Page 66 of Ransom
Ransom didn't argue. I knocked mine back without flinching, set the glass down, and grinned at him. He grinned back. Suddenly everything was a little looser, a little easier.
Eduardo brought two more shots. Then two more. The tequila burned going down, sharper than the salsa, and the cumbia shifted to something slower.
"I'm drunk," I said eventually, when it was past the point of obvious.
"No shit, Ranger."
"You're worse."
"I'm grieving. Doctor's orders."
"Doctor told you to drink your weight in tequila?"
"He implied it."
"Bullshit doctor."
"Best one in Albuquerque."
He grinned sloppily across the table, his hair falling into his eyes. He looked younger somehow, softer. Maybe more dangerous than ever.
"Dance with me," he said.
I looked around. "Here?"
"Nobody's watching."
I looked around at the old men and the couple and Eduardo polishing a glass that didn't need polishing.
"Alright."
We slid out of the booth together and staggered over to the dark corner where the neon didn't reach.
The song was slow, a man singing about a woman he couldn't have. Ransom put his hands on my hips and pulled me in hard, his fingers digging into the bone. My arms went around his neck and we moved together, no rhythm, no plan, just two drunk idiots pressed together in a dive bar, dancing like the world was about to end.
My chin dropped to his shoulder. He turned his face into my neck and breathed me in, and his hands slid lower, gripping my ass, pulling my hips flush against his so I could feel exactly what this was doing to him.
"That thing you said," he said against my throat. "In the prison."
I held my breath. "What thing?"
"You know what thing."
My breath caught. My pulse jumped under his lips, and he had to feel it.
"That man's mine," he said, low, right into my ear. "You said that. You broke a man's nose, and you pointed his bloody face at me, and you said that man's mine like it was nothing."
"It wasn't nothing."
"I know it wasn't." He bit down on the tendon in my neck, and I shuddered against him. His teeth held. His hand slid up my back, fisted in my hair, and pulled my head sideways to give him more of my throat. "You don't get to take it back now."
I couldn't get a breath in.
Somebody at the pool table whistled.
Ransom didn't lift his mouth off my neck. He just turned his head a quarter inch and growled low in his throat, and the whistle cut off mid-note.
"Say it again," he said into my skin.
