Chapter Text
Nana Wilson wasn’t a drinker, but she liked bars.
They were homey. At least, the right ones were. And they were easy to find on assignment, dive bars and pubs and good ol’ hometown watering holes cropping up no matter where her job took her. They were an American necessity, and probably the only constant for someone who spent maybe two months a year in her own home. If anything, they (and their clientele) were painfully and reliably consistent.
So the idea of hanging out by herself in a navy bar in San Diego didn’t bother her the way it probably should have.
It was a nice place, the one she’d landed herself in. Just down the road from her far-too-expensive apartment, the Hard Deck reminded her of the crab shack type places she’d hung around in growing up. All paneled wood and kitschy little decorations, a solid oak bar that was probably worth more than her life. Bay windows that looked out onto the ocean, tossing and turning and whipping salty sea air at those who dared to get near it.
She, fair-skinned as she was — read: burns easily in the sun — chose not to go near it, instead watching it from afar over the heads of patrons. That was the first thing she always did on assignment; scoping out the competition, her partners had always called it. Reading the room, getting a feel for how to act, how to best blend in to get the story.
She’d never spent time around a naval base before. She’d been to a hundred places for work — rural Europe, the plains of the midwest, hell, even the most stifling, desolate parts of Australia — but somehow she’d never landed herself working with the military. Personal preference, she figured. She’d always left those stories to the men.
But here she was, a few miles south of Naval Base Coronado, working on a profile of some retiring pilot — Mitchell something — and scanning the bar for interesting faces instead of drinking.
Some looked familiar, some didn’t. She’d only been around a few weeks, not enough to really start to remember anyone yet. At least beyond Penny, the sweet woman who worked the bar and didn’t mind when Nana came an hour before drink service actually started to curl up in a corner with a notebook. Nana was pretty sure she owned the place, but she hadn’t worked up the courage to ask whether that was true.
It was a decent Friday night — they were edging into summer, and the days had gotten just hot enough that everyone from the surrounding area was looking to escape the heat, ride it out with a cold one until the sun set and everyone could split off, wandering down the boardwalk or back home. The jukebox was blaring and Nana could zero in on at least five separate conversations happening in her general vicinity, about sports or the weather or whatever was going on at the naval base down the road.
She’d always worked best when there was noise. Loud music, construction sounds, you name it. Was it a quirk, or just undiagnosed something living in the back of her brain, the same thing that could get her from a blank page to a finished piece in a handful of hours flat? She had no idea, but it worked for her, grazing on tortilla chips and scribbling at one of the high-tops in the corner, since she’d given up her booth an hour ago to a family with a father who looked to be at least a rear admiral.
She was too short for the high-tops — her feet swung like she was six years old — but she made it work, one ear cocked to the conversation happening to her left about some cookout happening next weekend. Frankly, she was paying more attention to that than her notes, which had slowly devolved into illegible chicken scratch the longer the night had gone on.
She was supposed to be coming up with questions, gathering the two weeks of Googling and hours spent on her knees in a naval archives bunker into something mildly coherent. The admiral serving as her liaison — they called him Cyclone, if she remembered correctly — wanted them by the end of the week, and she had maybe one that made any kind of sense.
This Mitchell must’ve been a bigger deal than she’d thought.
Her brain, clearly, was more concerned with people watching than whoever the hell she was supposed to meet next week, getting a better feel for the people she was going to be spending the next month and a half of her life around, if this profile went to plan. It was easy to pick out who was military and who wasn’t. They carried themselves differently, even out of uniform, posture as perfect as if someone had taped a ruler to their backs. (On some, it was impressive. On others, Nana had to stifle the inner urge to make a crack about sticks going where the sun didn’t shine.)
There were a handful that stood out: the rear admiral in her discarded booth, a handful of petty officers still in uniform, a group of what looked like captains crowded into a booth on the opposite side of the place. Nana observed and cataloged them all mentally, wondering what kind of regulars they were, if they were at all. What they drank, how long Penny let their tabs run before she forced them to pony up. The kind of tiny details that made a person a person, beyond the ranks on their starched-to-hell uniforms. The things that made life interesting.
