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motive,” Cole says, folding his arms. “You know, the only reason you ever offer to pay for anything?”
    “Ulterior motive? Come on, man, how long have you known me?” Jens puts a hand on his chest, doing his best to appear confused by Cole’s blunt accusation, though it’s clear he’s not.
    “Long enough to know when you’re up to something.”
    As if a director had just screamed, ‘cut!’ Jens suddenly drops the act. “Okay, so when you do find the right girl, and you’re ready to close the deal, just casually ask if she has a friend with her who’s looking to hook up. Just be cool about it.”
    “How do you know she’ll have a friend?” Cole asks.
    “Hot girls in bars are like wild tigers out on the prowl, man: they always travel in packs.”
    Cole scans the crowd again, this time with a frustrated groan. “If I do this,” he says, holding up a hand, “and that is a huge ‘if’, here is the deal: you pay for drinks all night. And I get to borrow the Buick if I need to drive her somewhere.”
    “That’s my man!” Jens shouts victoriously, clapping his hands. He quickly turns to face the dance floor and furrows his brow, as if he’s delving deep into concentration. “All right, choose your target carefully. You don’t want to go for the best looking girl in the club because you just know she’s already getting hit on every five minutes. That’s a dead end. Don’t get me wrong, you wanna shoot for hot, but not so hot that she’s used to the constant attention.”
    As Jens continues his prolonged lesson about dating outside your league, Cole is drawn to a young woman sitting at the bar, sipping a multi-colored cocktail.
    “It’s always good to look for a flaw,” he muses aloud, “but not something overly distracting or off-putting. Try to find a girl with a strange looking mole on her face, a lazy eye or something, like a—”
    Suddenly Jens is on mute, and the thumping bass seems to quiet.
    The girl glances over her shoulder and catches Cole’s gaze. She holds it for just a second, lips twitching at the corners. Her long raven hair is pulled into a ponytail, exposing an intricate tattoo of angel wings that decorate her entire back. With her backless halter, leather arm wraps and the small diamond stud in her nostril, she stands apart from the crowd of generic-looking beauty queens that surround her. If Donovan didn’t know any better he’d think she hadn’t been to this location since Thrash was in business, and was somehow unaware of the change in management (and the dramatic shift in social etiquette).
    As if drawn by a magnetic charge, Cole begins to cut through the dance floor, legs moving of their own volition carrying him towards the bar, leaving his oblivious friend to finish his speech alone.
    “…or even a missing tooth could be a plus. Preferably a molar, because if you—” Jens turns and finally notices his friend plowing through the crowd, and identifies the target he’s headed towards. He smiles warmly, like a proud father sending his son off to college. “May the Force be with you,” he whispers under his breath.
     
    The dark-haired girl pivots dramatically in her stool when Cole approaches.
    Cole wipes his sweaty palms on the side of his shorts, unaware that’s he’s nervously repeating the same gesture over and over. He’s intimidated, but not by her beauty. She is beautiful, though not in the perfectly symmetrical way that you see on magazine covers. It’s her confidence that strikes him. It’s an ineffable quality that radiates from behind her haunted eyes – it’s as alluring as it is disarming.
    She arches an eyebrow. “Hey cowboy. You have an opening line?”
    A bead of sweat forms at his hairline, heat rising in his cheeks. Even the impending threat of being smashed in the face by a two hundred and eighty-pound professional fighter has never been this terrifying. “I’m kind of new at this, so I was hoping we could skip the opener and move