Free Three's a Charm by Sydney Michkal Page B

into her pocket with her dignity more or less intact . Even if he did pick her up, they would only fight all the way to her house and then probably inside, too . Better to sit on the sidewalk until the sun comes up and she can walk a straight line again . Odds are good she wouldn't throw Paul out again after he made it into the house, anyway; she's never been good at staying mad. Her anger always manages to short-circuit back around to worry before she h as time to really settle in and seethe .
    “ Katie ?” She jerks, looks up. Ryan stands there with Blue Eyes, his guitar slung over his shoulder. The rest of Ryan ’s band is nowhere in sight. N either are Blue Eye's friends. Blue has his hand resting lightly against Ryan ’s guitar, though, in a way that makes Katie think that he would rather be touching something else .  She feels like an intruder, a little bit, but hey.  This is her piece of sidewalk.  She claimed it by successfully sitting down before she could fall.
    Drinking always makes Katie randy. Paul used to tease her about it, but Paul is part of the reason that Katie got hammered in the first place.  She pushes the thought away .
    Leaving the other half of her reason continuing to stand in front of her.  “I didn’t t hink that you knew my name,” Katie says stupidly.
    Ryan blinks, maybe a little more slowly than usual . He’s not as steady on his feet as he ought to be, either; his s et ended hours before, and he had entertained himself on free drinks until the bar closed down.  Free drinks, and Blue Eyes . Katie had been kept busy all night, b ut she’s not blind, either, so. 
    “I’ve been playing here for nine months,” Ryan says. His tongue s ounds thick. “How could I not know your name?”
    That’s...really good logic, actually. Katie thinks that she might have hurt Ryan ’s feelings.  If she were steadier on her feet, she would give him a hug to apologize .
    “Are you sure that you’re all right t o be out here?” Blue Eyes asks her. He doesn’t look nearly as drunk as Ryan himself; when Katie casts her mind back, she doesn’t remember him having more than a beer or two the entire time that he was in the bar .  An easy fact to overlook, given how hard his friends had been hitting their pitchers.
    Katie starts to tell him that she’s fine, until she stops and realizes that she’s a woman sitting by herself on a curb in the most dangerous hours before dawn, and that even Billy has gone home. She’s drunk, but she’s not stupid. “Not even a little bit,” she says.
    Blue Eyes looks at Ryan , even though Katie can tell from where she’s sitting that Ryan ’s ability to make any decision more complicated than untying his shoes is at least six hours away from returning. Ryan looks back. This is how Katie winds up in the backseat of a car that Mystery Guy is just barely sober enough to drive.   She watches the sun come up through the back window, catches Blue Eyes watching her through the rearview.
    “My name is Adrian ,” he tells her .  His eyes might be a different color than Ryan's, but Katie still finds herself shivering all the same .
     
    *
     
    Adrian is staying in the kind of rundown motel that you only tolerate if you’re broke, and even then only by telling yourself that yo u’ll have a hell of a st ory from it later. He glances over his shoulder at them apologetically as he pulls into the lot and cuts the engine. “Road trip,” he says in a tone that sounds like apology. “The less money spent on where we sleep , the more there is for beer and gas.”
    When he says it like that, Katie kind of expects to see his three buddies already piled onto a single bed when they enter the room, but all that greets her is an empty room and a lot of tension . A bed, an end table, a low and ratty couch that might have seen Eisenhower.  For a few seconds, Katie, Adrian, and R yan look everywhere but at each other.  It's like being fifteen again.
    If being fifteen had