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His iceberg eyes cut to me. “Yes.”
Score. Another good yes.
“How are you liking it?”
Cole stops next to a beat-up blue truck that’s a few decades old. It’s blocky, and the paint has chipped away in places. The vehicle is not what I would have put him in. I might have thought a guy with his style and give-no-fucks demeanor would opt for something dark and sleek and fast. Maybe a car with a tricked-out stereo system that he could blast metal music on while cruising through the streets and flipping off the police.
But no. His truck, despite its clear age, seems downright reliable.
And it’s not even that old. The thing looks like a teenager compared to my ancient Volkswagen. I like to refer to my transportation as a classic, but it loses some of the prestige of the word because of the duct tape keeping the bumper on.
“You could come to a meeting.” His smoky voice has my mind off cars and back to my original question.
“Me? At a meeting? Oh no. No no, that wouldn’t work.”
“Why not?”
“Well, for one, and the most main one, I don’t write. Composing a tweet is almost too much for me to handle.”
“You could listen.” Cole watches me, and his intense stare has my hands wanting to twist around in flustered flapping. Luckily, the stack of books I’m holding keeps them weighed down.
“I couldn’t though. I mean, I wouldn’t talk while someone was reading. Of course not. That would be horribly rude.”
“So then what?”
“It’s once they stop reading that’s the problem.”
Cole leans a shoulder against the driver’s door. “You don’t have to comment.”
“But I would! Only, no one would call it commenting. I…well…I gush.”
“You gush?”
“Yes. I gush. I gush more than a massive crack in a levy. If I went to a writers’ group and heard someone read a piece of their own writing, something they created with only their imagination and gift for words, I would gush all my adoration all over them until everyone within a twenty-foot radius would be ill and pity me. It’s a problem. I went to a romance writers’ convention a few years ago, and I practically fainted. I think a few of the authors put out restraining orders on me.” The whole thing is a blur in my memory. I got drunk on their glorious talent, and I blacked out.
“Hmm.” Cole keeps his response short, not even a real word. But the way he looks at me seems like a different form of communication. His face holds an entire dialog. Only, I haven’t learned the language yet.
“It’s bad,” I promise. “Better if I keep my distance.”
Then Cole does something unbearably unfair. He tongues the stud in his lower lip. Not suggestively, exactly. I shouldn’t even be able to pick up on the movement because his mouth stays closed the entire time. But I can see the tease under his lip. The shift of the metal.
And now my mind can only imagine getting the chance to fiddle with his piercing withmytongue.
“I think I’d like to see you gush.”
Silence descends between us after his statement. I can’t tell if he meant for those words to sound as dirty as they did. The problem is Cole has a dark, almost sultry voice that can make anything sexy. I bet listening to him read a cellphone contract could get me wet.
I worry, though. That maybe his voice doesn’t naturally come with that raspiness. That maybe a chemical cloud has been eating away at his bad-boy lungs to give him the panty-melting tone.
“Do you smoke?”
His eyebrow, the one with the cute little barbell spiked through it, jerks up.
“No.”
“Good,” I sigh with a smile. “You shouldn’t. Bad for the lungs.”
So he’s deliciously smoky all on his own. Like those fancy smoked drinks bartenders with suspenders make at speakeasys. I went to one of those places once in college. My roommate offered to treat me to one of the pricy drinks that would’ve cost the same amount I spend on food for an entire day. Accepting her charity with only a slight bit of guilt, I ordered the special.
