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Piper
Just Enjoy It While It Lasts
Twenty minutes.
Twenty minutes in a bar with nobody from Kennedy Young, Marrs, or any of the RAs who I constantly embarrassed myself in front of. Twenty minutes of practice. I could be in a small crowd of people and I’d be fine. I took another sip of the second glass of Shower Sex and steadied my breathing.
Little by little, I was getting better at this. I took another sip and glanced at my partner for the evening.
I studied Adam, resting against the bar with his arm back, the perfect pose of comfort. Plenty of other people fluttered around like birds or glued themselves to their friends. Not Adam.
Adam was just…cool. Effortlessly cool.
“How do you do it?” I blurted out.
His eyes flickered back to mine. “Do what?”
“Do…” I gestured towards him, perfectly relaxed. “Do all this. You’re so…chill about this.”
“About what? The smell of the bar?”
“No. You’re so comfortable. I mean—you play in stadiums with forty thousand people. How?”
“Are you trying out for the Romans?” He smirked.
I gave him a hard look and purposely turned away from him, back to my view of people dancing without a care in the world. Adam never took anything seriously. I shouldn’t have asked him anything.
“Do you want to know the secret?” Adam asked.
I shifted to look at him again and slowly nodded.
He leaned down so we could hear each other over the pounding music. The closer he moved, the more I could see him. The gold specks in his dark eyes. The individual lines on his lips. The little scars from where he must’ve gotten hurt playing football.
“Practice makes perfect.” He chuckled.
That’s the big secret?
“Well, that’s what this is,” I finally said. “An attempt at practice anyway. I feel like such an outsider here. You wouldn’t get it.” The drinks were starting to creep up on me. My head was a little too warm and fuzzy. I sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe all of this has passed. It might be too late for me.”
“It’s not.”
I scrunched up my nose. “I feel old.”
“You’re twenty-one.”
“I don’t know if I’m a springy kind of twenty-one.” I took the glass from him and took a long drink of Shower Sex. There was absolutely no taste of liquor, just wonderful, fruity goodness. A shiver ran up my spine. “I think I was meant to be one of those monks, off in a tower somewhere.”
“A computer programming monk?”
I giggled.
Did I just giggle?
I did. I brought my hand up to stop the giggling and the rest of our drink spilled to the floor. Adam laughed, and I tried to reach down to clean it before I had anything to clean it with.
“I’ve got napkins.” He grabbed some from the bar and stooped down low with me. He wouldn’t give me any of them though, not even when I tried to snatch them out of his hands. “You’re spilling more, ice princess.”
“Let me clean it—”
