Kayla had been twenty-one for nineteen days, and she already had a favorite bar.
It was the one two blocks off campus with string lights and sticky floors, and the reason it was her favorite was standing behind the taps with his sleeves rolled to his elbows. His name was Jordan. He was twenty-seven, a grad student who tended bar four nights a week, and every time she ordered another vodka soda, he slid her a glass of water with it and a look that said pace yourself, I’m paying attention.
Tonight she’d only had two, and she was sharp and clear and very, very interested.
“You keep staring,” he said, leaning on the bar while her friends shrieked over a song across the room.
“You keep letting me.”
He laughed. “Fair.”
“When’s your break?”
His eyebrows went up. He studied her face carefully, the way he always checked IDs, all the way down to the birth year. “Kayla. How many have you had?”
“Two. You poured them. And four waters.” She held his gaze. “I’m not drunk. I’m just done pretending I don’t want you.”
Something shifted in his expression, a slow, warm smile. He glanced at the clock. “Ten minutes. Office in the back, past the kegs. If you change your mind, I’ll just see you at the bar.”
She did not change her mind.
The back office was a cramped little room with a desk buried in invoices, a box of lemons, and a single hanging bulb. Jordan closed the door behind her and the noise of the bar dropped to a thump.
“Last chance to just talk,” he said softly.
She answered by pulling him down by his apron strings and kissing him.
He made a sound low in his throat and lifted her onto the edge of the desk like she weighed nothing, invoices sliding to the floor. His hands were cool from the ice bin, and they slid up under her shirt and made her gasp. She tugged at his belt; he caught her wrists for one second, eyes on hers.
“Yes?”
“Yes. God, yes. Jordan, please.”
He let her go. She freed him and stared, and he laughed at her expression, a little embarrassed and a lot pleased.
“We’ll go slow,” he promised.
They tried. He eased into her bit by bit, one hand braced on the wall behind her, kissing her through every gasp, and she clung to his shoulders and felt herself open around him until there was nothing left but the delicious full stretch of it. Then she wrapped her legs around his waist and pulled, and slow was finished.
The desk creaked. A clipboard hit the floor. Through the door came the roar of the crowd singing along to some throwback song, and she let herself be loud under the cover of it, his name, yes, harder, over and over. He kept his eyes on her face the whole time like he didn’t want to miss a second. She came hard, her head thrown back against the corkboard, schedules fluttering. He followed with a groan into her neck, holding her so tight she could feel his heart pound against her own.
They stayed like that, breathing, foreheads together, both grinning like idiots.
“I have to go cut limes,” he said.
“Romantic.”
“I’m going to think about you the whole time I’m cutting them.”
“Better,” she decided.
He helped her down, fixed her shirt with careful fingers, kissed her one more time against the door. She slipped out first. Two minutes later he walked back behind the bar, cool as anything, and set a fresh glass in front of her.
Water. With a lemon wedge on the rim, and a napkin underneath with his number written in Sharpie.
Her friends never noticed she’d been gone.
