He laughed. “Jack’s my drink, but I have cheap-ass taste. I know that’s an upgrade, so yeah.”
With a smile and a shrug, she turned and opened a door in a freestanding armoire, which apparently was her bar. “I don’t believe taste should be qualified like that. People have different tastes. You like what you like. It doesn’t matter how much what you like costs, or how many other people like it. If it tastes good to you, that’s all that matters. How do you take it?”
“Uh ... in a glass? I never got my head around ‘straight,’ ‘neat,’ whatever. I just like it poured in a glass.”
She grabbed a plain, low glass and the bourbon. “That’s ‘neat.’ But people get that wrong all the time and say ‘straight’ when they mean ‘neat,’ so bartenders usually accept the two to mean the same thing. Hardly anybody really wants a straight drink in the correct meaning.”
“What’s the correct meaning?”
“Straight, according to the mixologist manuals, is chilled white booze, like vodka.” She pushed the glass with his drink—neat—toward him on the island.
“Doesn’t ‘on the rocks’ mean chilled?”
“’On the rocks’ means with ice. When a drink ischilled, the booze is either refrigerated or we use a shaker, shake the ice with it, and then drain the ice out.” She opened the fridge, grabbed a bottle of white wine, pulled a wine glass off a shelf above the counter, and poured herself a drink.
“Okay. One more. What does ‘straight up’ mean?”
“Any drink served ‘up’ is in a stemmed glass. ‘Up’ literally just means higher off the bar. So ‘straight up’ would be chilled liquor served in a stemmed glass.”
“No cap, I don’t know a single person who wants that when they say they want a drink straight up.”
She laughed. “I know. So few people actually do, we always have to double check what they really want when they order—and sometimes they get pissed like it’suswho don’t know what’s what. Whoever decided on the terminology did not do a good job of coming up with adequately distinct terms.”
Beautiful, rich, smart, a business owner. Older, by some still uncertain degree. Obviously with a lot more of her shit together than he had of his. He couldn’t even pass the fucking ASE exams. She really waswayout of his league. How the fuck had he ended up standing in her fancy loft, thinking she’d ever consider letting him get up close and personal?
Well, because she’d invited him. He was standing here holding a drink she’d made him. She’d told him to kiss her, and he had, and she’d liked it enough to invite him home.
He sort of felt like a stray dog she’d picked up off the street.
There were lots of areas in his life where Jay didn’t measure up. Most of them. He wasn’t as good as his father, his brother, his club brothers. He and Duncan had come in as prospects around the same time, and Jay had gotten his patch more than a year before him, which should have indicated he was at least a better Bull than Dunc, but more than once he’d overheard some patch mutter about how fucked up it was that Mav was keeping Dunc from a patch while Jay was walking around a full member. Even against a prospect, he hadn’t measured up. And if it weren’t for Zach, he’d probably have lost his patch entirely and been excommunicated after he’d tried to do that freelance deal and ended up shot.
Falling short in just about every area of his life. But not this one. Not with girls. Never in his years of fucking—since he was fifteen—had he felt like he did right now. Inadequate.
But maybe that was just because he aimed at girls who fell even shorter than he did.
This was dumb. A mistake. He should finish the drink and yeet out of here before he really humiliated himself.
Before she realized what a nothing he was.
CHAPTER SIX
Petra had no idea whatshe was doing here. Well, obviously sheknew, but she wasn’t entirely sure why she was doing it. This guy was cute, yes. Very. She found herself increasingly charmed by him. The swagger with which he’d walked into Gertrude’s was gone now that he was on his own. There was a vulnerability about him, buried under the leather.
She was also charmed by his ... innocence? That didn’t seem like the right word for a guy in a Brazen Bulls kutte, with a split lip and scraped knuckles from fighting, but it was the word that kept springing up in her mind since she’d found him waiting for her behind the bar.