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Sonya laughed and turned around. “Tommy, you gotta change up your lines once in a while.”
The rebuke shrank him a few inches.
Note to self: don’t piss off Sonya.
I turned to him. “Thank you for the compliment. But I’m waiting for Callie…” I glanced down quickly. “So we can discuss whether my condition is transmissible.” I’d read that mentions of disease put many people off, and although I’d allowed man-watching on my agenda tonight, I still needed to avoid conversations.
“Right.” He stood and mumbled something I didn’t catch to Sonya as he moved back to his previous stool. Mission accomplished.
Sonya returned and leaned over to whisper, “You don’t really have anything, do you?”
I shook my head lightly. “No. But I do need to talk to Callie Bush. My sister, Grace, Grace Plinkin, said she’d be here.”
She appraised me cautiously for a second, but mentioning Grace’s name had the desired effect. She pointed to the far corner with the pool tables. “Callie normally plays with the group at the corner table. I’d check with them.”
Success.“Thanks.” I swallowed the last of my drink and laid a ten on the bar. Shouldering my handbag, I started for the corner, focusing on my mental list.
Step one: Find Callie. Step two: Get Grace’s address so I had a place to sleep. Step three would be—
I tripped and almost ended up nose first on the floor.
Great, Angie. Want to be headed to the hospital to spend the night?
Call me nerdy klutz or klutzy nerd. Either fit.
In a second, Tommy appeared and took my elbow, helping me up. “Careful, there, Angela, baby.” He steadied me while I brushed the peanut shells off my pants.
My knee wasn’t as bruised as my ego. I thanked him and restarted my journey to the corner, this time without running through a mental list.
Halfway there, I paused.
The man facing away from me at the corner table had the most amazing back. His tight shirt stretched over broad shoulders and tapered down to a narrow waist.
I shuffled closer for a better look. I wasn’t a gawker, just a normal girl doing what any girl would. Just to be sure, I made sure my mouth wasn’t hanging open.
When he leaned over the table to take a shot, I decided his back took second place to his backside—a perfect ten of a man butt if ever there was one. A real BG, a butt god.
I gave myself a mental slap. A girl like me didn’t matter to man-candy like him. There was a reason I’d never entered the Publisher’s Clearing House sweepstakes, and it was the same reason I didn’t lust after men who looked like he did, even from behind.
A girl had to understand probabilities, which in both cases were dead zero. That kind of man could make any girl swoon after him, and they always went for the sexy Barbie type, not a nerd like me.
Dreams aside, I’d learned not to be disappointed when the only guy I could get to talk to me for ten minutes was the one none of the other girls wanted. Unless he drooled. That was still a hard no for me. BG, the butt god—I mean, the man with his back to me—made his shot and lined up another.
I stopped to watch.
Who cares? This guy probably didn’t even know his multiplication tables, or how many moons Mars had—the male equivalent of a bimbo, all looks and empty upstairs. Maybe BG also stood for bimbo guy.
BG stroked the stick forward and back, in and out of the hole he’d formed with his fingers. He could handle his wood.
He can handle his wood?Just like that, my brain was in the gutter. I didn’t talk like that, or think like that. I did IT at a world-class level. I could recite the alphabet backward in five different languages. I had pi memorized to thirty-five digits.
Blinking three times, I tried to reset my brain to rational mode and name all the planets of Jupiter. One evening—hell, one minute of guy-watching—and I was falling apart.
But he hit the shot, and all I could think was,The man can handle his wood.
“Hey, man, you’re killing it tonight,” the guy on the other side of the table said.
“I guess,” BG grunted.
