Chapter Twenty-Two
Jacks is less crowded than I’m used to, I suppose because we’re here so early. With so few people, the jukebox seems louder—but it’s playing Tom Waits, which always puts me in a good mood. There’s a blond bartender I don’t recognize; he nods at Mitch when we come in and is already drawing a Guinness by the time we get to the bar.
“How’s it going, man?” he asks, tilting the glass at just the right angle. A Guinness well-poured is a truly beautiful thing.
“It’s going. We’ll want two of those.”
“Sure thing.”
We stand there for a minute, not speaking. The jukebox switches from Tom to Johnny Cash. Also fine with me.
The bartender sets the first glass on the bar in front of us. Mitch slides it in front of me. “Ladies first,” he says, grinning.
I look around in mock confusion. “What lady?”
He laughs, and touches my upper arm so quickly I almost don’t notice it. Almost. If it didn’t go on tingling for a full thirty seconds, it would be safe to say I didn’t notice it at all. “You’re a class act all the way, darlin’,” he says.
The bartender, again getting just the right angle on the glass, asks, “Who’s your friend?”
Just friends. Just friends. I can do this.
“This is Jenna. Jenna, say hi to Kevin.”
I do, and Mitch passes money across the bar in exchange for the second pint, and sets down another ten. “For the table,” he says, and Kevin pops the cash register drawer and hands over a roll of quarters.
We take our drinks to the nearest pool table and Mitch holds up the roll of quarters. “You know where these go?”
I sigh. “Yes.”
“This is the rack,” he says, plucking the rack from the wall and tossing it on the table. “When the balls come out, you put them in here.”
“I know what it’s called, and what to do with it,” I say. “I haven’t been under a rock for the last thirty years, you know.”
“Hey,” he says, holding his hands up as if to fend me off, “you said absolute beginner. I’m just following your lead.”
“I’ve played,” I say. “Just not often. And badly.”
“That’s about to change,” he says, and leaves me to get started, heading over to the jukebox. I get the balls racked as best I can, hang the rack back up, and go over to pick out a pool cue. Since they all look pretty much the same to me, I pick them up one after another. I can’t really tell if there’s a difference in weight, and even if there is I don’t know whether I want a heavy one or a light one.
“Don’t use that one,” Mitch says from right behind me, and I jump a little. He’s standing just a little closer than is strictly necessary, in my opinion—close enough that I can feel his breath warming my neck. If I didn’t know better—
But I do. So I remind myself again that we’re just two good friends out for some beers and eight-ball.
“Why not?” I ask.
“It’s crooked.”
It looks straight enough to me, but I put it back and pick up another. Mitch reaches around me, takes it from my hand, and puts it back.
“What now?”
“Too light.”
“So I want a heavy one?”
“Is it always all-or-nothing with you?” he asks absently. I assume he’s distracted by trying to find me a pool cue, but I can’t help wondering how he always manages to say these things that cut right to the heart of me and never seems to notice.
“I guess it is,” I say.
“Well, try a little middle ground. You might like it.” He hands me a pool cue and smiles. “You want this one.”
“I do?”
“You do.”
“I like the one I had,” I say stubbornly, taking it back off the wall.
“You won’t like it for long.”
“Why?”
“We’ll talk about why later.”
“Why not now?”
“Because you won’t understand until you’ve played with it a little.”
“I’m sure I’d understand well enough.”
He grins and grabs a cue for himself. “Trust me?”
I’m helpless when he smiles like that. I switch cues and position myself across the table from him.
Might be in everyone’s best interest to keep the table between us.
The jukebox moves from Johnny to Springsteen, completing what we might call the gravelly-voiced, working-man trifecta.
Let’s Be Friends? Really? A sexy song about trying to get in your friend’s pants?
“Did you pick this?” I ask.
“I did.”
I take a deep breath. Well, then. That’s … weird?
Except I know it’s not. He would never. So the only thing weird here is me, misinterpreting perfectly innocent music choices and making shit up in my head.
“You break,” he says.
“Isn’t that kind of advanced?”
“Advanced-beginner,” he says, with a completely straight face, but I can see the smile at the corners of his eyes. “A girl who knows the lingo like you, and has such strong feelings about pool cues, will be a natural at it.”
As it turns out—surprise!—I am not a natural at it. The balls barely move when I break.
“I guess I’m crummy at breaking,” I venture.
“Not as crummy as you are at racking.” He grabs the rack off the wall again and starts putting the balls back in. “You definitely suck at both, but I don’t think anyone could have done much with that rack. Come here and I’ll show you.”
I move over to his side of the table, and he shows me how to do it right: alternating striped and solid balls and wedging them in tight, his hands quick and sure. I should stop thinking about his hands, but all I can seem to think about is the way he cupped my face in them, on our first date. Right before he kissed me.
Our only date. And he isn’t going to be kissing me anymore.
Because. We. Are. Just. Friends.
I listen to Bruce crooning about how much he’d like to be friends—and he’s full of it, he wants nothing of the kind—and watch Mitch’s hands as he lines the rack up properly on the table, puts his fingers in to make sure the balls stay bunched up, and slips it off without moving any of them so much as a millimeter.
“Got it?” he asks.
I nod, and he sends me to the other side of the table to try breaking again. This time the balls at least move; about half of them break out from the triangle, though none of them go anywhere remotely near a pocket. “Good enough,” he says, and walks around the table once, slowly, then drops three striped balls in a row.
