“Well…” Quinn started and looked toward me with a soft, maybe even slightly gloomy smile. “I guess this is it, huh?” The question hung in the air, heavy and thick with hesitation and melancholy, as our train pulled into the station in Birmingham.
“Yeah.” I felt my lips turn down at the corners of their own accord. “I guess so.”
We both stood when the train came to a stop, and like a gentleman, Quinn motioned me out of the way and proceeded to pull my carry-on down from the overhead rack.
“Thanks,” I said, and his blue eyes shone.
I felt compelled to say something witty, something memorable, but my brain wasn’t up to the task. I guessed it was still reeling from the fact that I’d just spent three and a half hours on a train—speeding through the middle of nowhere Alabama in the late hours of night—and I’d done the exact opposite of what I’d expected.
Instead of napping or finding solace from boredom with Candy Crush and random playlists on iTunes, I’d chatted with a complete stranger until it felt like we weren’t strangers anymore.
Quinn Bailey—a man who held the power of comfort and ease and apparently knew all of the right things to say to a girl. He was a force to be reckoned with, an enigma among my usual male acquaintances.
Where most men would have come across as pushy and too overzealous, his vibe was the opposite. A Southern gentleman to his core, he was playful and flirtatious, but only when he understood those qualities were welcomed.
And good God, he was funny.
I honestly couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed so much with another human being.
“You know what I think?” he asked, and my eyes met his.
“What do you think?”
“I think you should give me your phone number. Just in case of emergency. Or, you know, just so I can call you.”
A soft laugh escaped my lips. “Okay.”
His blue eyes lightened. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” I responded with one simple word, even though on the inside, I was jumping up and down like a giddy lunatic. It took all of my willpower to appear cool and collected.
Quinn pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, and as I recited my phone number to him, he saved my info into his contacts.
The doors of the train opened with a loud creak, and people started to file out in a surprisingly slow and easy manner. I guessed it was hard to be in a rush after spending the entire night on a train.
Preparing for our turn to exit, I started to wrap my hand around my carry-on handle, but I had to redirect it when my phone started ringing inside my purse. I pulled it out of my bag to realize it was an incoming call from a number I had never seen before.
“Just checking,” Quinn mused, and I turned and looked up to find him gazing down at me with a little smirk.
I hadn’t really calculated how tall he was until that moment—him standing behind me while we waited to file off the train. At five foot seven, I wasn’t a short girl by any means, but Quinn was well over six foot.
He raised the screen of his phone, and when Cat Wild shone back at me, I quickly realized he was the one calling me.
What the heck?
A second later, he ended the call with a quick tap to the screen and slid his phone back into his pocket.
“Wait…” I paused for a brief moment as my brain put the puzzle together. “Were you just checking to make sure I didn’t give you a bogus number?”
Quinn shrugged and sent a sexy little wink in my direction. “You never know, Kitty Cat.”
I had a hard time imagining that type of situation had ever happened to a man like him. If anything, women probably Sharpie-tattooed their numbers all over their bodies, just hoping he’d catch a glimpse of one.
“But good news,” he added. “Now you can call me whenever you like.”
“Emergency purposes?” I teased and promptly added him as a contact.
“Any purposes,” he clarified, and I blushed under his flirtatious gaze. “All the fucking purposes.”
I blushed harder. Smiled. And then giggled nervously.
Good God, he is dangerously charming.
It was our turn to file off the train, and before I managed to walk down the exit steps that led to the platform, Quinn gently squeezed my shoulder from behind, whispering into my ear, “I’ll call you. Have a safe flight back to New York.”
“Okay.” I smiled at him over my shoulder. “And you too.”
Our eyes locked as we stepped onto the platform, and for one brief yet very reluctant moment, our feet grew roots that held us in our spots. The crowd from the train moved around us, but neither of us seemed to care.
A hesitant goodbye suspended in time.
Eventually, in the name of getting to the airport on time, I had to break the trance. With a soft smile and a little wave, I felt his name roll off my tongue. “Bye, Quinn.”
“Bye, Cat.”
And that was that. Quinn walked in one direction, and I went in the other, both of us heading toward completely different destinations.
As my heels smacked across the cement platform, I felt disappointment over the idea of time. It was moments like these when I realized it passed too quickly. I wanted a redo of my train ride to Birmingham with Quinn.
But it wouldn’t really be a redo, because I wouldn’t have changed a thing. I just wanted to experience it again for the first time and try to find a way to savor how good being in his presence had made me feel.
It probably didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out I was insanely attracted to Quinn. I’d felt that attraction the instant I’d seen him in seat 2A, and it only grew stronger when he’d joined Casey’s Journey rendition and made himself comfortable in the seat next to mine.
Attraction was a thought inside your head that said, “There’s something about this…”
And believe me, when it came to Quinn, there was definitely something about him.
