He climbed up the stairs to his apartment after his run, hot and sweaty and irritable, but no longer in the kind of mood where he would knock over small children in his path. That mood had been kind of inconvenient for a pediatrician.
He pulled his house key out of the pocket in his running shorts, confused by the sound of the TV. It must be his neighbors, though they usually . . . oh no.
“Who the fuck told you to come over?” he said as he opened the door, knowing what he would find. Yep, Carlos sitting on his couch with a beer in his hand.
“Hey, man.” Carlos gestured to the spread on the coffee table. “I brought burgers. And beer.”
Drew looked at the food. His disloyal stomach growled. Okay, fine. He dried his face with a paper towel and opened the fridge for one of Carlos’s beers. This was bribery, but it’s not like he was going to reject beer. Carlos would just have to deal with his sweat; he’s the one who’d barged in uninvited in the first place.
He finished a burger and a beer without them saying much to each other except for grunts at the Dodgers game on the TV. Carlos went back to the kitchen and opened two more bottles. Maybe he’d just come over because he wanted company. Maybe Drew had been ignoring his friends because of Alexa, and Carlos had missed him, and was taking advantage of this Friday night that Drew was in town to hang out, watch baseball, eat burgers, drink beer. Maybe . . .
“All right.” Carlos turned off the TV and set a beer in front of Drew. “How drunk do I have to get you before you tell me why you’ve been scaring the nurses and making your patients cry all week?”
Maybe not.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Drew downed half the beer. “And that kid always cries—it wasn’t my fault.”
Carlos shook his head and took a handful of fries.
“His mom was crying this time, too.”
Drew banged the beer down on the table, making it almost overflow.
“Just because I told her if she had been paying attention to her child, he wouldn’t have gotten injured like that, now I’m the bad guy?” He turned to Carlos, whose mouth was wide open.
Drew finished his beer and sighed.
“Fine, I am the bad guy. Get me another beer.”
Carlos passed him his own untouched beer and stood up to get more.
“Just tell me what happened,” he said when he got back to the couch. “It might make you feel better. I assume this is about Alexa, since you’re all sweaty from a run on the beach on Friday night and not from . . .”
Drew kicked Carlos and he laughed.
“What, you told me yourself that when the two of you get together, it’s all—”
Drew threw a French fry at him.
“Do you want to hear this fucking story, or are you going to keep sitting there making jokes about my girlfriend?” He sighed. “Forget I said that; she’s not my girlfriend. She was never my girlfriend.”