The Rebound Agreement ✔

three

I sat in the passenger seat of Liam's banged-up, tiny, black pickup truck. He had taken the liberty of showing up unannounced an hour earlier demanding that I come with him. Unfortunately, my roommates were all there to witness the whole thing, so I didn't put up as much of a fight as I wanted to. I wasn't looking forward to the long explanation that they would demand the minute I stepped in the door.

My tailbone still ached from falling on the ice so frequently three days earlier and the lengthy car ride sitting on worn-out seats aggravated it. Liam was withholding our current destination and I was getting restless from having no clue as to what was going on.

Outside all I could see was black. Even though it wasn't quite seven o'clock at night, the sun had already set due to the early winter nights.

"So where are we going?" I asked Liam casually. A small part of me hoped that he would forget that he had to decided to keep this particular piece of information from me.

He glanced at me and smirked. "Nice try, princess."

I looked away. "Don't you think you could give me a little more notice for these things? I like to know what's going on days in advance so I can make plans."

"Where's your sense of adventure? That's half your problem, Katie. You never do anything impulsively or spur of the moment."

"How do you know?" He hardly even knew me, and it was awfully arrogant of him to make such bold statements.

Liam laughed. "Call it a hunch. Name something impulsive that you've done in the last month."

"I do a ton of impulsive things," I argued, "like..." It frustrated me that I was having such a hard time coming up with anything. Surely I had to have done something, right?

"Point proven." Liam dragged his hand through his hair before placing it back on the steering wheel.

"No, wait! The other day I ordered black coffee instead of a caramel latte at Starbucks."

"That's really the most impulsive thing you've done?" He looked at me with a mixture of amazement and distain.

"Well I agreed to dating you," I mumbled, sourly. "Apparently impulse decisions aren't all they're cracked up to be."

Liam laughed heartily. "Touché."

After another of hour of driving, Liam finally stops.

We had pulled up in front of a run-down looking building and the air reeked. The sign on the front of the building reading Dime's Bar and Grill didn't make me feel any more positively about where we had arrived.

"A bar? Really? I have no interest in drinking," I informed Liam as I came around the front of the truck to where he was.

"I won't make you drink unless you want to. But I think you'll surprise yourself and enjoy it here."

I doubted it, but refrained from voicing that thought.

We walked through the front doors and immediately I was overwhelmed. All around us people talked and laughed loudly. Bottles and fists clanked animatedly against the wooden tables and waitresses milled about carrying trays of food to various customers. On the far wall a football game blared loudly somehow finding its place among the noise. In another corner, a soccer game was playing on a large screen. The effect was quite chaotic.