Fletcher took the pitcher of margaritas over to the table where Rosie sat across from Loafers, and I did my fucking damnedest not to laugh out loud. I watched her in the reflection behind the liquor bottles and got a glimpse of this fucking killer scowl she’d never actually used on me before. I’d seen her use it for slow drivers and people who didn’t understand the express checkout at the grocery. For about two seconds, I felt like I’d pushed too hard. She was glaring at my back like I’d just unloaded forty items under the Twelve Items or Less Sign. But, c’mon. The guy was in loafers. His hair was gel-crisp. I couldn’t let her fight this war alone.

Not anymore.

I heard Fletcher make up some bullshit about Pitcher Fridays and that the first pitcher was on the house. Free booze in this bar made hell freezing over sound like a seasonal thing. Never free booze at the Nurse, never. Fletcher came back around the bar and went back to cleaning pint glasses. “Nail picker. Doesn’t stand a chance.”

Again, I forced myself not to laugh. Fletcher turned up the volume on the TV above the back corner of the bar, and I focused in on the Sox as best I could. It wasn’t easy because I was more aware than ever of her presence and how it was making me feel. I could smell her perfume, and that got me thinking about her bedroom, and that got me thinking about her panties, and that got me thinking about her tattoo, and that got me so fucking…

“You okay?” Fletcher asked.

“Yep. Totally.” I slugged back the rest of my beer and tapped the bar like I would’ve asked for another card in poker.

Fletcher put my dirty one in the rinsing sink and grabbed a fresh one off the shelf.

“What the fuck did you do? Go swimming in your clothes?” Fletcher asked, pulling me another pint.

“Rescued a Chihuahua, if you really wanna know.” Fletcher slowed the stream on the tap and started to smile. The thing about Fletcher was he was totally a dog guy. Fucker had been trying to get me to adopt a yellow Lab for as long as I could fucking remember, so if I were going to tell this story to anybody other than Rosie, it would definitely be him.

“Fuck you,” he said. “You’re shitting me.” He let the head overflow and cleaned the side of the glass before putting it on my coaster.

I raised one hand, scout’s honor. “From drowning. True story.”

Fletcher shook his head in that way he’d done to me a million times before. “Knew it. I fucking knew that under there somewhere you had a heart.”

Ballbusters. I was surrounded by them.

It was a pop fly to right field, and though I pretended to be paying attention to the game, I was eavesdropping to see what kinda bullshit Loafers might be spinning. I was pretty sure I heard the words, hedge, fund, and regatta. “She’s not gonna make it to the seventh-inning stretch,” I muttered to Fletcher as I put my elbows on the bar. I had visions of her storming out of this place, and me following her, calming her down with a beer on the beach, and then we could go to back to her place where I could show her just exactly how much I…

But before I could get too far into that one, I noticed Fletcher’s face change from a skeptical, serious, don’t-fuck-around-in-my-bar perma-scowl, to an openmouthed grin.

A table clattered, screeching on the floor as someone pushed it aside. I spun around on my barstool, beer in hand, and for the second fucking time that day, the world went into a slow-mo Jackie Chan fight sequence. Rosie had both hands on her hips, and there was an angry blush in her cheeks. “Excuse me?”

“What!” barked Loafers, lifting his arms and tipping back in his chair, like those assholes who sat in the back of every class in every school. “It’s just a question! Your profile says you’re thirty-four?” He actually pshawed. “Doubtful!”

I heard Rosie bellow, “Listen, you asshole…”

“My guess is thirty-nine. Forty, maybe.”

The air rippled with her growl, and then she picked up the pitcher of margaritas and dumped it…

Right.

Over.

His.

Motherfucking.

Head.