She’d almost grown bored of it until her eyes caught on someone in the back, snagging like a loose thread on a cheap Christmas sweater. Her brain did that sometimes, zeroed in without her consent. A bad impulse she’d never been able to curb — particularly not when she was bored.
He was tall — had a good few inches on her at least — and seemed to know exactly how good-looking he was, the way he scanned the bar like he owned the place. (She wondered if Penny had clocked that.) Obviously a regular, the way the other patrons gave him and his buddies — five other guys and a lone woman — a hefty berth around the dart board at the back of the room. They were the only ones she’d ever seen use it; most people sprung for the pool table, which sat empty as the sound of Dead or Alive played through tinny jukebox speakers.
She’d seen enough lieutenants wander in in the few weeks she’d been in San Diego to know one when she saw them. They all seemed friendly with Penny for the most part — which didn’t surprise her, considering the next closest bar was a hike down the highway. They were rowdy in a good way, the kind that showed up in Hawaiians shirts and sunglasses, slapped the barback on the shoulder with a greeting and a smile before keeping mostly to themselves. They seemed to be the only ones who ever used the piano in the corner, the old ragtime thing that was slightly out of tune, but not enough to be a bother.
Either Nana was living close to the chillest naval base on the planet, or she had gotten spectacularly lucky with her bar-going thus far.
She would quickly realize that her situation had been the latter.
Emphasis on had .
He was good at darts, whoever he was. He wiped the floor with the man he was up against as Nana watched, the only one of the group who sported a pair of glasses. His smile was as cocky as they came, and she could hear a collective chorus of boos as he landed what she figured was the newest bullseye in a series of them.
She wasn’t staring, she told herself. She was observing . Bars were good for that.
And observe she did, watching the game go down as the rest of his friends — fellow squadron members, she assumed — crowded around him, cheering or booing in equal measure depending on the move. His confident smile never slipped, and she could read everything she needed to know about him without him ever saying a word.
Overconfident. Bullish. Probably overcompensating, if I had to guess.
Once the game was nearly over, she’d decided she’d had enough, at least while she was trying to stay sober enough to get home. She moved to turn back to her notes, at the very least to pack them up and head home where she could rest, but before she could, something caught her eye.
Lieutenant Hotshot, who’d turned in her direction right as she’d been about to get away with staring.
Fantastic.
Nana could feel the way her entire body cringed as he looked her up and down for what he thought was a brief moment, though Nana was certain it was an eternity. Like being caught under a tractor beam with no way out. It was a cliche from a bad movie, one she’d walked directly into all on her own as the stranger stared at her, arrested in the middle of the floor as the both of them stubbornly refused to be the first to look away.
The stranger raised a brow, pointing at himself, and Nana had clench her teeth together to keep her expression schooled at just how satisfied he looked, like he’d caught her ogling with her mouth open instead of just people-watching.
(That’s exactly what it was. People-watching, not ogling. Definitely not anything else.)
She was the first to tear her eyes away, thinking that maybe, if she showed complete disinterest in talking to Navy men in her free time, he’d leave it alone. Take it as a fluke and go back to his game. It was a futile gesture at best, but it made her feel good, even as she flipped her notebook shut and tucked her pen behind her ear, waiting out the appropriate amount of seconds before glancing back up across the bar.
She was surprised to find Lieutenant Hotshot mid-conversation with one of his buddies — an equally tall white boy with a mustache out of a bad porn film — heads tucked together like they were conspiring. Nana shuffled her notes together as she watched them talk, his opponent scoring a couple of decent triple rings behind his back, to the sound of many cheers from the lone woman of their group.
Good, he’d left it well enough alone. She could scram, go home to where she could work off the drinks she’d had and not stumble into another one of her signature misadventures. She had to be up early in the morning for a tour of NAS anyway. Maybe if she moved fast enough, told Penny she’d close her tab tomorrow, that she could make it out of there. She’d slip out the back door unnoticed, and avoid the possibility of running into—
She caught a hand waving in the corner of her vision before she could finish the thought, and it was all over.
