“Oh, okay, that’s fine,” Maisie said casually. “A party’s cool with me.”

“It won’t be much of a party,” Oliver said. “Not if I know Shaun’s friends.”

“Great,” Maisie said, less enthusiastically.

I smiled at her. “I’m sure you’ll have a great time with Shaun and his friends.”

I would have a much better time knowing Maisie was not on her own with a boy she liked. Shaun seemed perfectly nice, but I was responsible for Maisie this summer and I didn’t want to encourage her to have too much fun.

With Maisie sorted, I was truly ready to let my hair down. “Come on then, let’s drop Maisie off at your place and head out. I’m in the mood for a cocktail.”

-*-

When we dropped Maisie off at Oliver’s, Shaun already had a few friends round, and they were just hanging out playing video games. With any luck, Maisie’s evening would be less exciting than she was hoping for.

Oliver and I jumped in a cab and went to a pub not far from the stadium. There were a few fans in the pub drinking to celebrate the victory earlier today, but most of them left Oliver alone after a pat on the back and kind words for his performance.

Oliver ordered a huge plate of chicken, bacon, fries, and two fried eggs, and added a side of vegetables for good measure. I stuck to a baked potato—called a jacket potato here apparently—with a portion of beans and cheese. The combination sounded utterly bizarre, but Oliver insisted I would enjoy it, and he was right.

Once Oliver had satisfied his huge appetite, we grabbed a pint each and found a small corner table that afforded a degree of privacy. I took the bench and Oliver pulled up a chair.

“I know you asked for a cocktail,” Oliver said, passing me a pint of dark, room temperature liquid, “but I want you to try a pint of bitter. It’s a bit of an acquired taste, but it grows on you.”

I gingerly took a small sip and then a slightly longer one. The taste was… inoffensive, I suppose. Bland would probably be a better word, although the lack of fizz meant it slipped down a lot easier than the heavily carbonated American lagers I had to serve back home.

“What do you think?” Oliver asked, eagerly eyeing my reaction.

“I think… I’m looking forward to my cocktail.”

Oliver rolled his eyes, but didn’t seem overly surprised. It’s not like everyone in the bar was drinking the stuff. Most of the women had wine, and the men were more often than not drinking a lager, albeit not usually an American brand.

“Do you like the pub at least?”

“Yes. I could definitely get used to this place.” The pub was busy enough that most of the tables were taken, but it didn’t feel loud and rowdy like the ones I’d worked in back home. “The bar staff look a lot less stressed than I usually am at work,” I remarked. They poured pints at what appeared to be a glacial pace, but no-one seemed to mind.

“You’re stressed most of the time,” Oliver said. “You need to let your hair down.”

“That’s what I’m doing now,” I said. As if to prove a point, I picked up my beer and drank as much as I could in one go. I put the glass down expecting it to be nearly empty, but saw that I’d barely drunk an inch.

“Good effort,” he said, with a slow nod of the head. “But you’re never going to finish that. I’ll go buy you something else.”

My eyes followed him as he walked to the bar. It was like his ass and my eyes were magnetically linked. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I suddenly felt guilty for scolding men who perved at my chest. Sometimes you just couldn’t help but stare; a work of art deserved to be appreciated.

If I’d been paying more attention, I might have noticed whoever it was who stole Oliver’s chair right out from under me. Shit. I looked around, but there were no spare seats.

“Is this your way of getting me to sit on your lap?” Oliver asked, standing over me with the drinks. “That’s fine with me, but I warn you, I’m heavy.”

“Sorry, I was a million miles away.” I moved up and made room for Oliver on the bench. He sat down and managed to fit about three quarters of his ass on the chair and needed to squeeze up next to me in the process.

“This one is a lager top,” he said, passing me a much more golden-colored beer this time. “It’s about three-quarters lager and then topped up with lemonade.”

“Lemonade? Lemonade with beer? That sounds gross.”

“It’s not the lemonade you’re thinking of. It’s like Sprite, not the freshly squeezed stuff. I guess you could ask for a lager and Sprite but it would sound odd. No one here describes it that way.”

I took a sip and this time I genuinely enjoyed the drink. It was remarkably refreshing and couldn’t have tasted much more different to the previous beer.

“It’s good,” I said. “Still not a cocktail, but it’s good.”

I kept checking my phone to see if Maisie had been in touch, but there were no messages. That was good I suppose. She only got in touch if it was an emergency.

“You worried about Maisie?” Oliver asked.

“No,” I lied. “Well, maybe a bit. I just hope she doesn’t do anything silly.”

“She’ll be fine. Shaun’s a good kid.”

“I still can’t believe you have a child,” I said. “I mean, I know he’s not yours as such, but still, it’s kind of incredible.”

“Yeah,” Oliver said. “It’s certainly that.”

“You’ve done a great job,” I said. “With Shaun. That can’t have been easy taking him in after his parents passed away.”

“No. It wasn’t.”

“You don’t want to talk about it?” I asked. I recognized the signs of someone trying to avoid a topic of conversation. I’d done the same thing often enough.

“It’s not that,” he said. “I’ll talk about Shaun all day. He’s a huge part of my life. But the circumstances leading up to that were… not pleasant.”

“I know the feeling. How did we both end up as parents to fourteen and fifteen year olds in our early twenties?”

“You’ve been a parent to Maisie ever since I’ve known you,” Oliver said softly. “She wouldn’t be the woman she is today without you.”

A light feeling of nausea washed over me as it always did when I contemplated my part in what happened to Maisie.

“I didn’t mean the burn on her face,” Oliver said quickly, reading my mind. “That’s one hundred percent on me. I mean that she’s an excellent athlete and a phenomenal young woman. That’s down to you.”

“Thanks.”

“Sorry, I keep saying the wrong thing, don’t I?”

“Let’s just talk about something else. We’re in a rugby pub aren’t we?”

Oliver gave a gentle shrug of the shoulders. “It does tend to get a lot of rugby fans and amateur players.”

“In that case, why don’t you teach me some of these drinking games you lot play. I promised myself and Maisie that I’m going to have fun tonight. Getting drunk with you seems like a good place to start.”

“This might not have been a good idea,” I remarked, as Michelle finished off half a pint of beer in one go before half slamming, half dropping the beer down onto the table.

“Your turn,” she replied, before turning her head away from me and discretely letting out a silent belch.

“Maybe we should slow down.”

“I’m keeping up just fine,” Michelle said.

To be fair, she was doing just that. I had drastically underestimated her ability to drink copious amounts of beer. I guess as a bartender she’d squeezed in plenty of practice after hours.

Michelle had asked me to tell her some drinking games, but to be honest, I didn’t really know many. Rugby teams had a reputation as being hotbeds of laddish drinking, but in reality that culture stopped at about seventeen, or at least when you turned professional. My team would still haze new youth team players with outrageous dares, but once you’d gotten through that there wasn’t much of a drinking culture. There was too much money in the sport now for excess drinking.