“Alright, so,” he said, turning in the booth to face me. I was tucked into the far back corner of it, a perfect view of the stage. “First thing’s first. Shawn’s going to come out and play his opening song, and then you’re going to go up there and drop a twenty in his tip jar.”

“A twenty?!”

“Money talks, sweetheart,” he said. “It’ll get his attention. And in a dark bar like this, you need to grab him somehow. Most of the other girls will try to do it with their eyes, sucking on the cherries in their drinks while they wait for his gaze to land on them. We’re taking a more direct tactic.”

I snorted. “Okay. And then?”

Clay leaned back, crossing an ankle over the opposite knee before taking a long pull of his whiskey. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

“Is that the phrase of the evening?” I asked flatly.

Before I could lure more information out of him, Shawn took the stage. And unlike the coffee bar at NBU where he would have had a round of applause from all the groupies that followed him around campus, he received only a courtesy glance up from where customers were conversing here. Most of them went right back to talking, not bothering to listen to his intro — though there were a few tables of girls right up by the stage who leaned in eagerly.

One of them popped a cherry in her mouth, her lush lips rolling over the swell of it until she plucked it free from the stem.

Clay gave me a look, and I shoved him under the table.

“Good evening. I’m Shawn Stetson, and I’m going to play a little music for you tonight.” He smiled, running a hand back through his long hair as he settled on the barstool and propped one boot underneath him on the lower rung of it. I’d seen him do it a hundred times before, and yet I still found myself sighing, smiling, and leaning my chin into my hand as I dreamily watched him pull his guitar strap overhead.

Clay’s brows bent together, gaze drifting from me to Shawn and back again before he shook his head.

“If there’s anything you’d like to hear, I’m taking requests. But for now, let’s start with a little Harry Styles.”

Butterflies flitted in my stomach as the first chords of “Cherry” smoothed over the crowd, and I found myself singing along, feet bopping under the table. I traced the stubble on Shawn’s chin, wandered over the silver of his lip piercing, and fell into his trance as he crooned the sad, somehow seductive song.

A flash of a scene from Thoughtless hit me out of nowhere, and my heart jumped with the memory, with the fantasy all of this could potentially unlock.