Page 61 of The Summer Show
“And what else?”
“Last time I was on Nera it was with my ex-fiancee.”
“Thanos’s ex?”
“Yeah, Taylor was with Roussos first.”
“Didn’t you and her … while they were together.”
“There was some overlap at the end. Look, I’m not a good guy. You should probably steer clear.”
“We’re just walking down a street.”
“You know that. I know that. People on Nera? They don’t know that. Right now they’re seeing what they want to see, and what they want to see is a scandal or something worth talking about. I can guarantee they think we’re together or pretending not to be.”
“That’s preposterous.” The Nick Merricks of the world didn’t look at women like me. They liked flashy women with perfect hair and lithe figures compressed by spandex. They went for women who had barely toddled over the line between childhood and adulthood.
I was cute, yes, but in a I never leave my library way. The only spandex I owned was in my jeans, and it was just there to provide comfortable backup for the cotton. The underwear I was wearing right now? Made for comfort and moisture wicking because I didn’t want to wind up becoming a yeast factory in this heat. Anyone with eyesight could surely see that Nick would never be interested. He liked shiny and glittery, guaranteed. Probably he had a favorite stripper.
“Do you have a favorite stripper?”
He looked surprised. “Dumond, I guess.”
“What kind of stripper name is that?”
Now he was downright confused. “What kind of stripper are you talking about?”
I bent forward at the waist, touched my toes, then slowly unfurled back to my normal height in what I hoped was a demonstrative and appealing way. “Ta-da!”
Nick’s gaze flicked to my hips then shot back up to my eyes. “Damn.”
“So do you?”
“What? No. Can’t remember the last time I was in a strip club. It’s been at least a decade.”
We’d reached a part of the village where the crowd was thicker and tourists were bumbling around like cattle. I know because I was one of them. Every few feet I stopped to gawk at something. A pink door. A charming spray of bougainvillea sprawling across a whitewashed facade. Two ancient men screaming at each other over a backgammon board while hand-rolled cigarettes burned on their lips. It was all so uniquely Greek, and I was here in the thick of it, enjoying the world outside of a book. And beside me was a man with a face and body out of a romance novel. A man who had carried me on his back and intervened when I was being harassed.
“Do you want a coffee?” I asked him.
“If you let me buy.”
“Not a chance. I asked, therefore I’m buying.”
He hesitated.
“Is this a male pride thing?”
“Usually I’m the one spending all kinds of money on women, which I’m happy to do because I like women. They don’t buy me coffee.”
“I’m buying you coffee, therefore women do buy you coffee.”
“You’re not like other women.”
Oh boy.
“I’m exactly like billions of other women—just maybe not women you’ve known up until now. Ultimately, I’m a woman’s woman, the kind of person who is always a champion for my friends and would never screw them over. Anyway, I think we might be friends, too, so it’s totally okay that I’m buying coffee. I’d do it for any of my friends. Ask Ana how much coffee I’ve bought her over the years. We’re talking gallons. Gallons. And if I invite you for coffee, I expect to pay.”
“Friends? Is that what we are?”