Zelda
“You want to know my name?”
The waitress comes back with the drinks, so he can’t answer. I’ve never seen a woman with that many tattoos before. She has to have more than Sawyer. I hear myself ordering a burger, but I’m desperate to get back to our conversation.
I’ve never been in this bar before in my entire life, and it’s four blocks from my house, at the edge of where the district turns from residential to business.
It’s not the kind of place my parents would have ever taken me, and after-school stuff obviously didn’t take place in hole-in-the-wall bars like Bernie’s.
I’d say that was what was setting my nerves on edge—even if it’s a half pleasurable edge—but it’s not. I went to dive bars in college, although not very often, and some of them were a lot shittier than this.
No, what’s making my stomach do slow flips is Sawyer.
Even the bar might as well be high noon compared to the darkness of the club, and now that I’m sitting across from him, I can’t deny that he tears me right in two.
He’s the sexiest man I’ve ever seen. Every muscle is cut, taut, and even though he’s wearing a t-shirt, I know absolutely that he’s got at least a six-pack, maybe an eight-pack.
But he’s not overdone like some of the guys at the local gym.
He doesn’t have a bulging neck. Even if he did, it would be hard to see past his chiseled, Greek god face to complain about it.
If my pussy was sensitive before we got here, now it’s practically begging for attention.
I shift in the booth, wondering if he can tell that I’m in the middle of the biggest mental struggle of my life.
Because…
It’s not tattoos that I have a problem with, per se.
It’s that the tattoos, combined with his muscles, and something about the look in his eyes, tells me that he’s not the kind of guy who works regular hours in an office in the city.
I don’t know what he does exactly, or what’s happened in his life to make him exude danger the way he does, but it’s rolling off him in waves.
It pulls me in at the same time that it sets off warning bells in my mind. Be careful, be careful… The refrain repeats over and over again in my mind, but my body overrides it every single time.
As soon as the waitress steps away from the table, I open my mouth.
“Yeah. I do want to know your name.” I have this sense that if I don’t jump on this chance right now, I’ll lose my nerve, and it’s forcing words out of my mouth that I don’t think I’d say otherwise. “I wanted to know in the club, but…”
“Your friend didn’t like me.” God, his half smile makes me want to climb over the table and put my lips on his right this second. How can he seem so at ease and so wound up at the same time?
I shake my head. “She liked you too much, I think. She was a little—”
“Mad that I wanted you instead?”
Wanted you instead. A shiver runs down my arms from my shoulders to my fingertips.
“Wanted me?” It’s not a sexy thing to say. I don’t care. I want him to keep talking.
Sawyer narrows his eyes a little, leans forward, cutting the distance between us. “The second I saw you, I wanted to…talk to you.”
I look down at the table for a moment, a denial ready on my lips.
There’s nothing very interesting about me.
I bite back the words and turn my attention back to his blue eyes.
They change color with the rays of shifting light coming in through the front window of the bar.
Every time a cloud goes over the sun, it casts across Sawyer’s eyes, too.
“It’s a good thing we ran into each other, then.”
A light flickers in his eyes. “It was.”
“So, seriously—what brought you to my neighborhood?” I’m dying to know. I’m dying to know who he’s visiting—a girlfriend? A relative? Is this some weird not-date that will fizzle out once I find out he’s seeing someone else?
He presses his lips together, and I can see that he’s deciding something, weighing whether or not to tell me the truth. He drums his fingers on the tabletop, one two three, one two three.
“My dad. I’m staying with my aunt, though.”
“Oh, really? Where does she live?” Obviously close enough to walk, but—
“Three houses down from the corner we were standing on.”
“Toward the yellow house, or across the street?”
“Toward the yellow house.”
I bite my lip again. Should I tell him? “That is in the neighborhood.”
The short laugh he lets out, and the widening smile, is going to melt me right into the booth. “Let me take a wild guess,” Sawyer says, grabbing both the menus and tucking them back into the wire holder. “You live next door.”
“Not—not quite.” I might as well come clean. Eventually he’s going to walk me home, and I don’t want to have to circle the block until he’s inside his own place. “My parents’ house is on the corner.”
“You live with your parents?”
This is making me look like a teenager. “Well, not in my childhood bedroom, or anything like that.”
He cocks his head, narrowing his eyes. “No?”
“No, they moved to that house when I was in college and had the basement refurbished into a guest apartment. I’m renting from them while I finish my degree.”
His smile dims a little, settling into something a little less brilliant. “College?”
“Grad school, actually.”
Sawyer nods. “Very fancy.”
I make a face. “Not really. It’s an online master’s degree. I don’t—” I cut myself off, then wonder why I’m bothering. “I don’t know why I’m doing it, really.”
“To get a job. Isn’t that why anyone gets a million degrees?”
I laugh. “Two degrees is not anywhere close to a million.”
“What kind of degree is it?”
“A master’s of library science.”
His eyes widen, and the sparkle returns. “You want to be a librarian?”
I lean in like I’m about to tell him a secret, and then say, in a low voice, “You’re never going to guess this, but I already am a librarian.”
He laughs out loud, hard and deep, and the tension between us shatters.