* * *

If I hadn’t stopped her, I was sure she’d have kneed him in the nuts. It would’ve been awesome, but no way was I letting her wildcat herself right into an assault charge, hell no. Loafers had the look of a guy who had his lawyer on speed dial, top of his favorites. Probably even had a special ringer for him—“Back in the Saddle” or some shit. No fucking way was I letting her go headlong into her first bar brawl, even as truly epic as that would’ve been. So, damn near before the margaritas splashed to the floor, I’d scooped her up in my arms from behind, lifting her right off the ground, and feeling her body—every curve—as if for the very first time. Her hips, her stomach, everything. Fuck. She gave me a few solid elbows to the gut, but she was way out of her league now. Welterweight to heavyweight. I proved it, tightening my embrace on her. After a few more elbows to my abs, she did start to give in. Her body relaxed into mine, and she stopped fighting me quite so hard. But still, I kept her close. As close as fucking possible, and not just because I thought she was still mad enough to go for his balls either. That too, though.

Fletcher could barely keep the laugh tears out of his eyes as he stepped out from behind the bar with a dish towel over his shoulder.

“This is going on my Yelp review!” squeaked Loafers, stepping out of his tequila-drenched shoes and standing there in these superweird little socks.

“Dude, are those womens socks?” I asked, my cheek right next to Rosie’s, the intoxicating smell of her perfume making me feel doped up and stoned.

“They are, aren’t they!” Rosie barked. “Those are Peds! Liner socks! In nude!”

Loafers wriggled his toes. “I told you! Blisters!”

“Out you go,” Fletcher told Loafers as he gripped the back of his neck in a horse bite. He showed him the door and then tossed his shoes out behind him.

Fletcher turned around and shook his head at the two of us, me behind Rosie like I was about to…

Anyway. With Loafers out of the bar, the tension dropped instantly. A tremor of laughter and a honk filled Rosie’s body as Fletcher slapped his bar towel into his hand. “What are we gonna do with you?” Fletcher said, pretending to be angry with Rosie—which none of us ever were, ever.

I felt Rosie’s full-body laughter against my chest. Then I caught the laughter, and Fletcher gave in completely. He steadied himself on the bar and wiped a tear from his eye. “Fuck. That was awesome.” He headed around to the back of the bar, lining up three glasses on the rubbery mat next to the taps. “If that ends up on Yelp, it’ll be the high point of my career.”

“You good?” I said into Rosie’s ear, close enough now to see she was wearing the earrings I’d given her for her birthday—small pink rose studs I’d found at a shop downtown. I could see her smile, and she nodded. “What’d he say?”

She sighed, and at the same time she held on to my forearms tighter, so I could just feel the tips of her nails digging into my skin. Yeah, I wasn’t going to be able to hold out on this very long. Ten minutes more of this, and I’d have to lock her in the bathroom with me and show her what kind of man she never knew I was. For the moment, though, I was holding it together. Sort of. Except then she answered, “He told me I should freeze my eggs. I could’ve killed him.”

Rage actually does have a color. Just like blood in the goddamned water. I let myself feel it for a count of three and shook it off. What a fucking asshole. “You don’t look a day over thirty. Fuck forty.”

“You say that because you like my cupcakes.”

Jesus Christ, you’ve got no idea. Yet, no matter how much I wanted her, or maybe because I wanted her so much, I knew it was time to put my foot down. In the puddle of margaritas on the floor. “No more guys in loafers, Rosie.”

“Never again.”

“You gotta knock off this internet dating. It’s killing me.”

She nodded, and I felt it more than I saw it, that’s how close we were. “All right. Okay.”

“Promise me.”

“Promise, Max. I’m done. Tapping out. Closing up shop.”

“You deserve better than some motherfucker telling you to freeze your eggs.”

She hung her head, and the sunset off the bay lit up the curve of her neck and shoulder. “I know.”

There were a thousand things I wanted to say then. That she was beautiful and perfect and whatever she wanted to do with her goddamned eggs was her business. And that no man, ever, would treat her like that again. It was like seeing her naked had unleashed me, but I kept a lid on it. This wasn’t the time. This wasn’t the fucking time. “If I set you down, you’re going to stay here. Got it?”

“Give me a steak knife, and I can go deflate his tires. C’mon! Live a little!” She bit her tongue as she laughed. A sultry laugh, though. Not a giggle. Something saucy and dark and fucking delicious.

