Page 13 of Runaway Bride's Guide to Love

I internally cringe for saying it again, because I think she’s about to bite my head off. Literally. But I also don’t think this is the time to tell her I call every woman whose name I don’t know “ma’am.”

“I’m not a ma’am!”

She starts pacing in circles, which makes her dress do this weird funnel thing. I’m just going to stand here because I’m a little scared to say anything, or move. Yet at the same time I feel like I need to be here to catch her when she eventually trips on the approximate fifty pounds of fabric. “I’m…I’m a...” She stops for a second. Is she thinking? Going to scream again? “I’m a mess!”

Tiger melts to the floor, her wedding dress pooling around her as she starts crying in the middle of the bar. I look around, and the few people who are here are definitely staring at her. I see the bartender coming around to make sure she’s okay, but I wave him off.

I got her.

I don’t know why that’s the only thought going through my head right now, but it is.

“Hey,” I say as I kneel down so I’m eye level with her. “What do you need?”

She looks at me like this is the most off-the-wall question I could’ve asked. “Excuse me?”

“What do you need?” I repeat.

“I don’t know if there’s a list long enough to answer that question now.”

“Fair,” I say. I don’t know how she’s making jokes right now, but it’s earning her points in my book. “Let’s start with the easy stuff. Water? A Lyft? To follow that guy out of the bar so you can get a clean shot?”

This earns me a small smile. “How about we start with helping me up?”

“Of course.” I pop up and hold out my hands for her, gently pulling her to her feet. “There we go.”

She tries again to smooth her dress, which gives me a chance to really look at her.

She’s much younger than I realized. If I had to guess, I’d say she’s around my sister’s age, so in her mid-twenties, meaning a solid ten years younger than me at thirty-seven. I also didn’t realize how short she was. I’d have to guess at least a foot shorter than me, and I believe I saw high heels under that dress. I don’t know why that makes me smile, but it does.

My smile only gets bigger when she looks up at me. Her cheeks are red from the combination of fighting and crying at the bar. Her eyes are pooled with new tears that haven’t leaked out. But that only enhances the blue in them. Then there are her lips. They’re pouty and perfect, heart shaped. I’m guessing at one point today she was wearing red lipstick. Lips that, under any other circumstance, I’d be figuring out a way to kiss.

She’s a mess. The most beautiful mess I’ve ever seen.

No. Stop it right the fuck now, Collins.

What the hell is wrong with me? I’m no better than the douchebag who hit on her. This girl has clearly gone through it today, and all I can think about is kissing her? Not only am I a fucking asshole but also a creepy old man.

I need to snap out of this. I need to leave. I need to make sure she’s okay and get the hell home to my silence and my dog.

“Can I ask you a favor?” Tiger says.

“Of course.”

“Can you sit with me?” She signals back to the bar. “I…I don’t have anywhere else to go and, well, after all that, I’d rather not be alone. I also don’t know if they take ApplePay because I don’t have my purse so I might need some assistance with that.”

Fuck…I don’t think I could say no even if I wanted to…

“Sure,” I say with a sigh. “I guess I should introduce myself. My name’s…”

“No,” she says, shaking her head. “No names today. If I tell you my name and you tell me yours then this whole day gets a lot more real, and I can’t handle any more of that. I need to escape as long as I can, and if that means no one calling me by my name, or what my name was supposed to be, that—that just sounds fantastic.”

Somehow that makes sense. “Okay. But on one condition.”

Her face gets a worried look. “What’s that?”

I smile to try and reassure her. “I get to pick your name,Tiger.”

The smallest smile graces her face, and it’s in this moment I decided that my goal tonight is to see her real smile. Because I bet it’s fucking gorgeous.

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