Page 17 of The One Night Dash
We eat quietly, and I stop paying attention when I realize it makes her uncomfortable, which is bullshit; she’s a beauty. Perfect curves, not too thin. An ass that would jiggle. Yeah, she’s hot. She kind of always has been.
I pay the bill before she can argue, not that she doesn’t try.
“I’m going to Venmo you,” she says, stuffing her hands in her pockets.
“Like hell you are.” I laugh, opening the door for her to head out.
She grumbles, “I can’t believe I forgot my bag.”
“We were on a mission,” I remind her. “Do you still wear a backpack everywhere you go?”
She grins. “I need to find one that matches my dress. Lauren hated those things. But you know what?”
“No, tell me.”
“When she needed a dress strap stitched on the way to formal, or a pad when she?—”
“Ew,” I cut her off.
“Fine.” She rolls her big brown eyes. “But you have sisters, a mother, and nature is?—”
“Nope, there is no way you can normalize that a woman can … you know, for that long and live.”
“But do I really have to normalize something that is actually normal?”
I give her the side eye, and she giggles.
I throw open the door to the cell shop. “After you.”
We head inside, and she approaches the counter with a polite smile, but this time, it has adon’t mess with meedge.
A kid emerges with a plastic tray and sets it on the counter. Her phone sits in the middle like a corpse.
“Yeah … this one’s cooked,” he says, sliding it forward. “Motherboard’s fried. Smarter to buy a good used one than have it fixed.”
Her shoulders slump, but she lifts one like it’s not a big deal. “It’s fine. I’ll send it back to the provider.”
I lean an elbow on the counter and pull my own phone out of my pocket. “You take one of mine until you get yours back.”
She blinks. “One of—what do you mean, one of yours?”
“I’ve got two.” I shrug. “Personal and team-issued.”
“You are Dash Sterling,” the kid says, with actual voice inflection for the first time. “I knew it.”
“Hockey fan?” I ask with my PR smile.
“Not really, but my situationship is a fan of the billboard of you in Times Square.”
I chuckle. “I’ll get you a couple of tickets to our next home game. Maybe, that way, she’ll be more than a situationship?”
“I mean, sure, I’ll take the tickets, but gotta be honest, I’d bring a friend, my dad, but not her.”
Noelle giggles, and I look at her. “What part of situationship did you not understand?”
The kid chuckles, too.
I roll my eyes and look back at the kid. “I was trying to do you a solid; now what do I owe you?”