She didn’t need to look over to know that her admirer was making his way over to her, but she gave him a cursory glance anyway. He made a point of dodging around chairs, making it seem like he was moseying his way over even though he never took his eyes off of her. She could feel his gaze even as she gathered her bag from the chair next to her, still going through the motions of packing up even as whoever-he-was got closer. He was still waving, trying to catch the eye that she was deliberately trying not to give him.
If she’d learned anything, it was that naval officers didn’t pride themselves on their subtlety.
She put mental bets on how he’d strike up a conversation. He couldn’t use the bar to his advantage, nor the deafening loudness of the music, since someone had switched on some ballad from before she was born. It was a crapshoot, and she hadn’t spent enough time studying him to decide whether he was clever enough to come up with something original. She didn’t have enough time to do it now either, even as she finally acquiesced and held his gaze, which only seemed to get more smug the closer he got.
He cut the shit once he got to her side of the bar, shooting her a smile and a wink as he dodged around the last of the high tops to get to hers — you know, the one in the darkest, least noticeable part of the room that she’d chosen for a reason?
You couldn’t be half-blind in the military, but Nana had her suspicions that he might just be anyway.
He approached with a swagger in his step, the kind you get either from too many years of being told you’re great or spending all your time on the water. His was probably a bit of both, Nana figured, watching him strut like he owned the place despite wearing some god-awful Jimmy Buffett ripoff.
She decided she didn’t have the energy to put up with a canned opening line, so she plastered on an equally canned smile just as he made it within earshot, the muscles of her face straining with the effort.
“Evening, Lieutenant.”
It was a shot in the dark, the guess at his rank, but it seemed to hit home. His smile went lopsided as he leaned an arm on her table, quickly deciding that personal space was a bunch of bullshit that he didn’t have time for. Charming.
“Evening.”
He nodded like he was tipping some kind of imaginary hat. Nana remained perfectly still. All her energy was being taken up by that smile.
“Pretty girls shouldn’t be drinking alone, don’t you think?”
Oh boy. This ought to be good.
His smile seemed equally plastic, though Nana was almost certain that was just how his face looked all the time. He was too much like a Ken doll, plastic and perfect and probably just as popular, passed from girl to girl with fervor even though there was nothing real under the uniform.
“They do when they’re working.”
She scanned him up and down, one hand gripping her notebook even tighter. There was some merit to how attractive he thought he was. Pretty eyes, sharp jawline, probably built like a brick house under the god-awful Hawaiian shirt he had on. Gossip fodder for the girls she graduated high school with, if anything. Nana assumed that the gaze he had focused on her would’ve been a little more intelligent, if not for the couple of Heinekens she’d seen him discard, which left it just the slightest bit hazy.
She’d been eyed up by a handful of military men in her lifetime, but he was certainly a standout.
Not that she’d let him know that, of course. He wasn’t getting off that easy.
“Gonna miss your turn.”
She gestured with her head to the dartboard, where she could see the guy’s buddies all staring at her without any kind of tact, focused like they were watching a football game on a screen above her head. She almost admired the bravery that took, particularly from the equally tall white boy, who looked on the verge of laughing his ass off.
Same here .
Hotshot followed her gaze, craning his neck in an uncomfortable direction, but it didn’t last long before his eyes swung back to meet hers. It was like a rubber band coming back to smack her in the knuckles, the kind of nasty trick her brother used to play on her when they were kids.
“Bar rules,” he replied. “They’ll get over it.”
Nana almost snorted at that, her elbow dangerously close to the mostly empty vodka soda she’d been nursing for the last hour and a half. Either this guy was more drunk than he looked, or he had no idea how bad he was at talking to women.
“I should tell Penny to stop serving you,” she muttered, more to her notebook than to him. “You seem a little out of it, leaving a winning game to talk to a girl.”
Especially one who’s so obviously not interested.
“You know Penny?”