“You’re supposed to be teaching me, not winning,” I say.
“Same thing,” he says, and takes another shot, this one directly into the center of the sad little cluster of balls left from my lousy break. They scatter to all four corners of the table, but none go in. He favors me with one of his wickedly sexy grins. “Your turn.”
I walk around the table, like he did, trying to look like I’m sizing up all my potential shots. Really, what I’m trying to do is find one that’s relatively straight so I have some chance at maybe not looking like a total waste of oxygen here. I’m not seeing any, though. “So,” I say. “What shot would you recommend?”
He points. “The 5.”
“Into what pocket?”
“Are we back to absolute beginner again?” he asks.
“It would appear so.”
He leans over the table, tracing an invisible line from the cue ball to the 5. “You hit—here,” he says.
“And?”
“And the ball banks off this side,” he says, drawing more lines with his finger, “and goes in that corner.”
“In theory,” I say.
“It’s an easy shot.”
“Can’t we do one in a straight line?”
“Jenna, do you see any straight lines?”
“Absolute beginner means straight lines.”
He laughs, and moves the 5 ball so that it’s directly between the cue ball and the corner pocket. “There.”
“That’s cheating,” I protest weakly. It certainly does look like a much easier shot.
“It’s not cheating. It’s teaching.”
I lean over and line up the two balls, and shoot. The 5 ball drops obligingly into the corner pocket, and the cue ball follows it like an obedient puppy.
Well, crap.
I look up and find Mitch has got the dimples and the eye-crinkles out again. Great.
“Still feel the same way about straight lines?”
“I didn’t know that was going to happen.”
“Would you like me to show you how to stop that from happening?”
I nod, and he comes around to my side of the table and takes the cue from my hand, turns it and balances it on his own hand for a second, then hands it back to me. “You’re holding it too far forward,” he says. “That’s not why you scratched, but it’s worth mentioning.”
He leans down to fetch the cue ball, and sets it and the 7 up in the same shot I just botched. “Here,” he says and moves behind me, crowding up close to show me how to hold the cue.
Oh shit, oh shit. I thought he was going to show me, not … whatever this is.
Just friends.
“Hold it back here, like this. I want the top half of your arm parallel to the floor. Now what you want is for the cue ball, when it hits, to roll back toward you, not continue on in the same direction. Right?”
He’s so close behind me that I can feel the heat of his body. On the jukebox, Bruce gives way to Joe Cocker. You Can Leave Your Hat On. Seriously? One of the sexiest songs in the history of recorded music? Right now?
“Is this one yours, too?” I ask. How can he possibly be so oblivious?
“Yeah,” he says, “pretty much the next hour is me. Now, lean—”
And then somehow I’m leaning over the pool table with him draped completely over me, showing me how to line up what should be an easy shot—and I can barely hear a word he’s saying. Something about geometry versus physics, and velocity, and “English.” My ears are full of the sound of his incredible voice mingled with the rushing of my own blood, he’s warm against my back and he smells so good, and on the jukebox Joe Cocker is suggesting quite strongly that I take off my dress—though he’s totally down with it if I want to leave my hat on.
This just friends thing … it’s not working out. And what’s more, I was completely insane to ever imagine that it would. I will never doubt Ryan again.
“Jenna?” Mitch says. “Are you listening to me?” His mouth is so close to my ear that I can feel his breath, and every muscle in my body feels like it’s pooling into molten lava. If I weren’t trapped between him and the pool table, I’d be wobbling on unsteady knees.
I nod wordlessly because I don’t trust my voice. Every nerve ending is screaming with the nearness of him, with the almost-painful urge to turn around and do something rash. If it was anyone other than Kari, I think, anyone at all, I might break a rule I thought was an immutable part of my morality.
He’s pressed against me so tight that I can literally feel the buttons on his shirt through my blouse, his hair against the side of my neck. I don’t think I’ve ever been this close to someone I wasn’t currently—I mean, right that second—having sex with.
But for all that, there’s something between us.
Twenty-three years of being closer to Kari than anyone else in the world. All the times she stuck up for me when we were kids. All the times she held my hair while I threw up from too much drinking in college. All the times she sat with me after the breakup with Drew, staying up all night and going to work feeling like a zombie because I needed her.
Dropping the cue on the table, I turn to face him. I'm still encircled by his arms, and he doesn’t move for one very long moment. I put my hands against his chest and push; he takes a step back. It’s not enough, but it’s a start.
“I need … some fresh air.”
He smiles at me—it doesn’t quite reach his eyes—and takes another step back.
“I don’t feel well,” I say. “I think I should go home and get some rest.”
There’s a long pause, then he asks: “You okay to get yourself home?”
He doesn’t put his hand on my forehead to see if I’m coming down with something. I think that’s over for us.
I nod. “Yeah, I’m good. I’ll take a cab.”
“Cool,” he says, “see you.”
And he snags his empty glass off the edge of the pool table and heads for the bar.
I grab my purse and walk to the door slowly, wishing … I don’t even know what I’m wishing. That I could be the kind of woman who could be his friend and let go of all that other stuff?
But I don’t think I can.
I open the heavy outside door and turn back to look over my shoulder. Mitch is talking to Kevin, his back to me. Neither of them says anything as I step outside and let the door swing shut.