“Cool it, hot stuff.”

She took a few deep breaths, and I let her feet come back down to the floor. “I hate men.”

“Nail picker. Forget that shit.”

She shimmied out of my grasp but stayed close, now facing me. “I hate them. I hate them all.”

I was standing with her in my arms, like we were about to tango. I didn’t step away. “Yeah? All of us?”

Rosie’s big brown eyes moved over my face and down my shirt. “Maybe not all,” she said, her voice tamer now, but almost…dangerous, somehow. Not so sweet. My thoughts unraveled so fucking fast in the direction of where I shouldn’t let them go. “Max…”

Jesus Christ. Maybe she did know. Maybe she was thinking the same fucking thing that was stuck in my head, like an endless GIF loop. Her and me on her kitchen table. “Rosie.”

“Why are you all wet?” she asked.

“Sit down. I’ll buy you a drink. I can tell you all about it. How’s that?”

She shifted her lips to one side. They were sparkly and a slightly darker pink than normal. The lipstick was enough to take her out of sweet and into naughty. It was all mesmerizing—her blush, her fury, her beauty, her feistiness. For the first time ever, I thought, Kiss her. Right now. But before I could make my move, Fletcher came over with the shots. We clinked glasses, straight tequila, which Rosie downed like a fucking champ. Fletcher gathered up our glasses and headed back to the bar. When we were alone again, I flipped my chair around backward and took a seat. “Betcha never knew I knew how to do canine CPR.”

Rosie’s jaw dropped, and she planted her hand on the booth seat. She slowly lowered herself down with knees pressed together. Cleavage perfect. Lips perfect. Everything perfect. “Shut the front door!”

I clicked my tongue. I liked making her wait. I liked drawing it out. I also liked being with her, heroic dog story or not. I didn’t want this night to end, not now that I had her all to myself, not now that I knew what was under that dress. “Nachos?” I asked her.

“God, yes.”

Super nachos it would be. And another pitcher of margaritas for sure.

* * *

She got so wrapped up in the Cupcake story that she didn’t touch our nachos, so she got tipsy quicker than usual. Not going to lie, I fucking loved it. I noticed something I’d never let myself notice before, which was that when she got a little drunk, she touched me more than normal—she’d reach out and touch my forearm or shove me when she was kidding. But every touch now was fucking electric. After what I’d seen that morning, there was no going back.

“Eat up,” I told her, pushing the nacho platter toward her.

“You named her Cupcake! I love cupcakes!”

Exactly. I picked out a choice chip, piled high with chicken and once melted but now cooled cheese. I added a dollop of guacamole and some sour cream and brought it toward her like parents do when they’re trying to get their kids to eat a spoonful of peas. “Open sesame.”

She didn’t even bite it in two, but ate the whole thing at once, and then kept on spraying me with questions, while shielding her full mouth with her hand. How big is she? How much does she weigh? What color is her fur? Finally, “Is she okay?”

I nodded. “So they said.”

But Rosie didn’t look convinced. She looked seriously at our side order of onion rings and picked out a crispy one. “Seawater can be very dangerous for dogs.”

I took an onion ring, too, and turned my margarita on the coaster, spreading the condensation so it made a circle on the cardboard. “They told me she’d be fine. Said they’re going to try to track down her owner.”

Rosie frowned, disappointed like I’d just hosed down her parade with a power washer. But as usual, when something didn’t quite line up with her plan, she ignored it. “When you adopt her, we can go to Petco! Just think! You picking out pink blankets for a dog that weighs as much as an organically raised chicken!”

I loaded up another chip and brought it to her mouth. “Who says it has to be pink?”

She pointed to her lightly tanned chest. “This girl! Right here,” she managed to say around a mouthful of nacho, with guacamole on her lip.

That girl. Right there.

In that moment, I knew that what had happened hadn’t been a fucking one-time sucker-punch lightning strike. It hadn’t just been that I saw her naked and got swallowed up by desire. It was real, and it wasn’t sudden at all. She really was the most beautiful woman in the world. I’d always wanted her. Only now, I knew what I wanted.

