Kat snorts and then she’s smiling, even though we’re in this crowded bar looking for Meckler, and the thrill of victory zips through me.
“You think of that all by yourself?” she teases.
“Of course not.”
“It’s not bad.”
“That means you’re gonna use it?”
“Sure, I’ll put it in my standup routine,” she says, and then the bartender’s back, sliding two drinks across the bar to us. Kat’s has a maraschino cherry on top, and for a moment, I wonder what she’d do if I stole it.
“Don’t you fucking dare,” she says, voice low.
“Dare what?” I ask, mock-offended.
“Take my cherry,” she says, grabbing her glass protectively. “Don’t even look at it. It’s mine, I’m going to enjoy it after I finish my drink, and if you so much as make an attempt at it, I will end you.”
God, it’s fun to rile her up, especially when I can do it to get her out of her head.
“Just a nibble,” I bargain.
“Ew. No.”
“A lick?”
And now her eyes dart up to mine, pure black in the dark bar, and there’s a heat behind them that makes my mouth go dry.
“No, Silas, you cannot lick my cherry,” she says, with remarkable calm, and I’m the one left needing to look away and take a sip of my own, cherry-less drink.
“Fine, it’s safe,” I grudgingly give in. “Patio?”
Kat nods, relief on her face, and we leave the bar.
* * *
“I might have gotten it wrong,”she says.
We’re outside on a second-floor deck, sitting on an outdoor couch with an unlit fire pit in front of us and the wall to our backs, lights strung overhead. Past the railing of the deck is the resort’s pool complex: a swimming pool currently lit with shifting underwater colors, smaller hot tubs dotted up a slight hill, each cleverly surrounded by rocks and foliage. According to the brochure I read earlier, each one is a slightly different temperature from the hot springs.
“I hope we’re at the right place,” I agree.
“You’re the one who said it was here,” she points out. “I just said hot springs and river.”
“I’m ninety-five percent sure,” I say, and take a sip of my almost-finished drink. “Maybe ninety-six.”
Next to me, Kat sighs.
“Do we have a strategy?” she asks.
Her legs are crossed under the soft red skirt of her dress, and I’ve got one arm slung around her. The condensation from her glass trickles over the knuckles of her hand, leaving wet spots on the fabric, and her hair whispers against my skin as she turns her head.
One might have been the wrong number of drinks. A couple more and I could numb this out. None and I’d have a little more willpower, but one drink dulls my judgement exactly enough that I can’t quit looking at her but also won’t do anything about it.
“When we find them, we hang around and call each other babe a whole lot,” I say.
“That’s the activity. What’s the objective?”
She takes another sip, and I watch her swallow before I answer. The damn cherry is still in her glass and God, I want to grab it, just to see what she’d do. Right now I feel thirteen all over again, a mess of warring impulses and urges that I can’t quell and can’t satisfy.