A Love Letter to Whiskey (8 page)

“I’m making a tequila drink,” I pointed out. “Mixing will probably screw me in the long run.”

“Nah, you’ll be fine.”

“I don’t know, Jamie…”

“Oh come on,” he challenged, taking a small step toward me. It was tiny, barely even an inch, but suddenly I felt the heat from him surrounding me and I picked at my tank top with my free hand, desperate for a breeze. “Don’t you want a little whiskey on your lips?”

My eyes shot to his, because I knew as well as he did that there was more than one question beneath the one he’d voiced out loud. He cocked a brow, waiting, and though I should have pushed him back, made space, poured up a margarita and walked away from him, I lifted my glass to his instead.

“To bad decisions.”

His grin widened, his eyes never leaving me as I tilted my head back, letting the amber liquid coat my throat. Jamie took his slower than I did, inhaling through his teeth as the burn settled in.

And just like that, I’d taken my first shot. I didn’t tell Jamie it was my first one, I didn’t think I needed to. I wanted to hate it, to detest it, to grimace and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and reach for a chaser. But we set the glasses back on the counter slowly, our fingers brushing, and Jamie’s eyes were on my lips where leftover whiskey remained. My tongue traced the liquid, and he inhaled stiffly, eyes snapping up to mine.

Cat, meet mouse.

MY MOM WAS GOING
to murder me.

Nearly everyone was gone now, the time on my phone reading 3:47AM. Everyone except for Jenna, who was passed out in my bed, Ali, a basketball player in my grade, who was curled around the same toilet Mom had been hugging the night she told me about Dad, and Jamie, who had stayed to help me clean what little we could once the last of the party had cleared out.

The carpets were ruined, that much I could tell for sure. I could probably salvage the cabinets and tables with a good scrub down and I’d need to search every corner for trash. Sticky cups had been gathered and thrown away, but shot glasses still littered the kitchen and various spots in the living room. It reeked of alcohol, a smell I wasn’t exactly sure how to get rid of at the time, and I was supposed to work in seven hours.

“I have to call out,” I finally said, blowing out a breath as I surveyed our surroundings.

Jamie looked around, too, running a hand through his long hair. “When does your mom get home?”

“Late tomorrow night.” I checked my phone again. “Or should I say, late tonight.”

“You’ve got time. It’s not too bad.” I leveled my eyes and he bit back a smile. “Okay, so the carpet is shot, but everything else is fixable.”

“My TV remote is missing.”

“Replaceable.”

“There’s a mustache made out of spitting tobacco on my face in one of the only family pictures we have.”

Jamie tucked his hands into the pockets of his dress pants. “Yeah, you’re kind of screwed.”

“I told you what would happen if I mixed alcohol,” I teased, trying to find humor in the situation while I still could.

Jamie crossed the living room to where I was standing, his eyes bloodshot but still beautiful. “Let’s get out of here for a while.”

“Are you crazy? I need to clean. I need to…” I waved my hands around. “Do something. About all of this.”

“You’ve already admitted that you’re screwed, B. What you
can
do is only going to take you a few hours, so why not send out tonight with a bang?”

I chewed my lip, knowing he was right and hating it all the same. “What do you have in mind?”

JAMIE THUMBED THROUGH
his phone as we settled in on a blanket in the sand, feet facing the waves, the beach still dark. He landed on Chad Lawson’s
The Piano
album, adjusting the volume before setting his phone down between us and reaching into the brown paper bag on his lap. He handed me one burrito before retrieving his and setting the brown bag aside, using his shoes to weigh it down against the wind.

I couldn’t believe he’d convinced the cab driver to take us through the only 24-hour breakfast drive-thru in town, but I was happy he had been smart enough to realize neither of us was in shape to drive. He cracked the seal on a Vitamin Water and took a long pull before passing it to me.

“Think this will save us from a hangover?” I asked, taking a sip before passing the bottle back to him. He replaced the lid and we both went to work unwrapping the tin foil around our breakfast burritos — mine bacon, his sausage.

“I think it’s one of my more brilliant ideas. What cures a hangover better than greasy eggs, Vitamin Water, and the beach?”

“So modest,” I chided, taking my first bite. The sarcasm died on my lips after that. “Homahgawd.” I groaned, taking another bite as Jamie watched me, chuckling.

“You’re welcome.”

I grinned through a full mouth, but didn’t say anything else. For a while, we just listened to the smooth melodies flowing from Jamie’s phone as we ate and shared that one drink between us. Dawn was on the horizon, the beach glowing first in a cool pool of blue before taking on a soft purple hue. I was still in the thin tank top I’d stripped down to at the party and I shivered a bit against the cool breeze rolling in off the waves.