Rosie pulled out her phone and looked up something, typing away with her thumbs. She turned her screen to face me, and it was covered in screenshots of Chihuahua mixes. She flipped through one after the other, and I shook my head, until she landed on one that was a dead ringer for Cupcake. “That’s her. She’s cuter, but that’s the idea.”

She slumped back in the booth and pressed her phone to her cleavage. Christ. “Oh-em-gee, Maxie. Think of how the ladies will fall all over you. You!” she said, with a gentle press of my shoulder. “With a Chihuahua! Maybe we could even put her in a dress!”

“One step at a time.” Ladies? There are no ladies. Only you. “Anyway, I can’t be going shopping for dog dresses. I’ve got to fix your porch.”

Rosie dropped her phone in her purse and loaded up a nacho. “I told you. I can’t pay you. I can’t have you working for me for free, Max. I just can’t.”

I hovered the pitcher over her almost-empty margarita. “Down that one, skipper.” She gulped it back and then smacked her lips, nibbling on the bottom one like it was numb. I topped her off and added, “I’m the one doing the work. If something better comes up, I’ll tell you. Until then, better to be busy than bored, yeah?”

She flicked the salted edge of her glass with her tongue and savored the salt with her eyes closed. Naughty and she didn’t even realize it. “You’re a terrible liar, Max.”

True, of course. But on the other hand, I’d made it a whole six hours without telling her what I was really thinking. “And I’m not taking no for an answer.”

“Fine, fine, fine.” She took a long sip of her margarita. “But at least let me buy you a few rounds of pool. Have a heart, Max. I might be broke, but I’m not a damsel in distress. Let me keep my dignity.”

There were six thousand things I wanted to say back to her, lobbing them like unsmashable volleys. You’re some kind of damsel. I’ll show you distress. But nah. For now, I’d take whatever I could get. Even if I had to let her think she’d won to get it.

Fletcher would put the games on my tab. She wasn’t paying a penny, even if she thought she was. “You buy, I break?” I tipped my head at the pool tables.

The ice in her margarita tinkled. She smiled and said, “You’re on.”

* * *

There was a very real possibility that she was the worst pool player on the planet. It was unbelievable. For someone so graceful and so precise—someone who’d spend half a day perfecting the shading on the spiral on a snail’s shell, someone who made baked goods like she was a professional chemist—her pool game was absolutely fucking beyond the pale. For every shot she made, she blew at least two. Less-than-half odds, about the same as if she were blindfolded. It was pretty much a riot. But I never laughed.

Her blindfolded, though, now…there was an idea.

I gulped back my drink to try to recenter myself. She thought I wasn’t watching as she moved the cue ball a half inch to the right with her stick. I almost always let her beat me, but sometimes I couldn’t find a way to play that badly. She bent down over the rail, trying to figure out how to make a straight shot and sink the seven.

Which meant that I was standing right behind her, looking at her ass.

I grated my fingers down my stubble and tried as hard as I fucking could to ignore what was happening. Her. The feeling. The fact that my cock was responding in spite of my brain telling me not to be a douche. “Don’t think too hard.”

She did some practice passes of the stick over her finger. She shimmied her ass up farther onto the rail. I could almost see the spot where her thighs met her ass.

Yeah. I was a goner.

She brought her left arm back and hit the ball with the cue, totally whiffed it, as in, didn’t even make any contact at all. Her signature shot. When she realized she’d blown it and I had her beat, she made a big dramatic show of splaying herself out on the felt, laughing into the crook of her elbow as her feet came off the ground, her flip-flops dangling, as the eight ball popped out from under her stomach.

I bent down over her and took the pool cue from her hand, spooning her for one blissful second up against the rail. “Well done,” I told her.

“Why don’t I ever get any better at this game? It’s like a mental block. Like long division.”

I chalked up the cue. “It’s all a hustle. I know it. You know it. You secretly drive to Bar Harbor when I’m busy and make pool sharks cry. No need to lie. We’re all friends here.”

