With Every Heartbeat

by Linda Kage

  “So, what did you give me?” I asked. “Some kind of girly frou-frou drink?” Caroline had insisted those tasted the best.

  “Fuck no.” Ten snorted. “It’s a Long Island Iced Tea. It’s what both of you have.”

  I nodded, then licked my lips and drew in a breath as I bolstered myself. Then I reached out and took a small sip.

  Quinn sat up as he watched me. He looked as if he was ready to perform CPR if I started choking, but I merely nodded my head as the new flavors slid down my throat. There was a bit of a tang to the flavor that made me want to shudder, but over all, it tasted...fine. Mostly like cola.

  “That’s actually not too bad.”

  Ten rolled his eyes. “I am a bartender, you know. I can tell which drinks will agree with which people.”

  “Well, thank you.” I smiled at him and took another sip. Then I turned to Quinn. “I just realized you’re a bartender who’s never drank before. That’s so cool. In my writing class, they would consider you a rounded character instead of flat and clichéd because of that kind of contradiction.”

  I could tell by the change in his blue eyes that my compliment pleased Quinn. Proud of myself, I took another sip. Maybe tonight wouldn’t suck quite so much after all.

  “What kind of character would I be?” Ten asked, leaning forward with interest.

  I lifted my chin and announced, “I believe they would call you quite a character.”

  Ten snorted out a small laugh and murmured, “Keep drinking, Blondie.”

  For a couple minutes, both guys just watched me nurse my Long Island Iced Tea. Quinn still had yet to touch his, but at least Ten had stopped trying to egg him on.

  “So, I don’t think I know what your major is?” I turned to Ten expectantly, since he was supposed to be my date for the evening and all. A girl was supposed to talk to her date, wasn’t she?

  “Architecture,” he answered and spun his soda glass in a puddle of its own sweat stain.

  Just as I frowned, Quinn lifted his face. “You told me your major was construction.”

  Ten just shrugged. “Pretty much the same thing; they both create buildings, right?”

  “Actually, no.” I shook my head. “They’re not the same at all.”

  “So, which one is really your major?” Quinn pressed.

  “Architecture,” Ten repeated.

  Quinn and I glanced at each other and frowned. He immediately turned back to his roommate. “Then why did you lie to me?”

  After another shrug, Ten took a long drink. “I don’t know. Architecture seems like a pansy-assed, artsy-fartsy major. Construction’s more...you know, manly. I didn’t want you thinking I was a pussy when we met.”

  Quinn pulled back, his eyes wide with shock. “You were worried what I would think of you?”

  “Fuck, yes. You were a big-ass dude who really rocked it on your first day of practice your freshman year.” Then he waved both of his hands as if fake apologizing. “Excuse me for wanting to impress you.”

  “Weird,” Quinn murmured, staring as if he’d just met Ten for the first time. Then he shook his head and glanced at me. “He wanted to impress me.”

  “So I heard.” Wanting to hug Ten for making Quinn feel better, I turned to him. “Aren’t you a senior?”

  “Yeah. Why?” He glanced at me and narrowed his eyes as if commanding me not to follow my own path of logic. But I did anyway.

  “Then shouldn’t you have taken a lot of art classes by now?”

  Quinn finally caught on. “Wait. Why are you in a beginning art class with us?”

  Ten drew in a deep breath. I could tell he was getting uncomfortable when he glanced away. “Because I knew you still needed to take one, so I badgered my advisor into letting me take it again, to keep you and Gamble company.” His negligent shrug was a little too careless though. He was putting on an act. “Wasn’t my fault I saw the wrong class schedule sitting on Gam’s table and thought it was his instead of his sister’s. The three of us would’ve owned that class.”

  Quinn shook his head. “No,” he murmured softly, studying Ten intently. “I don’t think you mistook that schedule at all. I think you knew it was hers all along. I think you just wanted a reason to be close to her and get to know her more.”

  Ten sent him a frown and snorted. “Whatever, man. You’re on crack.”

  “And you wanted me there, not Noel, to act as a buffer, because you knew you couldn’t cross the line if I was around, but you still wanted to get as close as you could because you were curious what she was like.”

