Page 19 of New Girl in the City
“Love,” I said before I could stop myself, because what did it matter when your entire purse fell out in front of a man. Dignity was kind of a wash at this point, especially when you were pretty sure he had stepped on your tampons. “What anyone wants really, you know?”
“Never figured you for a love kind of woman, Princess.”
Ow.That stung more than it should have. I stood up then, pretty sure I had managed to get everything up from the ground.
“I’m not sure what that means,” I said, hitching my purse up over my shoulder and dropping my phone into it, “but I never figured you for a man that cared much about what kind of woman I am.”
He fell silent then, hands still in his pockets and he shrugged at me, but I didn’t miss the way his eyes softened slightly. “Think you’d be surprised what kind of man I am.”
We weren’t far apart, just a few feet and it felt strangely intimate even though the city was a rush around us. None of that really mattered, because when I was getting looked at like that by Liam it was hard to notice much of anything else.
“Maybe,” I told him. And then because it was getting too cozy between us, the space seeming to shrink and the noise of the city vanishing a little too neatly, I stepped away from him and gave him a tight smile. “Thanks for keeping us from, you know, crashing and all that.”
“All part of the job,” he replied. “See you here at quitting time, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I returned softly. Then I did something that had never been hard for me to do until that day, and that was walk away from Liam.