I couldn’t stop myself from gravitating toward this man who so easily had captured my attention, and the more time I’d spent with him and the more I learned about him, the more I wanted to learn about him, the more I wanted to experience all that was him.
Over and over again.
If Quinn Bailey was the metal, I was the fucking magnet.
With my purse securely on my shoulder and my carry-on sliding behind me, I followed the signs that directed me toward the main area of the train station—where I would find a taxi to take me to the airport.
And thankfully, I had plenty of time to actually get to the airport, check in with my gate agent, and get my plane ready for the flight back to NYC.
Although, as Casey had finally pointed out, I could have avoided this altogether.
You wouldn’t trade last night for anything, my mind taunted. Not even less hassle.
I couldn’t even argue with myself. I knew my mind was right.
The platform was busier than I’d expected at nearly four in the morning, but my tired legs navigated the cement path just fine, moving with ease around motionless bystanders and stationary bags.
By the time I reached the door that led toward the inside of the train station, the chatter behind me grew louder until I heard a familiar name being called out several times.
I stopped in my tracks and turned to find a small crowd of excited people surrounding Quinn on the other side of the platform. His back was toward me at that point, but it was apparent he was laughing and smiling with the crowd, the screens of their phones catching his every move, some lucky enough to even get a selfie with him.
I imagined this was what it would look like if Kim Kardashian had stepped off that platform.
Shocked, I watched as he took several of their pens and scribbled what I assumed was his name across newspapers and notebooks and pretty much anything they could find for him to sign.
Am I hallucinating?
I mean, considering I’d just taken a late-night, nearly four-hour train ride after working most of the day, it was possible. But the scene that lay before me was too real. Too vivid.
Each flash of a camera and excited murmur was not fogged over or hazy in a dreamlike way. No. It was most definitely happening.
But what I couldn’t understand was why.
Was Quinn Bailey someone important? Or more than that, someone famous?
And if that was the case, how in the heck had I not known that?
If one of The Real Housewives or Khloe Kardashian had been sitting beside me on a four-hour train ride, you could bet your ass I’d have known who they were. I might have been overworked as a flight attendant, but I didn’t live under a rock. I was hip to the pop culture game. I kept up with US Weekly, and pretty much every show on E! was on regular rotation on my television.
I felt like an idiot for not understanding why the person I’d just spent most of my night with was being treated like royalty. Without drawing any attention to myself, I exited the platform and found a quiet, secluded spot inside the train station to pull my cell phone out of my purse.
And then I did what anyone in my situation would do.
I consulted Google.
My fingers tapped out the letters of his name until Quinn Bailey stood proud in the search bar. With one quick tap to the enter button, Google gave me everything I needed to know.
About 1.5 million search results to be exact.
My eyes read the first little snippet of a result, which just so happened to be Quinn Bailey’s Wikipedia page.
He has a fucking Wikipedia page?
Quinn Matthias Bailey is an American football quarterback for the New York Mavericks of the National Football League (NFL).
Holy moly. He was a professional athlete.
I honestly wasn’t an expert when it came to anything sports-related, but I knew enough to know that NFL meant he was a huge deal, and I was reasonably certain the quarterback was pretty much the most important guy on the team.
Quinn Bailey was an NFL quarterback. For the New York freaking Mavericks.
And I’d just spent four hours talking to him like he was just some regular guy off the street. How had I not asked what he did for a living? Was I that distracted by his good looks and easy lead of the conversation?
Not to mention, I’d given him my phone number with the internal hope that there was an actual chance he’d call me and ask me out on a date.
The outlook of a phone call from Quinn was feeling less positive by the second.
I mean, didn’t celebrities and famous people generally stick to each other?
I was a flight attendant from Cincinnati. Not Selena Gomez.
Sure, I had a pretty rocking greeting card shop on Etsy that I’d been doing with my dad for years, but that was about it. My life was probably boring compared to what Quinn saw on a daily basis.
Hell, the only red-carpet event I’d been to was Black Friday at Target.
Ten minutes passed, my head in my phone in the exact same spot in the train station, scrolling through Quinn Bailey’s page on the Mavericks roster, followed by three pages of his Google Image results. I’d thought he was dreamy in his everyday clothes, but Lord Almighty, he looked fucking ah-mazing in a football uniform.
Had I really just spent an entire night sitting next to this guy?
He hadn’t even hinted at the fact that he was someone whose handsome face was known by millions of people across the world.
The whole thing was surreal. Hands down, it was the weirdest day I’d ever had in my entire life, and it had literally just gotten started.
Okay, Cat. It’s time to stop gawking and move your ass again.
I had a flight to catch, and that meant I didn’t have time for OCD-level fixation and overanalyzing. But as I grabbed my carry-on and headed toward the taxi line, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking, Pfft. Yeah. Probably don’t hold your breath waiting for Mr. Famous Quarterback to call you…