  “That’s it,” Ten muttered, reaching for Quinn’s glass. “If you’re not drinking, then I am. This fucking karaoke is killing me.”

  But Quinn snatched the cup away from him and quickly tipped it up, starting to gulp.

  My mouth fell open as I watched.

  Ten’s did too. Then he shook his head. “Bastard,” he muttered.

  Quinn grinned as he set the cup down. “Sorry, but I guess you’re going to have to DD after all.” Then he arched an eyebrow and lifted a threatening finger. “And don’t ever lie to me again.”

  The two men had a mini stare down that seemed to end in some kind of draw because they both loosened their stances in the same moment and turned to me in unison. I sank lower in my chair, not sure what to expect from them.

  Ten snickered. “Aren’t you going to ask Hamilton what his major is?”

  I shook my head. Quinn wasn’t my date for the evening. I shouldn’t be talking to him at all. But what I said was, “I already know his major.”

  “Really?” Ten lifted his eyebrows and glanced to Quinn before turning back to me. “And how’s that?”

  “Uh...he told me.” I shook my head, wondering why that was such a big deal.

  But Ten only seemed more intrigued. “That’s funny. You guys seem to talk a lot for people who generally...don’t talk.”

  “Stop,” Quinn warned him icily, letting me know there was some inside thing between the two of them going on that I knew nothing about.

  Instead of backing down, though, Ten seemed more challenged. He turned to me abruptly.

  I shied away.

  He opened his mouth, but must’ve rethought whatever he was going to say because he immediately turned back to Quinn to ask, “Where’d your date go, anyway?”

  Quinn glanced around the bar before spotting Cora at a new table, drinking a pink drink, and chatting with a new group. “She’ll be over soon, I’m sure.”

  Ten sighed and ordered us all a new round of Long Island Iced Teas.

  Feeling miserable for Quinn, I opened my mouth and blurted out the first thing to come to my head. “If you could be powerful or honest, which would you choose?”

  “Why can’t you be both?” Ten asked.

  Quinn, however, mulled the question over before admitting, “Honest. It seems like you have to be meaner when you’re powerful. I don’t want to be mean.”

  I nodded. “So, then...if you had to choose between nice or honest...?”

  “I’d choose nice.”

  A smile bloomed across my face. “You believe in lying in order to keep from hurting someone, then?”

  He shrugged, but didn’t seem to question why I was asking him this stuff. Heck, I wasn’t even sure why I was. I just wanted to talk. To him.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I just can’t handle hurting anyone.”

  “Yeah,” I murmured thoughtfully. “Me neither.”

  And that’s about the point where I totally lost track of the conversation. The two Long-Island-Iced-Tea drunkards at the table with me started talking about all kinds of shit I didn’t follow, and yet they knew exactly what they were raving about.

  “Did you know the corneas are the only cells in the human body that don’t receive blood from the heart?” Hamilton told Blondie.

  She puckered her lips thoughtfully. “Does that mean the heart can’t see?”

  I groaned and realized their happy juice had definitely kick
ed in, especially when Blondie giggled and then swayed as she clutched her forehead. “Whoa. I’m getting woozy.”

  Hamilton grabbed her arm to steady her. “I know,” he slurred and glanced my way. “This shit is potent. I feel...” He nodded slowly. “Yeah.”

  I lifted my eyebrows, wondering if he was drunk or high.

  Blondie giggled again and pointed at him. “I’ve never heard you cuss before.”

  “I don’t,” Hamilton said blankly before Blondie charged, “But you just said shit.”

  He laughed and pointed back at her. “So did you.”

  As they giggled together, I rolled my eyes to the ceiling. Oh, dear God. Someone shoot me now.

  “I don’t know why I was always so scared to drink,” Quinn announced. “My mom used to get so mad when she drank. That’s when she’d beat me the hardest. So I always thought I’d lose my temper too if I ever drank. But I don’t feel mad at all. I’m just...happy.”

