Mason pushed his hand away. "Are you feeling okay?"
"But it's a lot to me," James said, ignoring Mason. "So I don't know why we have to stop on the homestretch. You know? It's like she's punishing me." He laughed. "Inside joke. Not with these guys." He waved his arms around, gesturing to the rest of the table. "It's an inside joke with me and Penny." He took a sip of his drink and made a slurping noise with his straw.
Daphne and I both laughed.
"See," I said, giving James a weird look. "Experiencing new people or new food is fun. And very passionate."
"You're so full of yourself." She picked up the margarita I had ordered for her and took a sip. She scrunched up her face. "Fine, I have to admit that it's actually pretty good."
"Exactly."
"Is it?" James asked. "Let me try." He put his straw in Daphne's margarita and took a sip. "It is pretty good." He laughed and made the slurping noise again with the straw as he pulled it out of her drink. He kept it in his mouth, letting it dangle like a weirdly long cigarette.
"Um, are you feeling okay, James?" I asked.
He spit the straw out onto the table and cleared his throat. "Yeah. Why? I mean, I'm a little overheated I guess." He pulled off his suit jacket. He tried to toss it on the back of his chair, but completely missed and just threw it on the ground. He didn't bother to pick it up. Or maybe he didn't realize he had missed. "What are you looking at?" he asked when he turned back around.
"Nothing?" I glanced over at Matt.
Matt immediately gave me two thumbs up. Oh, no. What the fuck did Matt do?
Chapter 21
Daphne
I quickly picked up the suit jacket that James had accidentally thrown on the floor. "You dropped this," I said and handed it to him.
"Oh, no, that's not mine." He immediately pushed it back into my hands. "I'm not wearing one."
"Right. Because you just took it off..." I let my voice trail off. Does he really not remember wearing it a second ago? James had only drunk half of the beer in front of him. Maybe he was a light weight, but I had never seen someone react so quickly to a beer. I placed the suit jacket on the back of my chair so it wouldn't get stepped on.
James ran his hand through his hair. It was the same thing that Rob seemed to do so often. It made me wonder if their father did it too.
"So," Layla said, breaking the awkward silence, "should we play an icebreaker game?"
"I learned a fun icebreaker game from my boyfriend, Tim," Kristen said. "You ask a question about someone, but then someone else at the table has to answer it."
"Two truths, one lie," James said way too loudly for the middle of a restaurant, completely ignoring Kristen's suggestion. He rolled up the sleeves of his dress shirt and put his elbows on the table. "I just played this with Penny and some of the new interns at my company. It's lots of fun. When it's your turn, you tell two truths and one lie about yourself, and everyone has to guess the lie."
"We can totally play that, if that's what you want, James," Kristen said way too seductively for normal conversation.
Rob leaned toward me. "Has everyone at this table lost their minds, or is it just me?"
I laughed. "I was just thinking the same thing. Your friends are very interesting."
"My friends? What about your friends?"
I laughed again. My eyes wandered to his mouth. His smile was so charming. And I couldn't help but think about how his lips felt on mine. The kisses we had shared had been some of the best of my life. Maybe Rob was right. Maybe there should be more passion in a relationship than I realized. His smile broadened when he noticed I was staring at his mouth. I cleared my throat and looked away from him. Kristen gave me a not so subtle thumbs up from across the table.
"I'll go first," James said. "Let me think. No! Actually someone else go first. I can't think of anything right now." He wiped a bead of sweat off his forehead.
Something was definitely off with him. It was almost like he had taken something to make him all hyper. I frowned. Was he on cocaine? The thought made my stomach twist into knots.
"James, are you feeling okay?" I asked.
"I'm swell. You go first!"
"Oh, um..." I tried to think of some funny facts about myself. All I wanted to do was tell him that I felt it too. That I loved the feeling of rain on my skin and his hand in mine. But I couldn't do that in front of all these people. Everything else that popped into my head was just super lame.
"I'll go first," Alina said, saving me. She gave me a small smile. Alina was never very outgoing either, so I appreciated the gesture more than she even knew. "I'm about to get married to the love of my life. I can play guitar. And I only have one major regret."
"You're definitely lying about getting married to the love of your life," Matt said.
Alina laughed awkwardly. "No, that's true. It's really, really true."
"It is," Kristen said. "Just mentioning Bryce's name makes her giddy like a school girl. See, look at her face right now."
Alina was smiling. She grabbed her drink and took a sip, clearly embarrassed.
I glanced at Rob out of the corner of my eye, but immediately looked away. He was staring right at me. We had both just talked about what love meant to us and how neither of us had experienced it yet. Was that why he was looking at me? Was that why I had looked at him?
"Cheers to that," James said and lifted up his glass. "And this guy right here is about to be in the same boat as us. He's proposing to his girlfriend soon." He slapped Mason on the back.
"What the fuck, man?" Mason said. "You promised you wouldn't tell anyone."
"I haven't told anyone. I haven't even told Penny. Which has been really hard, because we don't keep secrets from each other. Besides, we don't know these people."
I was pretty sure he meant to whisper the last line. He had said it a little quieter, but his normal speaking voice seemed strangely loud tonight.
"Layla knows her." Matt gestured to Layla who was sitting beside him.
Layla put her hands up. "I swear I won't tell Bee. Your secret is safe with me."
"Still," Mason said. "Stop trying to ruin the surprise." He laughed and lightly pushed James' shoulder.
James shrugged. "Anyway, Alina, you're lying about only having one regret. We all saw that it was more than that."
Alina's eyes got wide. If the restaurant wasn't busy around us, we would have been able to hear crickets chirping. "No," she said quietly. "I, um, lump that all together as one bad decision."
"Oh, sorry. You're lying about the guitar thing then?"
Alina nodded her head. "Yeah. I'm terrible with musical instruments."
"Really?" Matt asked. "I would have guessed you'd know your way around, say, a flute or a clarinet pretty well."
Alina choked on the sip she had just taken.
Rob laughed. "Did you seriously just compare your dick to a flute? Is it like super thin or something?"