Page 3 of June (New Orleans #6)

E nid walked back out to the main floor of the bar after waiting in line for what felt like hours only to pee and not have any toilet paper. Sometimes, New Orleans bars just weren’t worth it. She had used a paper towel and was now walking a little funny because it had been scratchy. Candace’s bar was way better. She catered to regulars, which meant she had to keep things clean and toilet paper stocked. Tourists usually stayed for a week or even just a long weekend and didn’t even remember the names of the bars they walked in and out of all night. They didn’t leave reviews about the bathrooms on Yelp.

“Hey. You were gone for a while,” Rory said.

“Long line,” she replied.

“Yeah… I wanted to just stay at Candace’s, but Logan works there, so it’s not a lot of fun for her to hang out where she works every night. She said she wanted to dance. I don’t dance, Enid.”

“You’ve danced with her before.”

“Not really. I’m good at standing still and moving my feet, but she wants to, like, really dance out there.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Enid asked.

“Nothing. She just wanted to go out tonight after work, but I want to go home and dance a different way.”

Enid laughed and said, “So, you just started having sex, and now, it’s all you can think about doing with her?”

“Yes,” Rory admitted.

“Well, I can’t blame you there. She’s gorgeous.”

“Hey!”

“What? She is,” Enid replied. “Why don’t you go grab her and take her home? I can’t imagine she’s going to say no to what you want.”

“She’s having fun,” Rory said.

“I’m guessing she’s going to have even more fun with you when you get home,” Enid suggested.

“Hi,” Jill said as she joined them at the table. “Where is everyone?”

“Um… Hi.” Rory laughed. “We’re part of everyone.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Linden and Asher are on the dance floor, making out like teenagers in love. Logan is dancing with Sophie. Melinda and Kyle are dancing, too, I think. Bridgette and Monica went home. Did I miss anyone?” Rory asked Enid. “Oh, Ava and her date, Bonnie, were here, but they decided to head out early. Not a big fan of bars in the Quarter, I guess.”

“I’m going to grab a drink,” Jill told them. “I had a bad first date. I could use one. Be right back.”

Jill was a tour guide at NOLA Guides, the tour company Melinda ran and would eventually own outright. She was beautiful, with long blonde hair and blue eyes, and only about a year or two older than her, if Enid had to guess, so she checked out Jill’s ass as she walked to the bar and thought about how she might be interested in seeing if Jill was interested in her .

“Really? Be more obvious,” Rory said.

“What? I’m alive. She’s cute.” Enid shrugged.

“Talk to her, then.”

“I will when she gets back.”

“No, I mean, she had a bad first date. Talk to her about it. Maybe buy her a drink and see if there’s something there.”

“Are you trying to play matchmaker?”

“No. But Jill’s great. She’s funny, and I’ve liked working with her so far. She loves New Orleans. You should hear her talk about it when she does the tours.”

“I was thinking about it, but I don’t know. Do we even have anything in common?” Enid asked.

“I don’t know. But I’m sure you can find out,” Rory replied. “I’m going to grab Logan to see if she wants to head out. Will you tell Jill I said goodbye?”

“Confident that I’m right and Logan will want to leave, huh?” she teased.

Rory laughed and went to find her girlfriend while Enid remained standing there at the table with her watered-down drink. She wasn’t sure why she had agreed to come tonight, to begin with, and especially here, to a crowded tourist bar. Then, she remembered that her idiot brother had his friends over. They were playing video games, and loudly at that. She couldn’t wait until he left for college in the fall. Just a couple more months, and he would be attending a state school, but two hours away, so he’d be living in a dorm, leaving her the guest bathroom all to herself. It made Enid happy but also sad because she was twenty-four, looking forward to having the bathroom in her parents’ house to herself when her kid brother went off to college.

“Where did Rory go?” Jill asked when she walked back to the table.

“She went to find Logan. They’re going home.”

“Sex?” Jill asked.

“Definitely,” Enid said.

