He grinned at me. I was really fucking glad I could provide so much amusement for my friends tonight. “Same thing you do on a date with a chick?”
I glowered at him.
“Or not,” he said, chuckling at my expense.
“You enjoy the food and drink,” his girlfriend, Danica, offered, “and make him feel like he didn’t totally waste his money.”
“And how do I do that?”
“You look him in the eye,” Summer said. “You listen when he speaks, and laugh at his jokes. And at the end of it, you thank him for a nice time.”
“Right. I’ll try that.” I threw back a shot. There were several of them on the table, and everyone had a drink on the go in front of them.
Danica shrugged. “Women have been doing it for centuries.”
Ash grinned at me and my obvious discomfort. Jessa smiled at me across the table.
Brody chuckled.
“Just smoke a joint first and chill out,” Summer said. “It’s not a big deal. You’ll do fine.”
“Or have a drink,” Ash suggested, and sipped his beer.
“Or a few,” Brody said.
“Like what’s your drink of choice when you want to relax?” Danica asked, sympathetically. “I like Strongbow.”
“Gin,” Ash said, venturing a guess, maybe.
“Gin and juice,” Summer said, raising an eyebrow at me. How she knew my favorite drink, I had no idea. Though she was the party queen; kinda in her job description to know such things. “How about one right now?” she offered. “You look like you could use one. I’ll find the waitress.”
She started looking around, but I just shook my head. “Not in the mood.”
“Gin and juice?” Danica giggled. “Like the Snoop Dogg song? On your playlist,” she said, nudging Ash.
“What playlist?” I said, watching them. She wasn’t in his lap, but pretty damn close. The two of them were always up in each others’ grill, deep in thecan’t-keep-our-hands-off-each-otherphase.
I wondered if that would last.
“My vortex playlist.” He shrugged. “It’s this thing Summer made up.”
I glanced at Summer, but she was talking to some woman at the next table.
“It’s like a deathbed playlist,” Danica said.
“Huh?”
“You choose twenty songs,” Ash explained. “Kind of your musical blood, guts and soul. Summer made us make them.”
“Us?”
“Me and Matt. When we were putting the Players together…”
Huh. I studied him.
Equal footing.That’s what he’d promised me when we put this band together.
And now they were making deathbed playlists without me?