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Give me back my penny!
“This is my stop,” I said, standing up and shouldering my bag. “It was nice meeting you.” I finished off my latte in a last-ditch effort to avoid the eager brown eyes I knew were on me.
His eyes.
The nameless stranger I’d bumped into. The man with the hot hands that had caught me. The man whose pants I’d wrecked with my donut-a-day addiction.
I stepped past him on my way to the exit, relieved to put the fiasco of that bus ride behind me. I had two blocks to center myself—to get in the zone—and it was going to take every bit of that distance to quiet my throbbing heart and chase away the butterflies in my stomach.
To be clear, my tall, dark, and handsome fellow passenger was definitely not the cause of my racing pulse or fluttery stomach. I was experiencing pre-interview nerves. Plain and simple. And that was preferable to being all hot and bothered by a man I’d never laid eyes on before that morning. I wasn’t that flighty.
My too-tall heels held up as I stepped off the bus and started power-walking toward the Howard building on Fifth. I tossed my cup in the trash can on the corner and took a deep cleansing breath to get Mr. Chocolate Britches out of my head. I thought it would help get him off my mind if I gave him an un-sexy nickname.
I thought wrong.
I cast a casual glance behind me as I waited for the light to change at the crosswalk. My stomach fell a little when I didn’t see his face in the crowd.
Bump!
A spark of excitement shot through my body. My “pick-pocket” was following me. Any other day, it would have creeped me out, but not today.
I ran the tip of my tongue along my lower lip, and turned to face him, performing a perfect hair flip in the process. I could afford to waste a little bit of time flirting, if the guy was so desperate that he was going to follow me down the street. “Fancy meeting you here.”
I came to my senses when the gray eyes of a fifty-something-year-old man stared back at me. Cream cheese from his breakfast bagel clung to what looked to be yesterday’s five o’clock shadow. “Well, hello to you.” He winked.
Now, that did creep me out.
I took back every nice thing I’d thought about winks a few minutes before.
“Sorry, I thought you were somebody else.” I stepped off the curb as if standing in the gutter would force the light to change and save me from the bulbous-nosed man with the receding hairline.
It must have worked, because the light changed a moment later. I was half-way across the street before most of the mob behind me had even stepped into the crosswalk.
“We never officially met, you know.”
I sucked in a breath at the deep bass voice behind me. “What?” I clutched my bag tighter. My prodigal pick-pocket had returned. The hair on the back of my neck rose.
“You said it was nice to meet me, but we never actually met. You don’t expect me to go through the rest of my life calling you donut girl, do you?”
I glanced to my left and caught another glimpse of that dimple… and his teasing eyes. I tossed my hair again, but the wind blew it all back in my face, spoiling one of my best moves. “You plan on thinking about me for the rest of your life?”
“That depends.”
“On what?” This was starting to get fun. But all good things came to an end sometime. I had half a block left to flirt, then I’d get back to business.
“That’s for me to know and you to find out. I’m Kai, by the way.”
Don’t name it! If you name it, you’ll get attached to it and want to keep it. More sage advice I remembered from my childhood. I kept my eyes straight ahead. “That’s nice.”
“And your name is?” He drew the words out, making them difficult for me to ignore.
“Not important.”
He clutched his impressive chest and winced. “You wound me. At least tell me why you won’t give me your name.”
We crossed the next intersection. I was almost there. Flirting season was over. “There’s no point. We’ll be parting ways any minute, and I’ll never see you again.”
“Ah,” he wagged a finger in the air, “but I’ll be seeing you every night… in my dreams.”
