“What was?” I ask.

I can see his smile from here when he answers. “You.”

Chapter SIX

Luke

I’M ELBOWS-DEEP IN a legal brief I can barely understand when my phone buzzes on the table at my elbow.

Beeeeeeeeeers, the text from Dylan reads.

I look up at the clock. Shit, how did it get to be six already? Where?

New place, on Island and 10th.

I groan—I fucking hate going downtown during the week.

Anticipating this, Dylan adds, Most of the team is coming. Jess broke up with Cody. We’re helping him drown.

I blink a few times, staring in shock at my phone. My former water polo teammate, Cody, has been with his girlfriend, Jess, since high school. In the best of moods, Cody will drink until he’s crawling. I can’t imagine how tonight will go down.

Still, weeknight or not, I can’t say no. Cody, Dylan, Andrew, Daniel, and I have been tight since freshman year when the seniors on the team locked the five of us on the pool deck for an entire December weekend in nothing but our Speedos, with a vending machine full of food as our nourishment, though no money. You don’t get through something like that, and go on to win two national championships without sticking together.

Be there by eight, I reply, putting down my phone and packing up my desk.

* * *

THE GUYS HAVE taken over two tables as close to the dance floor as one can get and reasonably remain seated. Not five feet from where Daniel has done a complete one-eighty in his seat is a group of girls dancing suggestively, pretending they don’t notice the six-foot-eight water polo player turned fitness instructor staring at them.

“Sorry I’m late,” I say in greeting, pulling out a chair and sitting down. I’ve never been to this club—it’s new but the décor wants to fool you into thinking it’s been here since the seventies. Looking to Cody, I ask, “You good?”

He puts his empty beer glass down next to another one. “No. But don’t feel sorry for me. I’ve been a dick to her lately. I think she might be doing this to scare me straight.”

I feel my brows lift. “Well, okay then.” I can’t tell if he’s being truly honest with himself, or if he’s in complete denial. Even if he’s wrong, and Jess is actually done, I wouldn’t blame him for wanting to stay in a hopeful place a little longer. He’s been with her for nearly six years.

Six years . . . it’s such a huge portion of our lives, and still, it’s shorter than the decade I spent feeling like I belonged to Mia. We grew up together in nearly every way possible. From eleven to nineteen she was mine.

The first time I was with someone else it felt like a distraction. Two weeks after we’d broken up, and I didn’t want to think too much about how I felt. I hadn’t needed to dig deep to understand why I was constantly nauseous and wanted to sleep half the time: I was fucking heartbroken.

But then I got drunk, and kissed Ali Stirling. She took off her shirt, then mine. One foot in front of the other: I got hard. That night, I fucked her three times in her aunt’s condo in Pacific Beach. Turns out, sex was still fun.

Until the next morning when I visited Mia at her dorm and broke down. We weren’t even technically together anymore but there I was, confessing, because that’s what we did. All of the air left the room the second the words “I slept with Ali last night” came out of my mouth.

Mia had stuttered out a quiet “Wow,” and we both felt it end, like the crack of a gunshot. We were sitting on her bed and had gone completely still, like a photo of us ripped in half straight down the middle. We’d agreed to break up, but I knew neither of us had felt it yet. Until that moment we didn’t really even know what broken up looked like. No one had ever touched me besides Mia, and suddenly that wasn’t true anymore. I wasn’t the guy who had one love. I wasn’t the Luke half of the one-word phrase, Luke-and-Mia. I was the guy with an ex-girlfriend. I was the guy who had sex with other people now. I moved on from our first love with a hard shove.

I shiver, blinking back into the present, asking, “Remind me why we came all the way downtown for after-work drinks when none of us work downtown?”

“I do,” Cody says.

Silence rings out at the table before Andrew finally can’t take it anymore. “Cody, you work part-time at Starbucks.”

“Yeah,” Cody says. “Starbucks downtown.”

“Actually . . . I work downtown,” Dylan says quietly and we all turn to look at him, confused. Dylan has a way of carrying on three lives, two of which remain completely unknown to us. I’ve known him since we were freshmen, but if you asked me what he does all day, I would guess he reads, surfs, goes for long walks, and gets lost.

“Wait, what?” I say. “Since when do you have a job?”

He shrugs. “Since, like, Sept—”

“We came here tonight,” Andrew begins, interrupting us, “because you, Luke, banged the bartender where I wanted to go, and—”

“Wait, hold up,” Daniel says, finally turning back to the table. “Luke banged the bartender at Mighty Brew?”

I groan. “She wasn’t the bartender. She was a—”

Dylan cuts me off. “I think Andrew means that you slept with the bartender at Fred’s,” he says, more quietly. I can hear the question embedded there: Did you fuck London, Luke?

Andrew shakes his head, confused. “Luke banged the new bartender at Fred’s? I was talking about the redhead at Stone at Liberty Station.”

Dylan gets up with a huff and heads toward the bathroom. Cody groans, saying, “Pretty soon we won’t be able to go anywhere without someone crying in the bathroom over Luke.”

“Jesus Christ.” I rest my head in my hands and Andrew slides a half-finished beer into my line of sight.

“Here. Drink this.”

“Can I get you guys anything else?” a voice asks at the far end of the table.

“Two more of these,” Andrew says, and then points to me, saying loud enough for our server to hear, “Luke, you’re not allowed to bang this waitress. They serve Ruination here and I’ll be pissed if we can’t come back.”

“Okay,” I mumble, closing my eyes and keeping my head down. Is this a conversation that would have made me laugh a week ago? Right now it makes me feel faintly sleazy.

“She’s hot,” Daniel says a few seconds later, “in that single-serving kind of way.”

“Dan—” Dylan starts, having returned surprisingly quickly.

I hold up my hand for him to wait, leaning in so I can hear Daniel better, repeating, “That ‘single-serving’ kind of way?” What the fuck is he talking about?

“You guys,” Dylan says with more intent.

But Daniel continues, turning and planting his elbows on the table. “That thing you have, a little treat, that fills you up but you forget it pretty quickly. A Twinkie, a bag of chips. An energy drink. Cute girl, nice body . . . single serving.”

In spite of myself I laugh at this shit—Daniel can be such a dick—finally lifting my head and taking a sip of my beer. But straight across from me stands Dylan, hunched over the table, wearing a shut the fuck up expression. He looks at my face and then widens his eyes when he looks over my shoulder, meaningfully.

I turn, and see that the waitress is right behind me, her back to us as she writes something down on her pad. Her wheat-colored ponytail brushes her shoulder when she straightens, takes a deep breath, and sticks her pen behind her ear. When she turns to us, smile plastered on her face, my heart immediately bottoms out.