. I do the odd bit of programming and graphic design here and there. I taught myself how to do it when I was a teenager but it doesn’t really feel like work to me, if you know what I mean.”

“I guess since you taught yourself, that must mean that it was something you were just messing around with all along?”

“Yeah, exactly. It’s basically like getting paid for having a hobby.”

“Still, it takes some serious skill to do that sort of thing, especially if you taught yourself. I don’t have a creative bone in my body. Kudos to you.”

“So what do you do, then?”

Carlos was silent for a moment. My eyes were fixed on his hand. Where his glass stood on the bar, he was tracing the rim around and around with his index fingertip. “I’m a doctor,” he said.

I swallowed the lump that formed in my throat at that statement. He was a doctor. Of all the men in the city, I had come across a doctor out on the town on a Friday night. It took everything in me not to groan out loud. “What kind of doctor are you?”

“I’m just the average old general practitioner.”

“A GP. I’m sure you still see your fair share of odd cases.”

He smiled again and I could not help the smile that I returned. I could live my whole life making Carlos smile. I had only met him that night but I had never seen such an amazing smile in my life. “You can bet on that,” he said. “It is more the on-call cases that get a bit crazy. That is where all the real excitement is.”

I wanted to laugh at the sarcasm dripping from his words. I had never been a fan of doctors or hospitals or anywhere with the sick and those who treated the sick. I had good reasons, though.

Rather than give him an answer, mostly since I did not know how to answer, I took another sip of my drink. I had returned to the whiskey. It warmed my throat as it went down, the warmth spreading all the way to my stomach. I was starting to get kind of hungry but the last thing that I wanted to do was leave the presence of the tall, dark, and handsome Spaniard whose attention I had garnered.

“I’m glad that you were here tonight, Nate,” Carlos said. His voice was low, suddenly husky. The change caused me to tear my eyes away from the glass and look up at him. There was something about the expression on his face that made my stomach twist.

I could feel my mouth going dry and I swallowed. My lips fell open as I sucked in a breath and I darted the tip of my tongue out to moisten them. For the briefest of minutes, I was uncertain as to whether or not that had been a wise move as Carlos’ eyes seemed to follow the motion. His eyes moved from my eyes to my lips and back again.

There was barely time for me to breathe before Carlos had leaned in. My eyes fell closed as he pressed his lips over mine, warm and soft. He tasted faintly of alcohol and something else I did not recognize. His lips moved against mine, almost as if he was slowly coaxing. I needed no coaxing and I found myself leading the kiss after a moment. I moved my tongue between his lips, finding his. I felt Carlos’ breathing speed up at that and smiled into the kiss, the palm of my hand pressed against the flat expanse of his chest.

The kiss felt short and long at the same time but, regardless, it ended all too soon. I felt Carlos pull back and I had to catch my breath. Something inside me had exploded, all of my senses were alight and my skin was tingling. I opened my eyes slowly, as though I was waking from a deep sleep. It felt almost like that – a dream that you never wanted to wake up from.

When my eyes were opened, I was met with a smiling Carlos. This smile was demure, not the confident one he had been sporting all along. He looked almost shy. I could get used to that smile, too, I thought.

Behind him, John the bartender had begun to make his way over to us. He had known before I had that Carlos and I would be getting out of there. I guessed that that was kind of a part of his job description, in a way.

“Shall I get you guys the bill?” John asked. He gave me a friendly smile as he removed our glasses and began wiping down the surface again.

“Yeah,” Carlos said. “I think the bill would be great?”

He posed it as a question rather than a statement and I nearly laughed. I was definitely ready to get out of there if it meant going with Carlos. I nodded my head in confirmation and John walked off to the other side to key in our orders.

I wanted to look at Carlos as much as I wanted to avert my eyes from him. I opted to look at the clean counter. The wood had been picked at here and there. I wondered how long the bar had been around for. Were those new scratches or were they old ones? Were they made by people or merely wear and tear? Was there a way to fix something like that?

Truthfully, I was nervous. I did not want to think about everything too much. I had never done anything like this. I was not the kind of guy who randomly hooked up with strangers from the bar. I did not know if I was going to be that guy that night. I hoped that it was not what Carlos had in mind.

Then again, a part of me hoped that it was.