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“Why’s that?” She countered seductively.
“I would have liked to see you like that.” I paused. “You’d probably be good with a pillow.”
“Rude.” She gave me a playful scowl.
Suddenly I heard a banging on the window next to me. A girl with brightly colored hair had her face smashed up against the glass and was pointing at Berkley. I looked across the table to see her smile and wave back.
“Those are my friends. I have to go, but it was nice meeting you, Dillon. Thanks for the company.”
I waved at her as she grabbed her wristlet and bolted out the door, hugging the girl that had just been pounding on the window. At least she was reunited with her friend. I watched as they put their arms around each other and walked away out the night. She turned around and looked at me once, those blue eyes catching my gaze immediately. But then she turned away and I knew I would never see her again. I sat and ate the rest of the pizza alone. I was the last one in the shop when they announced it was closing time. I grabbed my belongings and walked out into the night. I had twenty five hundred dollars sitting in my pocket, a wad of cash that could get me mugged on the streets.
But I wasn’t worried.
Only one thing plagued my mind: I hoped that Berkley got home okay.
For some reason she was my only worry now.
SIX
BERKLEY
“I can’t believe you just walked off like that. How drunk were you?”
Naomi was grilling me for the third time since we got home from the fight. She asked me twenty questions at least before we went to bed last night and that had started up again as soon as we were eating breakfast the next morning. “I told you, I wasn’t drunk. I don’t know how I left my phone with you. I was congratulating that fighter and then all of a sudden I turned around and Josh was gone. And those two guys said that they knew where he went, he’d been talking to them earlier about a bet. I assumed they were telling the truth.” My naivety had surely gotten the best of me last night. There was something about all the chaos and the tension of the fight pumping through my system that put my guard down. Those guys could have beat me to a pulp or worse. I’d been so lucky that Dillon had found me when he did. I was completely indebted to him. Pizza and beer didn’t seem like it had been enough. But I didn’t have any way to get in touch with him to say thank you again. I had just left, like a complete idiot. I had an amazing conversation with the most attractive guy I had ever met in my life and yet I had nothing to show for it. Not even his goddamned phone number. I was a female failure.
“Girl, you are so damn lucky I can’t even tell you. I asked Josh and Elliott about those guys and apparently they were trying to shake them down for some bets that they never made. They were thugs.”
She had also told me that little piece of information about eight times. As soon as she sobered up last night and realized what happened, I thought she was going to call Josh and Elliott herself and ream them out for ever letting me out of their sight. When I left the pizza shop, she was hardly concerned with my absence, but by the time we grabbed cab and headed back to the sorority house she was a wreck. Completely annihilated after eight or more beers, and the guys were nowhere in sight. What assholes.
“I guess you won’t be seeing Elliott anytime soon then?” I asked as I sipped on orange juice and picked out some fresh fruit.
“Too loud,” she said, putting both of her hands on either side of her head. I couldn’t imagine her hangover was anything less than massive, and the only reason she was out of bed before noon was because we had a house meeting. First Saturday of the month, like clockwork.
I lowered my voice to a whisper. “I said are you going to see Elliott again? Because you can leave Josh and I off the guest list. There was zero spark there. Besides the fact that he was hot, he had nothing going for him. And then he lost me! I’m a goddamn person. How do you just lose a person?”
She put her head down on her folded arms. I was raising my voice again and killing her brain cells at the same time. “No, I’m not seeing him again.” I heard her mumble.
“Good, I’m glad.”
She raised her head just an inch. “What about you?”
I scowled at her. “I just told you, Josh and I had no spark.”
She sat up even further, grabbing a bottle of water and sipping it slowly. “I wasn’t talking about Josh. I was talking about that fighter guy. He was hot as fuck, and watching you like you were a piece of meat. You have to call him.”
I sighed, ready to admit my failure, “I didn’t get his number. I still can’t believe he saved me like that, like it was nothing. He just made me feel so… safe.”
Naomi smiled at me. “Are you sure he didn’t also make you feel hot and bothered?”
I blushed in spite of myself. “Yes, he made me feel that way too. But I know hardly anything about him.”
She had a spark in her eye that meant that she was hatching a plan. I waited for her to drop it like a bomb. “Then why don’t we just accidentally bump into him again?”
I raised an eyebrow at her, “I don’t think I’ll be hanging out in anymore creepy alleyways in the middle of the night for a long time. Not even for a guy.”
“There’s another fight, Thursday night. We should go! You have got to see this guy again. I just have this feeling, it’s like a fate or something.”
I didn’t think it was fate, but I wasn’t going to argue with her either. I was desperate to see Dillon again, to feel the connection between us. And if I got to see him with his shirt off, that was just a bonus.