  My gut twisted as I listened to him so nonchalantly announce something like that. I’d seen his back before, so I knew he had to have been beaten once upon a time. I just figured school bullies though, or someone else he hadn’t been related to. To learn it had been his own mother, the one woman who was supposed to protect him from all kinds of bad shit, made me want to look that bitch up and beat her. It also made me want to call my own mom and tell her how fucking awesome she was.

  But it’d been too long since I’d voluntarily called her, so...yeah, didn’t want to give the old broad a heart attack or anything.

  I was just starting to feel shitty about how I treated my parents while they might possibly be the best parents in the world when Blondie had to go and say, “My dad didn’t need alcohol to hit me. So, I don’t know why I was always so scared to drink. I guess I’m just an overall coward.”

  My eyes grew wide with that little piece of information.

  Well, shit. Both of them had been abused? No wonder they’d turned out so much alike.

  Fuck, I really was an ungrateful asshole to my mom and dad.

  “You’re not a coward,” Quinn insisted, taking Blondie’s hand. “You’re...you’re...resilient.”

  I squinted, wondering how the fuck “resilient” was such a complimentary word to use on a chick, but hey...to each their own, I guess, because the freaking word seemed to work on Blondie.

  She murmured, “Thank you,” and stared at him with a pair of longing green eyes that made me want to reach across the table and thump Hamilton on the back of the head. Hard.

  Prime opportunity to kiss her, I wanted to tell him.

  Kiss her already.

  Why wasn’t he kissing her?

  God, what a pansy.

  Instead of kissing, they just kept staring until Ham blinked and then grinned. “Staring contest?” he offered.

  Dear fuck. Really?

  I groaned and covered my face. I was going to have to work on my boy, big time. Who the hell offered a staring contest instead of kissing a girl? I might actually have to defriend him after tonight.

  Blondie laughed and glanced away, blinking rapidly. “God, no.” She rubbed her eyes. “I’ve never been able to play very long in a staring game before.”

  “It makes your eyes water too much?” Hamilton guessed.

  She shook her head. “No. It’s just...too intimate, I guess.”

  I lifted an eyebrow. Wow. If staring was too intimidating for her, I’d hate to see what she’d do if I made her watch some porn.

  Thank God, Hamilton seemed similarly bewildered. He barked out a surprised laugh. “Staring? Intimate?”

  “Hey, don’t make fun of me.” She pushed lightly on his arm. “Staring is like step two in the Twelves Stages of Intimacy.”

  “Wait.” I held up a hand and leaned in, feeling the need to interrupt. “The twelve stages of what?”

  Blondie glanced at me, before turning back to Quinn. “Intimacy,” she repeated before gazing between the two of us. “Haven’t you guys ever heard of Desmond Morris’s twelve steps of intimacy before?”

  Ham and I both shook our heads. “Who? What? No, never heard of him.”

  She laughed. “Desmond Morris. He’s this famous behavioral scientist, or something. I don’t know. He wrote a bunch of books about studying the mating patterns of human couples.”

  Ham’s eyebrows arched with interest. “And you’ve actually read one of his books?”

  “No.” She blushed. “But I read a small five hundred-word article about his famous twelve steps.”

  I let out a surprised snort of laughter. “What a nerd.” She was totally meant for my biology-loving roommate.

  “Hey,” she muttered, insulted. But Quinn waved her quiet.

  “No, I want to know about this. Are there really steps for intimacy?”

  “Well, obviously.” She rolled her eyes and sighed. “You don’t see people just jumping into bed with each other without any buildup, now do you?”

  “Actually—” I started, but Blondie held up a finger in my direction, shushing me.

  “Trust me. When it matters, you don’t. You lead up to it. Familiarize yourself...one step at a time.

  “So what’re the steps?” Hamilton asked, genuinely interested.

  I rolled my eyes, already bored out of my mind, but Blondie decided to humor him.

  “You’re in luck. I think I’m actually drunk enough to remember. Step one, you make eye-to-body contact.” To demonstrate, she dropped her gaze down to his chest. Wiggling her eyebrows, she murmured, “Oh, yeah. Looking good.”

  Yep, she was drunk.

