Putting her clutch down next to her, she ran her fingers through the ends of her updo.
Okay. Sitting there. Doing nothing. Not talking to Sir TextsAlot. Totally normal and comfortable… If he wasn’t there, she’d be on her phone… If she took her phone out, would he think she was copying him? Mocking him maybe?
“…that’s always the way, isn’t it?” she asked. “Nobody looks at each other anymore. We just sit around, hunched, fiddling with our little devices. No one talks to each other. No chance meetings. No hello, how you doing? What do you do for a living? Wanna have sex among the shrubs? Nothing. Are they shrubs? Do you know anything about plants?”
His brow rose in time with his chin. Suddenly the device wasn’t as interesting. Nope, his attention was definitely fixed on her.
“Are you talking to me?” he asked doing a bad job of containing his smirk.
“Yes,” she said then bobbed her head in concession. “Not exactly you, it’s aimed at everyone. But you’re the only one here so…”
“I get the pleasure,” he asked, watching her retrieve the lollipop from her cleavage. “You keep a store of those in there?”
“They’re giving them out in the ladies room,” she said, unwrapping her lollipop and tucking the wrapper in her clutch. “Some marketing thing for a new cocktail.”
“That’s just wrong. Management will be hearing from me. We don’t have those in the men’s room.”
“Have you been to the men’s room?”
“No.”
She smiled and pointed her lollipop at him. “Then you don’t know if they’re giving them out there or not.”
“Have you seen a guy with one?”
Raising her eyes to their top corners, she pondered. “No. But that isn’t conclusive. I’m not always the most observant person.”
Maybe not true, her priorities adjusted to any given moment.
“Lollipops are more of a girl thing anyway.”
“You think?” she asked, swirling the candy in her mouth before drawing it out slowly and circling the tip with her tongue.
His smirk became a laugh. “Okay.”
Back to his phone again.
“What?” she asked.
He laughed again, quieter, but it was definitely there. “Nothing. Forget it.”
She shuffled down the wall to get closer. “No, you can’t laugh at me and then not tell me why.”
“You know exactly why I’m laughing,” he said, little bit of side eye there.
“Why is that?” she asked, conceding her suggestive act was the provocation. “Why can’t a man look at a woman’s mouth without thinking about his cock?”
He locked his phone and slipped it into his jacket pocket. “You’re asking me?”
“You’re a guy. We have nothing invested in this. We’ll never see each other again. What do you have to lose?”
“An argument,” he said. “Because I’d say your judgment is flawed. I can’t speak for every guy on the planet, but I can look at a woman’s mouth without thinking about my cock.”
She swirled her tongue around and around the candy sphere. There were only so many ways to eat a lollipop, it wasn’t entirely on her. Okay, it was a little bit on her, she wasn’t that clueless.
“Are you gay?”
An exhaled laugh this time. “No.”
“You were thinking about it a minute ago.”
“You’re a beautiful woman,” he said, light in his eyes.
“I’m a stranger. Just sitting here eating my candy. All innocent like.”
He slid further back on the wall to reach behind for something.
When he brought it around, her eyes lit. “You have wine!”
“I do,” he said, pulling the stopper out of the top to slug the liquid right out of the bottle. Why hadn’t she thought about bringing wine? This guy was smart. “You have your candy.”
Hopping off the wall, she went to thrust it toward him. “We could share.”
“Oh, we could, huh?”