***
“You,” she said in surprise.
“Me,” he confirmed, standing up and pulling off his helmet after doing a quick sweep of the street to ensure no other Agents were present. It wouldn’t do for him to be showing them his face if it could be avoided.
Justin wasn’t too worried about their presence. Whatever had just happened had been for show, to drive home a point to him and to the Underground as a whole. Someone new was in charge, and they were done playing games.
The woman’s eyes widened as he got up easily and brushed himself off, ignoring the blood and skin scraped across the pavement, leaving a rather unsightly dark mark.
“I’m clear, uninjured, and not being followed,” he said into the helmet, then tucked it at his side, not listening for a response. His attention was elsewhere. “Look,” he said with a grimace, “I’m really sorry for cutting you off earlier. Honestly, I got distracted and didn’t see you emerging from between the vehicles. It was totally my fault, and I apologize for it.”
She frowned, still staring at his back. “It’s okay,” she mumbled. “But are you sure you’re okay? You’re back is ripped to shreds…”
Justin grinned. “I’m fine, trust me.”
“But…”
He shrugged. “I’m a shifter; it’ll heal up in a few minutes. Hurts like hell now, but nothing a bit of time won’t fix.”
The woman rocked back on her heels. “A shifter? Really? I’ve never met one before.”
“Well, now you have,” he said with a laugh.
“And the headset?” she prompted, pointing at his helmet. “What’s that, and this,” she swept her hand around to encompass him and the crashed bike, “what is this all about? Are you some sort of secret agent?”
Justin laughed again, louder this time. “Close enough,” he managed to get out between bouts. “Close enough.”
The woman gave him a strange stare, as if she didn’t know whether to believe him or not. Her eyes captivated him as they seemed to swirl back and forth between green and blue, a mesmerizing shift that he found tugging at something deep within him.
Careful, Justin. Don’t do anything stupid here. You don’t know this woman at all. The last thing you want to do is stare at her and make her think you’re some kind of creep.
So instead of staring, he whipped his eyes away to stare at his bike.
Smooth. Real smooth. Natural ladies’ man. That’s you, bud.
His bear rolled its non-existent eyes in disgust and seemed to walk away, throwing its hands up in the air, as if he was beyond even its help. That was a reassuring notion.
“So what do you do now?” she asked, sounding a little more timid.
Almost as if you should have said something there, instead of forcing her to. Idiot.
“Uh, well, if I’m as well-liked as I hope I am, my friends will come back with their truck and I’ll toss it in there.”
“Come back?” she asked with a frown. “They left you behind after you wiped out like that?”
He chuckled. “It’s…a little more complicated than that,” he admitted. “And, in case you missed it, I didn’t just wipe out. I was taken out.”
The woman’s eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. “Oh?”
She didn’t believe him. That was okay; he had proof.
“Yes,” he said, still smiling. He took a step toward the road, crooking a finger when she didn’t follow him.
“I don’t know about this,” she said slowly. “Every time I go between two cars with you nearby, I seem to have some sort of bad experience.
His smiled became a grin as he reached down and picked up the big door that was lying in the road, half-blocking one of the lanes.
“See this?” he asked, waiting until she nodded. “This is why I wiped out. Kind of hard to avoid one of those and stay upright on one of these things.”
The woman shrugged. “You should have seen it coming. It’s called being aware, like seeing someone emerge from between two cars.”
He looked at her for a long moment. “You know, that really isn’t an excuse, considering that you aren’t actually supposed to do that. Besides, if that didn’t happen, then we wouldn’t be able to have this amazing conversation.”
This brought a smile to the woman’s face.
Score one for Justin and his ability to talk so much until he says the right thing!
“Perhaps,” she admitted coyly, then retreated to the sidewalk as he removed the door from traffic.
“Besides,” he told her as he easily set it down against the nearby building. “It’s hard to see it coming when one moment it’s attached to the vehicle next to you, and the next it’s flying at you.”
“So, what, it just sort of fell off the vehicle?” she asked skeptically, looking over the damage to his bike, her reddish-brown hair falling over her shoulder.
“Uh,” he said awkwardly. “More like someone kicked it at me.”
Her eyebrows—a much darker shade of brown, indicating that her hair wasn’t natural—shot up this time. “Someone kicked it off their vehicle and at you? How is that possible, and on top of that, why?”
Justin looked embarrassed. He couldn’t tell her the truth about the why. He could, however, tell her the truth about the how.
“This is how,” he said, bending down with a grunt, lifting his motorcycle clear off the ground, and walking it across the sidewalk to set it against a building. Thankfully not much had actually broken off the bike. There was plenty of deformed metal, but it was all still attached for the most part.
“Did you just lift that whole thing by yourself?” she asked, eyes wide as she walked over to it. “This is a big boy too. It’s gotta have what, two hundred, two hundred and twenty ponies?” she asked, eyeballing the engine.
“Two-ten,” he replied, caught off guard by her sudden display of mechanical knowledge. “And yes, I did lift it. Part of the whole shifter thing. You know, change into an animal, heal faster, super strong, blah blah blah.” He tried not to make it out to be a big deal as he looked at her again. Really looked at her.
She was gorgeous, standing perhaps five foot six, and clad in a layer of muscle. That brought with it a few extra curves that she wasn’t even aware she possessed judging by the way she held herself. If she was aware, she didn’t realize that they made her drop-dead gorgeous in his eyes. As she looked over her shoulder from her inspection of the bike, he realized her face looked almost fragile compared to her body. High upswept cheekbones gave her an almost elfin appearance, contrasting the obvious power in her body with very dainty and feminine facial features.
He was hooked, even before she bent over, giving him a full view of her exquisite rear. Justin swallowed nervously, flexing his abs and legs as hard as he could to draw blood away from between his legs, where it had suddenly decided to pool with a ferocity that surprised him.
Inside his bear roared, eager to move forward, the practically feral animal screaming at him to fulfill his primal nature.
Knowing that he was in public, Justin mentally forced his bear down, not wanting to make a fool of himself, or even worse, drive this very interesting woman away.
Desperate to think of an idea, any idea, to talk to her more, he looked at the shops on the street. As if fate were trying to tell him something, two storefronts down to his right was a big-chain coffee shop.
Thank you, he thought, to whomever or whatever was looking over him.
“Hey,” he said, then stopped.
She stood up, turning back to face him. “Yes?”
He froze.
The beautiful woman frowned slightly. “What?” she asked, though there wasn’t any vehemence in her voice.
“I was just wondering,” he said, at last managing to force the words out.
She waited a second, then prompted him one more time. “Wondering what?”
Justin smiled and shook his head. “Did you want to get a coffee?” he blurted out, trying to make it seem smooth.
The woman hesitated, and Justin felt his luck fall away.