Gabriella
I looked down at his hand on my wrist. Warm and soft and yet iron-hard in its grip, no give there at all, and his hand was so big. The heat of him throbbed into me, sending prickles up my arm. I opened my mouth to speak but nothing came out. God, he was so gorgeous...and he was looking down at me with an intensity that blasted straight through to the very center of me, making me catch my breath. It rolled down through me, changing to heat that soaked downwards….
I lifted my arm and his grip didn’t falter, his arm lifting too. He didn’t exactly resist my movement—he didn’t have to. He was so big that just trying to lift the muscled mass of his arm was an effort. If he actually wanted to hold me in place, I realized, he’d have no trouble at all. He could probably hold me against the wall, or down on the floor, with just one of those big hands—
Another, unexpected wave of heat, starting somewhere deep inside and twisting between my thighs.
I glanced around. People were starting to look at us and I wasn’t used to that. No one ever looks at me. It’s not just that I’m unremarkable, it’s that I’m not normally around people. I was suddenly very aware of what a complete mess I must look—leggings and tank top, sneakers...I’d just run into the hottest guy I’d ever seen in my life and I looked like—
Well, like a girl who never goes out.
I swallowed. “Um.” The first thing I’d managed to say to him and it wasn’t even a word. I waggled my wrist.
He looked at his hand as if seeing it for the first time and slowly, reluctantly, released me. My wrist immediately felt cold: I missed his touch. I started to say something but he cut me off.
“Who are you?” His accent sounded like icebergs crashing together in the blackest night. The who was a bitterly chill wind and the r was like the grind of ice on ice. He snapped it out, a demand, but it somehow didn’t sound rude. It sounded more like he just had to know, right now, and there wasn’t time for pleasantries.
I tried to answer but the first thing on my tongue, the honest answer, was: no one and I was sure that wasn’t what he wanted. And his accent was doing something to me, vibrating through my body and making my chest go light and fluttery, my toes dancing inside my sneakers. I hadn’t heard anything like it before. I’d known a guy who was Polish, once, but his accent had been like a faded photocopy of this one. I tried to gauge his age. Twenty-seven, twenty-eight? About five years older than me.
He seemed to realize that he’d been abrupt because he frowned and said, “Sorry. What is your name?” The is sounded like izzz.
I started to say Gabriella but, at that second, the person behind me in the line got tired of waiting and asked me, “Are you going to order?”
And suddenly the whole reality of it came back to me. Echoes and brightness and polished floors and stifling, air-conditioned air. I was in the coffee shop, which is just borderline manageable for me on a good day, and I was surrounded by people and I didn’t remember the room being this big or the doors being that far away and I didn’t have his hand on my wrist anymore so I felt like there was nothing solid, nothing to hang onto and and—
I bolted. I threaded between the tables, hauled open the door to the lobby and sprinted into the elevator, thumped the button for my floor and panic-breathed all the way up to apartment 1006. I slammed the door behind me and locked it. Then I sat and panted with my back against the door.
As I calmed down, the shame took over, hot and all-consuming. I’d met someone and it had felt important—something that might never happen again. And I’d fucked it up because I was a pathetic, panicking freak.
He’s probably still there. Go back down there.
I almost laughed at that thought. Now that I was panicking, the corridor outside my apartment might as well have been black, airless vacuum, completely impassable. I’d never see him again.
The part of my mind that made me panic, the part that kept me shut up in the apartment, whispered that my mistake had been going downstairs in the first place. I would have been okay if I’d just stayed put.
I wouldn’t go to the coffee shop again.