“Yeah, she was talking about it at work, like, non-stop today. I think she’s insatiable now that she’s gotten some.”

Enid laughed and watched Jill watch the people on the dance floor.

“I can understand that. When you find great sex–”

“Keep having it,” Jill finished for her.

“Exactly,” Enid agreed.

“I bet Logan’s good, too. She’s got that frame that just screams butch on top, you know? My guess is she knows how to use it.”

“Is that your type?”

“No, I don’t really have a type. Well, I don’t think I do, anyway. The date I had tonight was with a shy, cute vet who runs a clinic. I mean, cute, and she takes care of animals. What could go wrong there?”

“What did go wrong, then?” Enid asked.

“It was really weird,” Jill said. “She’s nice, but she talked about a surgery she did earlier that day for, like, twenty minutes while we were eating. She also told me she worked with her ex. She’s a vet, too, and they work together most days. Not a dealbreaker or anything, but then she’s telling me that they live together and usually carpool to work and that if I came over, her ex would probably be there, and I was kind of done at that point. I get it. You’re with someone; you sign a lease, so it’s awkward until you can move. I said as much. But she mentioned that they just re -signed their lease a month ago.”

“What? Why?”

“She said they’re good friends now, and it’s cheaper. All I could think was that if this went beyond a first date, I’d be running into her ex all the time, and one night, I would find out that they’d fallen back in love or hooked up or something. Maybe it’s unfair to think all that, but I didn’t want to have to deal with any of it.”

“Pretend you two went beyond a first date, and you’re actually together: she would be seeing her ex more than you,” Enid offered.

“I know. She told me that they cook together, too, and I pictured myself sitting at a table across from both of them, listening to their inside jokes, and I didn’t really like it.”

“I don’t blame you,” Enid said. “I know some people are better off as friends, but it’s hard not to think what you were thinking.”

“She’s also thirty-two, and they met in vet school. They were together for seven years. Almost got married. I mean, that’s a lot.”

Enid laughed and replied, “Jesus. She’d be better not mentioning any of that on a first date.”

“Right?” Jill agreed. “So, are you not dancing?”

“Not much of a dancer. I came here because I needed to get out of the house more than anything.”

“Bored?”

“Not really. My little brother has friends over.”

“You live with your brother?”

“Well, good thing this isn’t a date because I’m about to sound like your cute vet.”

Jill gave her an inquisitive look.

“I got out of college here with a job offer in Tallahassee,” Enid began to explain. “It was the job. Entry-level, so not the best money, but it was the right job to get me where I wanted to go. I packed up everything and moved there. Not long after I’d settled into my new desk, though, I got laid off. They did major cuts, and since I was one of the newest hires, I was out. I think I’d just set up my email folders the way I wanted, and that was it. I tried to find something else there, but I didn’t have much saved to do that for long, and my parents offered their place until I could find something else. So, I moved back here and decided to go to grad school because that’s what you do when you have nothing else going on, apparently. Now, I take summer classes for my program, have no job, and live with my parents and an eighteen-year-old brother, whom I scold for jerking off in the shower.”

Jill laughed and said, “I’m only laughing at that last part, not the rest of it.”

Enid laughed as well and said, “Yeah, I get it. He’s going off to college in a couple of months, and part of me can’t wait. The other part of me wants to find a job so that I can at least get my own place, but I’m lacking real motivation. Losing that job really did a number on me, I think. It’s like I went from having a career trajectory that other people would be envious of coming right out of college to not having anything in only a few months.”

“Sorry. That sucks,” Jill said. “Do you want to be a tour guide? Melinda might have something. We’re always losing people when school starts up in the fall.”

“Rory said the same thing. I guess I could, but it’s not something that I really want to do. I know I’m being picky, and I shouldn’t be.”

“No, I get it.”

“Do you like it?”