He glanced at the bar, where the owner was polishing glasses and chatting with the barback. Nana shrugged, even though he couldn’t see it. He’d barely registered a word she’d said.
“Enough.”
If by enough, she meant “we know each other’s names and I no longer have to remind her what I drink,” then yeah, that’s exactly what she meant.
Hey, it worked for the situation.
“Little loud for work, huh?”
The stranger drew circles in the air with his finger, and Nana figured he must’ve gone half-deaf from all that flying, considering the jukebox had dulled to a quiet roar, someone having picked out a set of Sinatra songs in the time it took him to get to her table. Either that or he was fantastically stubborn, choosing to stick with the path he’d chosen to see where it took him.
She shrugged again, still smiling, determined to stay purely noncommittal.
“I’m used to it.”
Theirs was a conversation that was going nowhere very quickly, and Nana was morbidly curious enough to see what kind of a trainwreck it would turn into if they kept it going. She wasn’t exactly resistant to being hit on, not really. She just liked watching boys fumble.
Hotshot scanned her face, his gaze intensely heavy on her as he no doubt searched for cracks in her veneer. He’d find none, she knew, but he was persistent. It was like watching a cat sneaking up on its prey, all narrowed eyes and tight shoulders as she waited for him to say something.
“You,” he decided on, “You’re not from around here, huh?”
Nana shook her head. She couldn’t help it.
“And he goes for the classic,” she muttered. “Very impressive.”
She chuckled as she said it, because really, she never thought she’d meet someone clueless enough to actually use the cheesiest pick-up line on the face of the planet. That was one for the bucket list.
Nana shifted as Hotshot looked down at the tabletop for a moment, and she followed his gaze. Maybe she could find something so fascinating in the cracked finish of the wood table that she could just forget he was there, go silent until he got the idea and walked back to his friends, defeated.
He didn’t seem like the kind to give up that easily though.
“Woulda noticed you around before.”
She didn’t need to look at him to know he was waggling his eyebrows at her, and she was actually kind of impressed. Someone had pulled a walking 1980s side character out of an old VHS movie and stuck him down right in the middle of San Diego.
Yeah, he definitely wasn’t giving up any time soon.
“I’m a journalist,” she replied, as though that would answer his definitely-not-a-question and get him off her back. “I’m here on assignment.”
She lifted her notebook in front of his face, using the accompanying waving movement as an excuse to take a very large pull from her drink. She drained the last of it as she did so, and yet noticed no change on Hotshot’s expression once she set her glass and her notebook back down.
“Here to write about how fucking great the pilots at North Island are?” he asked.
Nana couldn’t help herself; she snorted.
“Just the one.”
And, before he could come back with the retort she was expecting:
“And he’s not in this bar, that’s for sure.”
It was cold and she knew it, especially paired with the plastic smile still tacked onto her face, the one that was starting to hurt her cheeks the longer she held it. She let it go slack a bit, watching Hotshot’s face for any sign that she’d managed to dent his ego.
That didn’t seem to be the case, the way he merely glanced back down at the table before meeting her eyes again.
“If I guess who it is,” he asked, “Will you let me buy you a drink?”
And there it was. Honestly, she was surprised he hadn’t led with that.
“I’m fine,” she replied, waving him off. “Really.”
Hotshot shook his head.
“I insist.”
“Do you insist for my sake,” Nana asked, “Or just to get me to keep talking to you?”
“Little bit of both.”
He was honest. Shocker there.
Nana weighed the pros and cons of giving in, of just letting what was already in motion happen to avoid something worse down the road. She couldn’t be getting into fights before she’d even started her work — her real work — and she was too tired to come up with a cleverer way out of it. The only way out was through, and that meant taking this sorry son of a bitch up on his offer and suffering through whatever piss-poor flirting skills he had to offer as a result.
Best case scenario: she gets a free drink out of it, and then leaves Hotshot in the dust and finds another bar to hang out at until she gets what she needs from Mitchell.
Worst case scenario: she gets a free drink, but wastes it by throwing it in the guy’s face and still has to find another bar to go to.