“Here,” Jamie said, unbuttoning his shirt the rest of the way down. He yanked his tie off before shaking one arm out and then the other. I tried to argue with him, at least I thought I did, but my voice must have been just as stuck in my throat as my eyes were on his chest. His bare, beautiful chest. He draped his shirt over my shoulders, the fabric still warm from him, dripping in his scent, and I sighed with the comfort it brought.

“Thank you.” I peeled at the foil covering my burrito, eyes on the water. “So, you excited to get out of here? Ready to cause trouble at UC San Diego?”

He smirked, but offered a single shrug. “Yes and no. Remember our talk over Christmas break?”

I nodded.

“I’m still feeling a bit of all that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited for this next chapter and all that, but it’s still a little scary.”

“It’d be weird if you weren’t scared,” I reminded him, and he gave me a small smile. I could tell he didn’t want to talk about the future anymore, and in a way I didn’t blame him. Up until that point in our lives, high school had been our biggest and best experience. It was hard to imagine a future where the things that mattered to us then would only be a distant memory.

When we finished our burritos, we both leaned back on our palms, watching as the sun began its slow ascent. There was always so much hype around sunsets on the west coast of Florida, but I found even more beauty in the sunrises on our coast. There was something about being so close to the ocean at the dawn of a new day, filled with new possibilities.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” I said after a while, keeping my eyes on the horizon just past my toes.

“Not just you.”

“I know,” I clarified. “I just thought maybe you’d call me. Or want to go for a drive. Or…” I didn’t know what else to say, so I let my sentence fade on the breeze.

“I wanted to,” Jamie said, adjusting the weight on the heels of his hands. “I don’t know. Jenna hit me at a time that was already so hard for me, you know?” A line formed between his brows. “My parents were high school sweethearts.”

The weight of that statement hit me hard in the chest. What he meant to say was that he wanted what his parents had, and he thought Jenna was the key to that. I suddenly realized her breaking up with him was the best thing that could have happened to me. Even then, when I was still in denial about my addiction, the thought of him marrying my best friend nearly caused me to gasp out loud.

“It’s okay that Jenna wasn’t the one.”

“I know,” he said quickly. “I think I always knew. She was fun, we clicked, had some great times together. But there was something missing.” He turned to me then, eyes boring into the side of my face because I refused to meet that stare.

“You’ll find someone,” I said softly, eyes still on the waves. They were bathed in a pinkish-orange glow as the sun struggled to wake up our part of the world.

“Well,” he said loudly, sitting up straighter. “I don’t like leaving my life to chance. So, I have a proposition.” I met his eyes then, and they were playful — mischievous. “If you’re game, that is.”

“Why do I feel like I should run right now?”

Jamie laughed, and it was the first time I’d seen his real smile break through that night — teeth bright, skin wrinkled at the corners of his eyes. “I say we make a pact.”

“A pact?”

He nodded. “If neither of us are married by the time we’re thirty, we marry each other.”

“Oh my God,” I scoffed, leaning up to mirror his new posture. “That is so stupid, Jamie. It’s also the plot line for every cheesy Rom Com ever.”

He shrugged, wiping the sand from his hands and gazing back out at the water. “Sounds like someone is scared.”

“I’m not
scared.
It’s dumb.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“I’m going to be married by thirty, Jamie. And you’re
definitely
going to be locked down by then.”

“So then you have nothing to worry about.” He challenged me for the second time that night, eyes sparking to life as they met mine. He extended his hand. “If we’re not married in twelve years, you become Mrs. Shaw.”

I swallowed hard at his words.
Mrs Shaw.
“That’s not fair. You turn thirty before me.”

Jamie shrugged again. “My pact, my terms. Do we have a deal?” He thrust his hand out farther, and I stared at it, brows bent as I chewed my cheek. Finally, I rolled my eyes and gripped his hand with my own, shaking it three times. “Fine. But this is dumb, and pointless.”

Jamie just grinned.

“You’re so weird,” I said, getting in the last word on my feelings about the stupid pact.

“Yeah, but you love me anyway.” He winked, stealing the Vitamin Water from the space between us and draining the last of it before leaning back on his hands again.

I didn’t think too long about the fact that he’d said I loved him, or the possibility that he might be right. I didn’t think about the pact or what would happen in twelve years, because Jamie was leaving, and I was staying.

Mom grounded me for the first month of that summer and I had to pay to replace the carpets, but I didn’t even care. It was worth it to have that first shot of Whiskey, to eat breakfast burritos on the beach and make stupid promises we wouldn’t keep.

That was supposed to be the last night I saw Jamie Shaw.

I let him go, just like I was supposed to, and I did my best to never think about him again. Not that summer when I saw him around town, not that fall when he left for California and I stayed behind, not even when I applied to Alder University knowing it was in the same city as the University of California San Diego. I avoided looking at his social media, too. Eventually, as senior year kicked into gear and my focus became my
own
graduation, I really did start to let him go.

But as fate would have it, that wasn’t my last night with Jamie Shaw.

Not even close.