Faking It

by Cora Carmack

  been in.

  “You like?” Katalin asked.

  I pressed myself closer to Tamás and said, “I love.”

  Tamás led me into the bar, where drinks were amazingly cheap. Maybe I should stay in Eastern Europe forever. I pulled out a two thousand forint note. For less than the equivalent of ten U.S. dollars I bought all five of us shots.

  Amazing.

  The downside to Europe? For some reason this made no sense to me—they gave lemon slices with tequila instead of lime. The bartenders always looked at me like I’d just ordered elephant sweat in a glass.

  They just didn’t understand the magical properties of my favorite drink. If my accent didn’t give me away as American, my drink of choice always did.

  Next, Tamás bought me a gin bitter lemon, a drink I’d been introduced to a few weeks earlier. It almost made the absence of margaritas in this part of the world bearable. I downed it like it was lemonade on a blistering Texas day. His eyes went wide, and I licked my lips. István bought me another, and the acidity and sweetness rolled across my tongue.

  Tamás gestured for me to down it again, so I did, to a round of applause.

  God, I love when people love me.

  I took hold of Tamás’s and István’s arms and pulled them away from the bar. There was a room that had one wall knocked out in lieu of a door, and it overflowed with dancing bodies.

  That was where I wanted to be.

  I tugged my boys in that direction, and Katalin and András followed close behind. We had to step over a pile of concrete if we wanted to get into the room. I took one look at my turquoise heels, and knew there was no way in hell I was managing that with my sex appeal intact. I turned to István and Tamás—sizing them up. István was the beefier of the two, so I put an arm around his neck. We didn’t need to speak the same language for him to understand what I wanted. He swept an arm underneath my legs, and pulled me up to his chest. It was a good thing I had worn skinny jeans instead of a skirt.

  “Köszönöm,” I said, even though he should have been the one thanking me, based on the way he was openly ogling my chest.

  Ah, well. I didn’t mind ogling. I was still pleasantly warm from the alcohol, and the music drowned out the world. And all my problems were thousands of miles away across an ocean. They might as well have been drowning at the bottom of said ocean for how much they mattered to me in that moment.

  The only expectations here were ones that I had encouraged and was all too willing to follow through on. So maybe my new “friends” only wanted me for money and sex. It was better than not being wanted at all.

  István’s arms flexed around me, and I melted into him. My father liked to talk, or yell, rather, about how I didn’t appreciate anything. But the male body was one thing I had no issue appreciating. István was all hard muscles and angles beneath my hands, and those girls were definitely a-wandering.

  By the time he’d set my feet on the dance floor, my hands had found those delicious muscles that angled down from his hips. I bit my lip and met his gaze from beneath lowered lashes. If his expression was any indication, I had found Boardwalk and had the all clear to proceed to Go and collect my two hundred dollars.

  Or forint. Whatever.

  Tamás pressed his chest against my back, and I gave myself up to the alcohol and the music and the sensation of being stuck between two delicious specimens of man.

  Time started to disappear between frenzied hands and drips of sweat. There were more drinks and more dances. Each song faded into the next. Colors danced behind my closed eyes. And it was almost enough. For a while, I forgot the emptiness that lay beneath the excitement and desire and intoxication. And every time the void began to creep in, when the black behind my closed eyes felt suffocating, there was another drink in my hand to chase the dark away.

  That was me. One drink away from the cliff’s edge. I didn’t mind so much, though. Life was more exciting on the edge, if a little lonelier.

  I shook my head to clear my thoughts. There was no room for loneliness when squeezed between two sets of washboard abs.

  New life motto, right there.

  I gave István a couple of notes and sent him to get more drinks. In the meantime, I turned to face Tamás. He’d been pressed against my back for God knows how long, and I’d forgotten how tall he was. I leaned back to meet his gaze, and his hands smoothed down my back to my ass.

  I smirked and said, “Someone is happy to have me all to himself.”

  He pulled my hips into his and said, “Beautiful American.”

  Right. No point expending energy on cheeky banter that he couldn’t even understand. I had a pretty good idea how to better use my energy. I slipped my arms around his neck and tilted my head in the universal sign of “kiss me.”

  Tamás didn’t waste any time. Like really . . . no time. The dude went zero to sixty in seconds. His tongue was so far down my throat it was like being kissed by the lovechild of a lizard and Gene Simmons.

  We were both pretty drunk. Maybe he didn’t realize that he was in danger of engaging my gag reflex with his Guinness-record-worthy tongue. I eased back and his tongue assault ended, only for his teeth to clamp down on my bottom lip.

  I was all for a little biting, but he pulled my lip out until I had one half of a fish mouth. And he stood there sucking on my bottom lip for so long that I actually started counting to see how long it would last.

  When I got to fifteen (fifteen!) seconds, my eyes settled on a guy across the bar watching my dilemma with a huge grin. Was shit-eating grin in the dictionary? If not, I should snap a picture for Merriam-Webster.

  I braced myself and pulled my poor abused lip from Tamás’s teeth. My mouth felt like it had been stuck in a vacuum cleaner. While I pressed my fingers to my numb lip, Tamás started placing sloppy kissing from the corner of my lips across my cheek to my jaw.

  His tongue slithered over my skin like a snail, and all the blissful alcohol-induced haze that I’d worked so hard for disappeared.

  I was painfully aware that I was standing in an abandoned building turned bar with a trail of drool across my cheek, and the guy across the room was now openly laughing at me.

  And he was fucking gorgeous, which made it so much worse.