“Actually, is that going to be okay?” he asked. “I don’t want to scar your feet for life or anything.”
I shrugged. “I’ve walked entire tech conventions in these things. They’re not good for marathons or dirt pathways, but I can manage sidewalks. Besides,” I said, casting him a grin, “if I find that I can’t make it, I can always just bribe you to carry me.”
He looked taken aback by that, like he hadn’t expected me to be so forward, and I actually congratulated myself. It had been years since I’d tried to flirt with a man. Years in which I’d been too concerned with my company and my daughter to even think about speaking to a man about anything other than business.
Sure, every meeting held an element of flirtation—that casual smiling and laughing that you do when you’re trying to make business more pleasant, or when you’re trying to get something out of someone. But it was never anything serious. I never let myself get carried away. I definitely never let myself think of it as anything more than what it was. Because the problem with flirting when you’re doing business is that a man will take any excuse—and I mean any excuse—to stop taking you seriously.
And flirting all too often led to exactly that. So I’d learned early on not to let it get too out of control. I’d learned to flirt only so far as I needed to, and to always keep a steel fist inside my velvet glove. Along with pepper spray in my purse.
I mean sure, we were in the corporate world and we were all rich and sophisticated and we all knew the same people, which mostly kept us in line. But you just never knew how safe you were when you were alone in a room with a man. You just never knew when they were going to think they could pull some shit.
So yeah, flirting had become more of a business tool than anything else. But from the looks of it, I hadn’t lost my touch at flirting just for the hell of it—and without any end game in mind. I’d said about three things and this Jack fellow seemed to be eating it right up.
I wondered what he did for a living and why he was out in the rose garden in the middle of the day. I wondered if it had been as long since he’d flirted with someone as it had been for me. I wondered if he was enjoying himself as much as I was.
And then I yanked my thoughts right back from that avenue.
Dear Lord, woman, a man asks you out for a drink and suddenly you’re jumping into bed with him. Get a grip.
I gave a mental nod to that voice of reason, lectured myself again about the dangers of getting carried away with the whole flirting thing, also reminded myself about how dangerous it can be to allow a man to catch you off guard, and then turned and gestured towards the exit of the rose garden.
“Shall we?”
By the time we got to the bar—which was indeed only a block from the rose garden—we’d gotten through the basics: how long we’d lived in San Jose, where we were from originally, and what we had in the way of family. Jack, it turned out, was a single man from Oregon who had moved here to start a contracting business of some undefined quality, and didn’t have a family. No wife, no kids, no local relatives.
“I’m sort of surprised you chose San Jose, then,” I noted, walking through the door he was holding open for me. “San Francisco is a whole lot friendlier to single people. You know, they have a nightlife, which we don’t really have down here.”
He cast me a grin at that. “What can I say, I’m not a nightlife kind of guy. Give me a comfy couch, takeout, and a good movie and I’m happy.”
I took that for what it was and turned to look around the bar.
It was indeed a dive bar, with cheesy movie posters and neon signs covering the walls, three pool tables in a corner in the back, and the rest of the floor space taken up by dingy tables, chairs that looked like they might actually fall down at any moment, and a row of booths lining one wall. It didn’t really fit into the neighborhood, which was generally arts-and-crafts stores and hipster-type homes, but dive bars were like that, weren’t they? Always popping up where you least expected them. It was part of their charm. Or something.
I looked doubtfully at the chairs around the tables in the room and gestured toward the booths.
“I vote for a booth,” I said.
Jack followed my eyes and nodded. “I’m with you there. You might be able to handle those chairs, but I don’t think they’d support me for more than thirty seconds.”
“Best not take the chance, then,” I said seriously. “Because if you go down, I’m not even going to try to get you back up again.”
And I wasn’t even exaggerating, there. The man had to be a full six-four to my five-five, and though we would have made for a cute couple, my head reaching just high enough for him to rest his chin on, it would definitely have made it impossible for me to move him once he was on the floor.
He tipped his chin to give me another one of those scorching up-and-down looks. “I don’t know, I bet you’re stronger than you look.”
I shrugged. “I didn’t say I couldn’t do it. I said I wasn’t going to bother trying.”
He grinned roguishly at that and opened his arms, indicating that the choice of the booth was mine. I walked up to them, eyeing them closely, and decided pretty quickly that they were all in equal states of disrepair—and that the best choice was therefore the one that was closest to the bar, where we’d get the quickest service.
“A woman of practicality,” Jack said appreciatively, slipping into the booth ahead of me.
I followed, sinking into the warm leather as I did and wondering how long it had been since I’d actually been to a dive bar—or a bar of any sort, at that. Too long, I realized. Maybe that was what had led to the lack of laughter over the past couple of years.
That, and a host of other things, I quickly decided.
Which was what this afternoon was supposed to be about. Breathing. Having some fun again. Maybe even finding my direction for the future. Yes, it was a lot to pack into a single afternoon, but I had a schedule I had to keep. I had one afternoon to myself, not an entire weekend. So if I was going to meet those goals, I was going to have to do it quickly, and in the most efficient manner possible.
“Eminently practical,” I said, gesturing to the girl at the bar that we were ready to place an order. “Practicality is one of the few things in my life that has never let me down.”
And today, I was evidently throwing that practicality to the curb and getting along without it. I must have been. Because instead of heading directly home from the rose garden, the way I should have, I was sitting in a dive bar with a guy handsome enough to make your mouth water—and thinking about the things he could do with his mouth that would make me just as wet.
Today, I was the anti-Alice. The opposite of my better self. The devil on my own shoulder. And for once, I wasn’t regretting a moment of it.
Two hours later, I was several glasses of red wine deep and beginning to see the world through a rosy glow that was only partially due to the amount of alcohol I’d had to drink.
The other part, the part I’d never in a million years seen coming, was Jack himself.
The man in question leaned forward a bit unsteadily, his dark eyes looking just as bleary as mine felt, the dimple at the corner of his mouth deepening as he considered what he wanted to say next.