Page 7 of Holding Out for a Gyro
I licked my lips, weighing my options for squirming out of the admission, but drew courage from the strength of the imagined truth serum. “The answer to that is yes.”
He dragged his eyes away from my mouth, like he’d been watching my tongue slide across the crease with hungriness. “Yes, you find me attractive, or yes I’d be wasting my time?”
“Yes,” I repeated breathlessly.
A smile grew. “But you find me attractive?”
My eyes fell onto his plump lower lip, tempting enough to suck on for days. “Yes.”
“I can work with that.”
If I was being honest, and I was temporarily, I wanted a little more time with this mysterious Greek with the sexy eyes and the awful dad jokes. So instead of running for safety, I said, “Walk me to my car?”
If I played it right, maybe I could still wrangle an invitation to his place. Cheesy as he was, Basil Stavros had stoked a fire, and all I needed was for him to ask if I wanted to burn it off with him.
Just tonight, while he had access to the real me.
Tomorrow would be a different story.
Chapter Two
Basil
Challenge: Have a100%50% bullshit conversation with a total stranger
“Is it me or was that a total trip?” Evan strolled ahead of me into the open air of the pedestrian mall while we waited for the girls to make a pit stop.
“Definitely not what we planned.”
What we planned was a night revisiting some of our old college stomping grounds. Left to my own devices, I would’ve stayed home and sulked, but Evan cajoled me to hit some bars on his last night here, reminisce, forget our troubles.
This hadn’t been the best day of my life. Shit, I’d nearly quit my job earlier—and over a minor irritation. Thank God it was Friday, because I needed a weekend to recover from being scolded by a twenty-year-old for refusing to put “pumpkin spice” in the butternut squash soup.
Pumpkin spice.
As if that was an actual thing.
I took a deep breath to retain the mellow composure a simple conversation with a beautiful woman had brought me, swallowing the need to explain, to literally nobody, the existence of ginger and nutmeg.
Pumpkinspice. I shook my head.
Evan shot finger pistols at me. “I told you we’d have fun. You’re even smiling.”
I was. My thoughts returned to the cranberry lips and midnightblack hair of the haunting vixen who’d captivated my attention from the minute I’d laid eyes on her. And her eyes, soulful and penetrating, had drawn me in. Sailors had been tempted toward jagged rocks by less.
“It didn’t turn out so bad,” I conceded.Understatement.
I’d worried for nothing that barhopping with Evan would make me feel worse about myself. It was a practical concern. Whoever said comparison is the thief of joy must have spent time with a golden boy. With his perfect smile, super-styled blond hair, and emerald eyes, Evan was the Type O of good looks—universally appealing. Whenever we hung out, women hit on him like I wasn’t even there. Evan was never a jerk about it, and I wanted to spend time with him, but I hadn’t been in the mood to feel even more invisible. Not tonight.
In the end, I’d agreed to go out because Evan had promised me no women. He swore he wanted to catch up and get reacquainted with the town after he’d interviewed for a potential job at a local news station. True to his word, he dorked up his look and batted away uninvited attention, right up until Lizzy and Chelsea crashed our party of two.
I gave Evan a pass for ignoring me. Chatting with an old acquaintance wasn’t the same as lady cruising. Besides, flirting with Chelsea had vastly improved my glum mood. After a day being bossed by a rug rat and an evening next to Mr. Television here, I drank in her attention. She’d never once glanced at Evan and confessed straight-up attraction toward me. But what had soothed my soul was the way she rhapsodized about my work, about my food. It was the antidote to mywhat-am-I-doing-with-my-lifeblues. I hadn’t realized how badly I’d needed some validation. It had been so long, I’d nearly forgotten how good it felt to be appreciated.
Evan shoved his hands into his pockets and stared up at the sky. “It’s a shame I didn’t run into Lizzy earlier this week. If I hadanother night here, we could have a proper reunion.”
Ididhave another night here, an indefinite number of nights, though I didn’t know what that might mean. “I’m going to try to get Chelsea’s phone number,” I declared.
He shot me a skeptical glance. “Didn’t you hear her say she doesn’t do boyfriends?”