Not the worst odds she’d ever seen.
So, when she looked at the stranger pointedly, it was with slightly more guts than she’d figured she had that day.
“Just the one.”
She raised one finger in front of him, watching his gaze follow it as she smirked.
“No guessing required.”
His eyes lit up at her words, and Nana knew, even with the best odds, that she was in deep shit.
He was up and moving before she could even put her hand down, and if she’d been more receptive, she might’ve been a little surprised at his eagerness. He walked with a kind of spring in his step, though she figured that was probably from the unintentional boost she’d just given his ego.
Go you, you pressured a perfectly innocent girl into drinking with you for your own pride. Congratulations.
She followed him to the bar, not trusting anyone enough to bring her back a drink she couldn’t see being poured. Once she hopped off her stool, she realized just how tall she actually was — he towered over her by a good handful of inches, if not a whole half foot, and she glowered at his back over it.
His very nice, very muscular back.
This was fine.
She was fine.
That vodka had definitely done something to her brain though.
She sidled up to Hotshot as she shook her head, clearing the last of whatever that train of thought had been as she glanced at her booze benefactor. He’d already murmured something to Penny about what he was drinking, and Nana leaned against the bar as she uncapped another beer for him, something in an ugly green bottle that made her stomach turn.
Boys never had any taste.
Both Penny and Hotshot glanced over at her silently, and clearly it had already been communicated that he was paying for drinks, thank God. She didn’t have the guts to look Penny — kind, badass, cool-as-hell Penny — in the eyes and tell her she was letting a man pay for her drinks. She hadn’t so much as spoken to another patron in all the days she’d been camping out at the Hard Deck, so this was certainly out of character for her.
All in the name of research, right?
“Whiskey sour,” she muttered, suppressing the urge to pull out her phone as a buffer.
Fuck it. If he was buying, she was going to get drunk.
The words came out louder than she’d intended — she could tell by the way the patron to her left turned, quirking an eyebrow at her and the man standing next to her. She tried not to give it too much thought, instead turning back to Penny in an effort to avoid eye contact with Hotshot, which was a more difficult game than she’d anticipated.
Penny made Nana’s drink with the practice of someone who’d been doing it all her life, and Nana nodded in appreciation as she went back to cleaning glasses once the job was done. The look the older woman shot her over the damp rag in her hand did not go unnoticed, and Nana got the distinct impression that she was communicating something like good luck.
Clearly, this was not a new phenomenon for the man at her side, whoever he was.
Which, speaking of.
“Shouldn’t I know who’s buying my drinks?”
She rested one arm on the bar and nursed her glass in her pink-manicured hand, turning to face the lieutenant who was now doing the same. She took a sip from her glass and bit her cheek as the taste of it hit her all at once; either Penny had given her top shelf out of mercy, or Hotshot was trying harder than she’d expected.
Her question hung in the air for a moment, and either her newly minted drinking partner hadn’t heard her, or he expected her to already know the answer. He seemed like the kind, the way his posture was perfect in the stick-up-his-ass kind of way. Nana wondered what he’d done to earn that kind of attitude — if he’d done anything at all.
She let the question settle, hang like a film over their drinks as she brought back that sickening smile, wondering how long he could go without answering before she broke and told him to cut the shit.
He managed a few more seconds before he caved, taking a swig from his drink before he finally answered.
“Hangman.”
So the mental nickname hadn’t been far off then.
She’d heard the names floating around before, the call signs that the pilots threw around that sounded like a foreigh language to her. She knew they meant something, served as a rite of passage for the kind of sociopaths who flew F-18s for a living. They tossed them around as much as they did real names, though she hadn’t expected them to be important enough to use with civilians. It was odd hearing someone actually use one, like it was a perfectly acceptable substitute for a name and not a random noun with a meaning attached that she didn’t yet know.
All she could think to do was quirk an eyebrow, words momentarily escaping her for the first time in recent memory. She wondered what that name meant, where he’d gotten it from.
