“Thanks, babe,” he murmurs.
She grins and wipes her hands down the front of her ripped jeans before holding it to me. “I’m Ivy, Ben’s girl.” When I introduce myself she nods, and I can’t help but like her because instead of mentioning my connection with Lucas, she says, “You play pool?”
“I have played.” Which, I have. Just not well.
She inclines her black and blonde head to the opposite corner of the bar, where a tall woman dragging on a cigarette ducks into a dimly lit room. “Play with me?” She jerks her thumb from Ben to Wyatt. “You and me against them.”
“She always loses,” Wyatt tells her, biting the corner of his lip when I glare up at him. “But f**k yeah, you’re on. You in, Ky?”
I glance around the bar in search of my best friend, but she’s nowhere to be found and neither is Cal, so I lift my shoulders. “Guess I am.”
I quickly learn that Ivy’s a bit of a pool shark and a whole lot competitive. She easily makes up for everything that I lack in the game, which is unfortunately a lot. She sinks billiard ball after ball into the table pockets, rubbing our winning streak in Wyatt and Ben’s face each time and pumping her fist to the raunchy anthem about getting drunk and waking up naked that blasts from outside the pool room.
I’m ecstatic when I manage to knock one, the orange 3, into the hole.
“You going to Albuquerque with them?” I ask her between games. Wyatt has disappeared to get himself a drink, and Ben is talking to some of the band’s fans, the three women who had stalked Cal and his cousin for signatures a little earlier.
Ivy downs her Jager Bomb and shudders from the aftereffect. She rubs her hand back and forth over her mouth, bothering the hoop at the end of her nose, before shaking her head negatively. “No, I live in Katy, a half an hour from here, so I can’t go.” She stares longingly at the empty shot glass and sighs. “Plus, I’ve got work in the morning. Guess I should’ve thought about work before I dove into the Red Bull, huh?”
“Nah. I mean, just drink a few more and you should be good.” I lean against the pool table, sliding my bottom up to the edge. Cocking my head to the side, I take in the women crowded around her boyfriend. “How long have y’all been together?”
“Four long ass years.” She glances over at Ben who’s signing right above one of the girl’s lower back tattoos. “Wonder if she realizes how long it takes to get the Sharpie prints off.” If watching other women fawn all over Ben fazes Ivy, she doesn’t show it. She seems entirely at ease with the multiple sets of br**sts being shoved into his face, and I find myself studying the obvious trust she has for him, asking myself how the hell she does it.
Even though Wyatt and I have promised not to lie to each other—and there have been those times when he’s been so brutally honest my chest aches for days—I’ve always hated the doubt that comes along with what he does for a living.
My thoughts are still conflicted when Ben and Ivy drop out of the next game and Terra and Nate take their place.
“Wyatt says you sing,” Nate says shortly after the new game begins. “Here, like this.” He comes around the pool table and leans over me to reposition my grip on the pool stick. He’s careful not to touch the intimate parts of my body, keeping his crotch several inches from my ass as he guides my arm forward. “You wanna get up there with us next show?”
“Yeah, I sing. In the shower.” I glance back into his teasing, wide set eyes. “And I’d ruin your show, babe.”
“Bullshit,” Wyatt says from across the table. When I lift my head, I flinch at how hard his eyes are despite the laughter in his deep voice. “She’s goddamn amazing—everything about her is—but she’s even better on the guitar.”
“You play?” Nate asks.
During the tour eight years ago that changed everything for us, Wyatt showed me how to play on Lucas’s old Gibson. I’ve always been a quick study, so I picked it up easily. I’m not horrible, but I don’t think I’m goddamn amazing, either.
Besides, I haven’t played in well over a year.
“She’s better than Lucas’s ass,” Wyatt answers for me, his tone a little mocking. Jamming the tip of my cue stick to the floor, I straighten my back and narrow my eyes at him.
Other than with my ex-husband, this is the first time in years that Wyatt’s played the jealous card around me. Nate doesn’t notice Wyatt’s sudden mood change because his intentions are obviously not to get me into his bed, but Terra does. She’s standing on the far left corner of the table, taking in the exchange and sliding the tip of her tongue back and forth between her lips.
“Actually, I haven’t played in so long I think I’ve forgotten how,” I say.
Wyatt glides his pool stick forward, managing to knock the cue ball into the red stripes. It stops a mere few inches from the pocket. He straightens, and glowers across the table at me. “You forgot?”
My shirt has crept up on my waist, so I pull it back down before I focus my gaze on Wyatt and nod slowly and deliberately. “Yeah, I did.”
Our eyes never waver from each other even as Nate and then Terra take their respective shots. By the time it’s his turn, Wyatt slams his cue into the rack by the wall and jerks his head toward the door leading to the bar. “Be right back,” I tell Nate.
Terra answers quickly, beaming at both Wyatt and I with her megawatt smile. “We’ll be here.”