“Being a tour guide? Yeah. I didn’t think that was something I’d be doing for this long, and it’s weird, seeing so many college students come and go all the time while I’m still there, but I like it. I don’t want email folders.” Jill laughed. “I like being out and about. And on the days when I’m a little less social for whatever reason, I can usually work in the office. Mel’s a great boss. The owner leaves her alone now. I’ll probably be promoted to a manager soon, and then, I’ll have my pick of tours to give, and Mel can do more owner things and fewer tours herself, if she wants. We talked, too. She said if I wanted to, one day, we could talk about us owning it together. That’s not something I planned, but it could be really cool.”

“Yeah, that could be cool.”

“I’ve never planned on owning anything,” Jill shared. “Maybe a house one day, and my car, obviously, but that’s a piece of junk, and I don’t use it very much.”

Enid laughed and replied, “I have a car, too, but that’s about all I own at this point. I had to sell the furniture I’d just bought when I moved back, so I’m sleeping on my old bed and using my old desk from high school.”

“I bet that’s fun,” Jill said sarcastically and took a drink.

“Hey, my dance partner left with her girlfriend, so I’m going to go home and call mine,” Sophie said as she walked up to them.

“Is she still in LA?” Jill asked her.

“No, she’s back home for now,” Sophie replied. “These LA trips have been annoying. It wasn’t supposed to be this hard to have time together. I work from home, so I thought I’d be able to go to Tennessee to spend a week with her, and she could come here, but she’s been working on the movie, and she’s in LA, like, one or two weeks a month.”

“Why don’t you join her there?” Jill asked.

“She’s working and not at home either way, and I don’t want to interfere. Besides, she hasn’t exactly asked me.”

“No?”

“She’s been really excited. It’s like she’s found what she wanted to do all along, and I want her to have that.” Sophie smiled. “She finally let me read the first draft of the script, too, and let’s just say, I loved it.”

“Yeah? She made you look good?” Jill asked.

“Yes, she was very kind. They’re already talking about actresses to play us, which is crazy. So, I’m going to go home and call her to see if they’ve got names for me to look up if I don’t know who they are.”

“Have fun, Soph,” Jill replied.

Sophie left them at the table, and Jill quickly caught Enid up on the fact that Sophie and Bryce’s love story was being turned into a movie by some production company, and Bryce was writing the script.

“Linden and Asher look happy,” Jill said after a lull.

“Yeah, I guess they do. I didn’t know them before they got together.”

“I did. I made out with Linden.”

“What?” Enid said, laughing.

“She’s a good kisser. It wasn’t a big thing, though.”

“Did you and Melinda ever date?”

“Oh, no. I’ve never dated anyone in the group, technically. Linden and I had a lunch thing, but that was the extent of it. We weren’t feeling it, and she was already in love with Asher.”

“Would you maybe want to go out with me sometime?” Enid chanced.

Jill looked over at her as if she hadn’t been expecting that.

“I know I have a full bed, and I share a bathroom with a teenage boy, so that’s not much of a selling point.”

Jill laughed and replied, “Well, I live alone, so if we go out, we’d have my place to avoid the nosy parents and little brother.”

Enid laughed as well and asked, “Am I better or worse than the cute vet?”

“Better, obviously. My guess is that you’re not sharing that full bed with your ex-girlfriend.”

“Definitely not. My mom would try to make us breakfast every morning and ask when we’re getting back together so that she could then ask when we were getting married.”

Jill’s laugh continued. Then, she took a drink, probably to stall her response a bit.

“Why not?” she said when she set her cup down. “Let’s go out.”

“Yeah?” Enid asked.

“Sure. I’m not exactly a catch either, to be honest. I leave my dirty clothes all over my apartment, and I don’t always do the dishes, so they’re usually stacked in my sink.”

“If that’s the only downside, I think I can risk it,” Enid teased.

“Want to dance, then?” Jill asked.

“Not much of–”

“A dancer, I know. Come on. It’s just dancing.”

Enid nodded, deciding that if she were going to break out of this funk, she needed to do something different.