“Not exactly the name I want to hear from the guy buying my booze,” she murmured, looking at her drinking partner over the rim of her glass as she took a sip. If she knew anything about call signs, its origin couldn’t have been good.
The stranger — Hangman — laughed at her sarcasm, and Nana briefly noticed how nice his smile was. A poster boy smile, the kind you saw on billboards and in influencer pictures. Perfectly straight teeth, but with the laugh lines that told her he did so often and without holding back.
Well, at least that was encouraging.
He shook his head for a brief moment, taking another sip from his drink as the last of his laughter died off.
“Real name’s Jake.”
Jake. Yeah, that felt right.
“Does Jake have a last name?” Nana asked. Hangman/Jake shook his head, and she could see the sarcasm in his eyes. She had a feeling he pulled that expression more often than not.
“That’s classified, sweetheart.”
“Call me sweetheart again and I’ll ruin that terrible shirt of yours.”
She shook her drink gently, ice rattling against the glass. Not that she’d really waste such good whiskey, but still.
Like she said, she liked watching boys fumble.
She watched as Jake eyed her up, searching her expression for any hint that she was kidding. She was, of course, but she was good at nothing if not bullshitting.
“Is there a name I can use to avoid that unfortunate fate?” he inquired, almost hiding behind his drink as he did.
Nana almost shook her head just to fuck with him, but she decided against it. Whatever liquor she was drinking, it was too good to waste on a navy brat who was slightly too big for his britches.
“Susannah,” she replied, making the executive decision to hide behind her full name. Worst case scenario, she introduced herself to everyone else in this town as Nana, and if things went south, he’d never be able to find her again.
She watched something shine behind Jake’s eyes as she gave him her name, and something fuzzy erupted in her chest as it did. She blamed it on the whiskey, which left just enough aftertaste in her mouth that she could disguise the way her brows furrowed as disgust.
Vodka on top of whiskey must be going to my head.
“Does Susannah have a last name?” Jake parrotted, relaying her earlier question back at him. Nana shook her head, trying to banish the fuzzy feeling before it led her to saying something she’d regret.
“Not that he’s earned.”
She let the plasticine expression slip, finally, replacing it instead with the kind of mischievous expression that matched how she felt on the inside, the feeling she was fostering to avoid the buzzing in her chest. She watched her drinking partner’s expression change as hers did, taking in just who he was talking to now that she’d dropped the rest of her act.
“Mm.” He nodded once, a smirk settling on his face. “Does she have a nickname? She doesn’t look like a Susannah.”
She raised an eyebrow, and she’d never tell anyone that it was to combat the way her stomach flipped out of nowhere when he said her name. She’d taken that whiskey way too fast, that was for sure — she hated when people used her full name. And she did not get some kind of fuzzy feeling spreading down through her arms. Never.
“Doesn’t look like a Susie either.”
He twirled his beer bottle with one hand, gesturing at her like he’d made some kind of grand revelation while she was still fighting off a chill.
About that, he was right.
“People call me Nana.”
She said it as flatly as she could manage, glad to be rid of the sound of anyone saying her Christian name. It was Jake’s turn to quirk an eyebrow this time, presumably in the same way she had when he’d spouted his own nickname at her.
“I take it that’s not a call sign.”
He smiled at her, and when she didn’t take the bait, he continued with,
“You don’t look old enough to be a grandmother.”
“Says the man who goes by the name for a children’s game.”
She smirked at him herself, taking a pull from her drink as he sputtered a bit, blinking back against her words. She got the distinct feeling that not many people ever took a crack at his call sign.
“You really think you’re hot shit, huh?”
She leaned her weight on the bar as she did, leaning back just enough to take all of him in. The self-entitled posture hadn’t slipped one bit, and she adjusted the mental picture she’d drawn of him earlier, sharpening off the edges until he became a proper John Hughes castoff in her head.
Overconfident. Bullish. Probably not overcompensating though.
Scratch that. Definitely not overcompensating.
“Well, Nana, I kind of am.”
