A Love Letter to Whiskey (7 page)

And Jenna noticed.

She narrowed her eyes. “I was joking, spazz. What is up with you? Why does this bother you so much?”

Jenna was scrutinizing me, waiting for a confession of some kind. I stared back at her for a minute, frozen, and then finally forced a long, deep breath before covering my face with my hands. “Ugh, I don’t know. I’m sorry. I just really thought you guys were good together.” I sighed, scrubbing my hands down my face and letting them slap into my lap. “I just want you to be happy. But clearly you’re fine with this and it’s what you want, so of course I support you. It’s just my job as your best friend to question big decisions like this and make you think about them.”

She was still watching me, eyes wary, but she smiled. “I love you, B. Even if you are thirty-five shades of weird.”

“Love you too, bestie.”

I forced a smile and changed the subject, all the while replaying our conversation in my head and wondering how Jamie would take the news.

I must have texted Jenna a million times that night asking if she’d done it yet, but she hadn’t. She waited four days to break up with him, and once she told me it was done, I waited again — for him to text, for him to show up at my house, to want to take a drive. But he didn’t. He didn’t say a word to me. Not the night it happened, or the night after, or the week after. Jamie completely ignored me and Jenna both until the night he graduated.

And that was when I met the other side of Jamie Shaw.

IT HAD BEEN MORE THAN
three months since I’d had a Friday night off.

Since I needed every single Friday off in the fall semester for the games, I had to make up for it once football season was over by picking up the Friday slack at the grocery store. But now, school was out, the seniors were currently walking across the stage at our high school gym, and I was less than an hour away from stepping into the role they just left vacant.

Senior.

It felt strange, calling myself a senior, like when you say a word too many times out loud and it stops making sense. The plan for that night had been to crash the grad parties, say goodbye to our senior friends and toast our new reign. But Brad Newman’s parents had surprised him with a trip to the Bahamas, flying out immediately after graduation, and so the biggest grad party of the night had, in turn, been cancelled.

Jenna made a joke earlier that week when we found out, saying that we should throw a party at my house. I don’t think she expected me to say, “Let’s do it!” Hell,
I
didn’t expect me to say it. But I was high that week, feeling the rush from the transition, and my mom was going to be out of town. Why not throw a party?

So instead of getting ready to go out, Jenna and I were setting up my house, lining the counters with booze most of the seniors had worked together to get for the occasion and cranking the music on my mom’s old five-CD changer stereo. We were both dancing as we mixed punches with too much alcohol, broke out my mom’s favorite shot glasses, and put on lipstick that smeared too easily on the rims of our red plastic cups.

“To us,” Jenna said, her cup tapping mine. “The new seniors.”

“
Seniors
, Jenna!” I squealed, sipping my drink quickly before wrapping her in a crushing hug. “Can you believe we’ve made it? From pigtails and sandboxes to high school seniors.”

“I know, it’s crazy to think about,” Jenna agreed, her eyes glossy as she shook her head. We were standing in my small kitchen, her leaned back against the counter while I straightened everything for the fifteenth time. “I couldn’t have gotten through all these years without you.”

I paused, smiling at my best friend. “Me either.” Lifting my drink to my lips again, I kept my eyes on the counter when I asked, “Do you think Jamie will show?”

It seemed I was more affected by that possibility than Jenna was, because she simply shrugged, shaking her blonde hair over her shoulder and adjusting the spaghetti straps of her thin tank top. “I doubt it. He went ghost on us after I broke up with him. I imagine he’ll probably end up at a different party, if he even goes out at all.” She frowned. “I think I broke his heart, B.”

I took another, longer drink, letting the fruity sting of the alcohol sink in. “I should turn the air down. It’s probably going to get pretty hot in here.”

I couldn’t have known how right I’d be about that.

The party kicked into gear slowly, a few people trickling in around nine followed by a few more and it continued like that until my house was completely packed. The music was too loud, thumping through every room as tables were cleared of picture frames and knick knacks and replaced instead with drinking games of various types. With how often the front door opened to let new people in and the back door opened to let people out to smoke and drink in the back yard, it became a pointless task to try to keep it cool. South Florida was hot in June, plain and simple, and I gave up trying to fight that.

Still, if I wasn’t able to control the temperature inside, I needed to find another way to stay cool. The alcohol was cold, but still sent a heat wave through me with each new sip. I was in the middle of a flip cup game with Jenna and a slew of people I didn’t know very well when I gave up and decided to go for the next option — taking clothes off.

I had a thin tank top on underneath my shirt, so the strip show would be PG-13, at best. I pulled the loose v-neck over my head, vision temporarily blocked by the lavender fabric before I dropped it to the floor with a smile, those in close proximity cheering over the music at my little stunt. I felt instantly cooler for all of three seconds before my eyes landed on the newest arrivals at the party and my smile slipped, along with the cup in my hand, its contents crashing to the table.

Jamie looked different. I knew it had only been a few weeks since we’d hung out, I knew he was the same age, but there was something different about him. It was the way he carried himself, the cocky half-smile he was flashing me as he high-fived a few of the guys in my living room, the challenge in his eyes before he tore them away from me and turned to a tiny brunette on Jenna’s cheerleading squad, instead. I don’t know how long I stood there staring at him with my mouth open, but clearly it was long enough for Jenna to notice, because she followed my eyes and gasped.

