“Oh. Okay.” The waiter looked in her direction. “And you?”
Lyric smiled. “A ginger ale.”
“Right away.”
When they were alone again, she was the one who extended her palm this time. “Hi.”
Dev chuckled and took her hand in his. “Hi.”
“I thought about you, too.”
“Did you,” he drawled, his smile slow and sexual. “Good.”
The door opened and cold rushed in along with a quartet of bundled-up people. As their laughter spilled throughout the place, the sound barely registered.
It was amazing how you could be alone in a public place.
“Not much for drinking?” he remarked.
It was hard to translate his words, what with her mind going in all kinds of NSFW directions. But then the syllables arranged themselves properly.
“No, I don’t drink.”
He glanced out into the restaurant like he was looking for someone. “You want me to change my order? I can change—”
“Oh, no. It’s fine. I just don’t like the taste—as lame as that sounds.”
“Now that you mention it, you didn’t drink the beer I gave you last night. I would have gotten you water.”
The waiter came over with two golden long-stems, one of which had ice. “I’ll get your menus.”
“Thank you,” Lyric murmured. And then as they just stared into each other’s eyes, she flushed. “So…”
“Hard to make conversation without the soundtrack of bullets, huh.” As she recoiled, he put his free palm up. “Too soon?”
“Ah—no. No, I—”
“That was a bad joke. Sorry.”
Well, she thought, it would have been funnier if her brother was willing to talk to her. Or if all of her parents would have stopped looking at her like she was someone they didn’t recognize.
But come on, casually dating a human shouldn’t be that big a deal. And all of them had dealt with their own kinds of unconventionals in their relationships.
The arrival of the menus cut that avenue of thinking off, and that was not a bad thing. The conversation also got easier as they started to talk about food choices: what they liked, didn’t like, hated, would eat until they passed out.
After they put their order in, Dev sat back and regarded her in that way he did… like there was absolutely no one else on the entire planet. He’d been right. She did get told she was beautiful by males. But that was usually as their eyes were going down her body.
Dev’s were right on her own—
In the back of her mind, something registered, some kind of… not an alarm bell, no. It was something else that—
“So tell me more about your work?” he prompted.
Snapping out of it, she forced a laugh. “Well, I’m about to be out of work.”
“Career transition?”
“You might say.” She took a sip of the ginger ale. “I have one more commitment I have to honor, and then I’m through with the influencer business.”