  Ham cracked up, and okay, so did I. But then Blondie slid her gaze from his body up to his eyes, and suddenly it wasn’t so funny anymore. Hamilton’s laugh died as he stared back. The tension between them made me pull back in my seat, feeling like a freaking voyeur all of the sudden.

  “If you find the figure pleasing,” Blondie said into Hamilton’s eyes, “you move your attention up to make eye-to-eye contact.”

  “Someone actually wrote a book about this?” I asked, snorting.

  Blondie shrugged but kept her gaze on my boy, who seemed trapped in her hold. “Someone has written a book about everything.”

  “But—”

  Ignoring me, she kept talking to Ham. “So Morris says a man and woman make eyes at each other, throw out a couple sparks and if things feel good from there, the ‘hi, how ya doing?’ comes into play.” She held out her hand to shake with Ham. “Which brings us to step four.”

  “Wait. What was step three?” I asked as my entranced roommate reached out and took her hand.

  Okay, fuck. Fine. I was starting to get interested in all this twelve-step bullshit, because damn, Hammy seemed to fall for it, hard.

  “Voice to voice.” She sent me a quick, irritated frown. “Keep up.”

  I gulped as I watched them intertwine fingers. Then I glanced around to make sure no one else was looking.

  Yeah, yeah, I know I wanted to shove these two together and make them kiss, like two seconds ago. But honestly, Hamilton needed to dump his current woman before moving on to the one he was actually meant for, otherwise he’d never forgive himself. And...well, shit. I didn’t care if they were only holding hands, that fucking article Blondie had read must’ve known what the hell it was talking about. I couldn’t recall ever being as intimate with any chick as those two seemed to be now.

  “What’s next?” Hamilton murmured, unable to take his eyes off my date.

  “After ste—uh, step four, which is hand to hand, things move away from visual and auditory and toward the…the physical.”

  “Like what?” he asked softly, repeating step two and fucking the shit out of her with his stare.

  I resituated myself in my seat. If anyone else watching this didn’t get as sucked in as I was, then they had to be fucking dead from the neck down.

  “Uh...the, uh...” Poor Blondie. Steam was rolling off her, she was sizzling so hard for him. “Step five would, be...arm or hand to s
houlder.”

  “We’ve already done that,” Hamilton said, making me lift my eyebrows and wonder just when he’d put his arm around her. But then he went and explained it. “The night the pipes broke in your bathroom. On the couch. Remember?”

  Blondie nodded. “Yeah.”

  Touching on a couch, huh? I was impressed.

  Ham’s gaze dropped to Blondie’s mouth. “What’s step six?”

  We all knew what he wanted step six to be. Horny bastard. I couldn’t believe he was this far gone after only two and a half Long Island Iced Teas. But I loved it. I was so getting his ass drunk every time I possibly could from here on out.

  “S-step six. Hand to waist,” Blondie said, her face flushed and chest heaving.

  My roommate was the fucking man. He was getting a girl all hot and bothered by just asking her questions. Fuck, the two of them were making me horny just from listening to his questions.

  “And then?” Hamilton leaned in as if he was going to slip his arm around her waist.

  Blondie closed her eyes. “Mouth to mouth,” she said.

  Shit. I had to stop them. Now.

  “Hey, is that Cora headed this way?”

  Hamilton lifted glassy eyes and looked around, but he didn’t spot his girlfriend anywhere. “I don’t see her. Oh, wait. There she is; dancing with that guy.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “Could’ve sworn that was her coming this way and waving, trying to get your attention. Sorry.”

  Blondie opened her eyes and met my gaze. With a blush, she straightened in her seat and made a production of smoothing down her shirt and trying not to look guilty.

  I tapped my fingers on top of the table and kind of regretted interrupting their moment, even though I know they’d both thank me for it...if either of them knew what I’d just saved them from.

  “Seriously,” I muttered when the next singer started on “My Girl.” I motioned toward my roommate. “Ham, you sound better than that in the shower every morning. Get up there and sing so all those other losers who can’t hold a tune don’t get a turn.”

  Blondie turned curiously toward him, her lips twitching with a smile. “Do you really sing in the shower?”