“Holy shit, he showed.”

I swallowed, finally ripping my eyes away and stacking cups for a new game. “Mm-hmm.”

“He looks hot.”

“Everyone does, it’s a hundred degrees in here.”

Jenna smirked, nudging my elbow before letting her eyes find Jamie again. “Man, maybe I should have waited until after graduation to break things off. Would be nice to have one more night with him…”

“I’m going to go figure out what to do with my hair,” I said quickly, giving up on setting up a new game and ducking through the crowd to my room. There were several signs on the door with warnings of those who dared to enter, clearly marking it as a NO PARTY ZONE, which I was even more grateful for when I slipped inside and felt the only air-conditioned relief in the house. I sighed, back against my door, and took a few much-needed breaths through my nose before opening my eyes again.

I fanned my neck, crossing to my small vanity mirror and taking a pulse check of my appearance. My makeup was somehow holding up, eyes dark and dramatic like Jenna had shown me how to do, but my hair was frizzy and unruly, so I twisted it into a tight bun on top of my head and secured it with a few bobby pins before reapplying lipstick. The deep, dark red almost made my freckles pop more under my gray eyes, but I embraced them.

Turning in the mirror, I eyed the wet spots on my tank top, debating changing, but knowing that would earn me a few raised eyebrows from my classmates. I’d just called attention to what I was wearing and it would be weird to walk out in something new now.

Once I had regained my composure, I slipped back out to the stifling heat of the party and made my way to the kitchen, a new idea for cooling myself sparking to life. Frozen margaritas. That’s what this party needed. But first, I had to get to my mom’s blender, which was conveniently placed on the very top shelf of our top right cabinet.

I opened the cabinet wide and eyed the edge of the blender peeking out over the shelf, hands on my hips, debating options. I’d just braced my hands on the counter and was about to lift myself up when strong hands found my waist.

“Here,” he said, voice low and husky. “Let me help.”

His hands gripped tighter and he lifted me, my knees finding the counter as I tried to find my breath and a little balance. For a second I just stayed there, staring at the blender within reach now, but not being able to focus on anything other than where his hot skin touched mine. My tank top had risen, his grip on the slick skin of my hips. I forced a breath, grabbed the blender, and made to turn but was stopped by him once more.

He had stepped closer to the counter and every inch of my body brushed his as he lowered me down. First just my hips in his hands, but then my ass rubbed against the front of him, causing him to groan into my neck as my toes finally found solid ground. I turned, his hands still on me, my breath still caught in my throat as I lifted my eyes to his.

“Hi, Jamie.”

He smirked down at me, his eyes too heated, too low. “Hi.”

I cleared my throat as a sign for him to drop his hands from where they seared themselves to my skin, but he didn’t catch the cue. Or he didn’t care. So I slipped out of his grasp and plugged the blender in, reaching into the freezer for ice and searching mom’s cabinets for margarita mix. I found some, blessedly, and snatched what was left of a Jose Cuervo bottle on my way back to the blender.

Jamie stood next to it, casually leaned up against the counter, arms crossed. His hair was longer than I remembered, curling at his ears and laying in a perfect wave across his forehead. He hadn’t changed out of his graduation clothes, but he’d loosened the tie around his neck and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt, rolling the sleeves up to cuff just below his elbows. It was clean, crisp, and white, calling attention to the tan he’d clearly been working on since I’d last seen him. I wondered if he had been surfing, work keeping me from doing the same.

“You’re wearing makeup,” he said as I sidled up beside him, dumping ice cubes into the blender and covering them in tequila.

“And you’re wearing dress shoes.”

He looked down, chuckling, before lifting his hazy eyes back to mine. “We should dance.”

“Wh—”

I didn’t have the chance to ask my question because Jamie grabbed my wrist and twirled me before pulling me flush against him, attempting some sort of drunken version of a waltz in my tiny kitchen as high schoolers weaved in and out around us, oblivious to the way he was making my heart race. I giggled, breaking free after another spin and finding my place back at the blender, topping off the tequila with margarita mix and snapping the lid in place.

“You’re drunk, Jamie Shaw.”

“And are you, B Kennedy?”

I clicked the blend option and spoke over the noise of ice breaking. “I’m getting there.” I eyed him, my head tilted to the side as I tried unsuccessfully to figure out what had changed. Jamie seemed more dangerous that night. He stood too close, watched me for too long. It was unnerving, but in an oddly pleasing way. “What have you been drinking, anyway?”

“Whiskey,” he answered easily, and a short laugh escaped my lips.

“Of course. I should have guessed.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I shrugged, using a spoon to break up a large ice chunk before replacing the top on the blender and turning it on again. “Just makes sense. You’re practically whiskey on legs, anyway. The color of your hair, your eyes, the way you smell — it’s like your spirit drink.”

“I remind you of whiskey?”

“In every sense of the word,” I murmured, maybe too low for him to hear. I thought of how his skin burned mine when he touched me, how just being in his vicinity made my limbs tingle.

I realized then that it was harder pretending like he didn’t affect me when he was no longer tied to my best friend.

“We should do a shot.” Jamie pushed off the counter and grabbed the only bottle of Jack Daniels, filling two of my mom’s shot glasses to the rim before turning back to me. He slid the one branded with the downtown casino’s logo into my hand and lifted the other.