Jake leaned back to look at her as well, and if he weren’t so goddamn good-looking it would’ve seemed sleazy. His words were so cocky, so textbook Jane Austen novel villain that…well, Nana didn’t know what to think.
Is this what happened when you graduated from TOPGUN? Did the Navy blow so much smoke up your ass that it took copious amounts of booze to keep you weighed down?
“I mean, considering half your goddamn squadron’s over there staring at us, I’m not exactly surprised.”
Nana pointed across the bar with the hand that wasn’t holding her drink, not even sure it was moving in the right direction. “Guess they must think you’re hot shit too.”
She flicked a glance over at the poor sucker’s pals, still staring at them with reckless abandon. They weren’t even trying to look occupied by anything else.
She almost thought she saw a flicker of embarrassment on Jake’s face when she looked back, the way his eyes slid over the six people watching them with deep and obvious interest, and her smirk slipped a bit.
Huh. He’s got a sense of humility. Who’d’ve thought.
“How much did they bet that you wouldn’t be able to get my number?” she asked, still pointing. Jake shrugged.
“Hundred bucks each.”
Damn. Were navy brats really that bored these days?
“A little steep, don’t you think?”
Jake’s smile returned, plastic Ken doll parts replacing any hint of the humility she’d just spotted.
“Not for a gal like you.”
She could feel the drawl in his voice like a film on her skin. Who the fuck ever said gal anymore?
And why the fuck was it working on her?
“What, you mean the loner you pestered who just came to the bar to work?”
She decided to pick that thread up again, wondering how far she could push it until he got frustrated. He seemed almost tipsy enough to be immune to it, though, the way his eyes glittered as he leaned closer to her.
“Like I said,” he mused, “Who comes to a bar to work?”
“Clearly the kind of women you’re interested in.”
It was a barb he didn’t have a comeback for, and Nana almost laughed at the both of them. They were dancing around each other, piling snark on top of snark until one of them finally caved. It was a game of wits, as much as any other time she’d been flirted with, and he was good.
But not as good as she was.
“Here.”
She set her drink down on the bar, careful to leave it on top of the napkin Penny had given her so she could have both hands free. She waved both hands at her drinking partner, who’d tilted his head when she straightened up and lost the smile, beckoning him to give her something.
“Gimme your phone,” she said, gesturing to his pocket. “Maybe we can get together in a place where we don’t have an audience.”
The words felt slimy and awkward coming out of her mouth, but she had an idea, and she needed to see it through.
She continued to gesture as Jake stared at her, and it almost made her laugh. He wasn’t shocked, per se — maybe just impressed with himself that she’d caved faster than he’d expected. Or that she’d caved at all.
“That eager to get rid of me, huh?”
There were layers to his statement, and Nana pointedly ignored them as he handed his phone over, about as eager to unwrap that as she was to drink Everclear straight from the bottle.
“Points for effort,” she explained as she accepted the device, never looking up as she punched her own number into his contacts. She proceeded to send a text to that same number, feeling her cell vibrate from where it was stowed in her pocket, and she made a show out of it, let him boost his own ego for a moment.
And boost it he did, watching her intently before glancing over at his pals, who were in various states of amusement or shocked as he pointed at Nana, who still had full control of his phone as she finished saving her own contact. Only the woman of the group — short, muscular, and probably slightly more aware — looked any differently, one eyebrow raised as she looked from Nana to her drinking partner and back, almost knowing what she was about to do next.
Jake was far too occupied with his own victory lap to notice Nana move, slipping his phone onto the sticky surface of the bar. She let it rest for a moment as she caught Penny’s eye, who looked at her like she was about to get away with murder.
Because, in a way, she kind of was.
Maybe she felt a little bad later on, especially considering she’d warmed up to the guy enough to give him her actual number. It was a dirty trick and she knew it, one she’d only picked up because she’d watched someone else do it. It was an old move, one practiced and perfectly since the age of the Nokia, and Nana couldn’t believe she’d found herself in a position that granted using it.
But the deafening cheers after Penny rang the bell that meant he owed the bar a round were more than enough to make up for the hassle.