She looked back over her shoulder at me. “Maybe I should take up darts.”

“Christ.” I blew chalk residue off the end, watching her all the time. “You’re dangerous enough on the felt. Give you a pointed object, we’d all be missing an eye.”

She snort-chortled but made like she was pissed off and shoved me. I didn’t budge, but I felt the heat of her hand through my T-shirt. The bar was packed, and I used it to my advantage. The table behind me was getting rowdy, but I only noticed it in the way that I’d notice anything that was the opposite of my own reality. Like when you dive into the water and everything goes quiet, and then you notice how fucking loud the real world is all the time. She was like that—looking into her eyes was like that—like a deep dive into the ocean, where all I could hear was my heartbeat. But all I wanted to hear was hers.

I was aware of the guys behind me, getting aggressive with each other, and instinctively, I wanted to protect her from their bullshit. But more than that, I needed to be close. That was the instinct that I couldn’t ignore.

“You’re acting strange, Max,” she said. She plucked at my T-shirt, like she was pulling a piece of lint off me. A tiny gesture, but flirtatious as hell, different from how we were normally. She was tipsy, and I was hungry for her, and it felt like we were feeding off each other.

Strange? She had no fucking idea. I put down the chalk and leaned into her farther, compressing her body against the table, making her feel how much bigger than her I was. Rosie’s breathing quickened, I watched it happen, and I could see her pulse fluttering away in the hollow of her neck. “Listen. We don’t have secrets, do we?” I asked her.

She shook her head slowly. “No. We don’t…”

“If I saw something, if I realized something,” I said, all husky and almost hoarse, “you’d want to know?”

Rosie nodded and blinked.

“You’re fucking positive?”

Just a blink this time, and a whispered, “Yes.”

Here goes nothing. “I saw you naked today. Through your skylight.”

Her eyes popped open wide. A fast, embarrassed blush spread across her cheeks, of a redness and intensity that I’d never seen on her before. “You did? Naked-naked?”

I put my hand to her hip and let her feel what I wanted. “Fucking naked-naked, yeah. And it’s got me all fucked up, because now, every goddamned time I look at you…” I didn’t fucking know how to finish that sentence, so I let it lie. I’d let her finish it. I’d let her feel it, because I was hard already. And getting a hell of a lot harder.

If she was tipsy earlier, she didn’t seem it now. Her eyes were wide and clear and certain. Her hand came down to my forearm and gripped me more tightly than I expected. That tiny gesture, that flexing of her hand that told me yes, set off a fucking chain reaction inside me. She wasn’t touching me like her best friend now.

So I went with it. Rode that wave to the breakers and hoped like hell I came out whole at the end. “I’m not sorry, either. That I saw you.”

“You saw…all of me? When I was changing?”

I nodded at her, getting closer and closer with every fucking second. “Down to the tattoo.”

She swallowed hard. “Max…”

Now I really gave her a press with my hips, driving my belt into her stomach, driving my cock and balls against her enough to be fucking clear about it. “You deserve to be treated right…”

It was a turning point, and I knew it. I could step back, I could walk out of the bar. I could deprive myself of my air, my water, the voltage that kept me going.

But she had me burning hot, and there was no fucking way I could turn away. I took that beautiful, perfect face in my hands. I looped my fingers into the hair at the nape of her neck. I pulled her close. I felt the softness of her skin against my stubble. And then I looked her right in the eye, telling her, “… I want to be the one to treat you like you deserve.”

And kissed the hell out of her.

I wasn’t a gentleman about it. With my tongue, I made her understand all the shit I hadn’t yet said. I want you. I adore you. I need to be inside you.

At first, she pulled me closer, and the head of my cock pushed against the inside of my zipper. Her hands made fists of my shirt, and she leaned back onto the pool table, damn near hooking her legs around me.

Fuck yeah, fuck yeah.

I tipped her back onto the felt. I came down low on top of her. I felt the lamp above the table brush against my shoulder. Somewhere a guy whistled. Another guy catcalled. But then her grip on my shirt tightened, and she started to push me away.