“I meant about last night…I was wondering…” She gives me a warning glare.
She sits up in bed and her eyes scan the room; she’s looking for her clothes. “Well this was fun,” she says matter-of-factly, and I look at her like she’s crazy.
“Are you brushing me off?” I laugh, confused
“Let’s not prolong this. You did me a favor. It was good for you, right?” she replies coldly, getting out of bed. Her clothes are on before I even have a chance to protest.
“Wait, hold on! Chill!” I leap out of bed, still naked, and slide between the door and her stiffened body. “What’s wrong?” I try to touch her, but she shrugs me off.
“Get out of my way, Ian,” she mutters, barely audible.
“I have to go,” she whispers. I look at her, confused. “Move!”
She pushes past me and is almost out the front door when I yell out. I’m not letting her get away again. It might actually kill me this time.
“Why are you always running? What are you afraid of?” I shout.
She stops dead in her tracks. I can almost hear her brain ticking, the cogs whizzing round in dizzying circles, trying to figure out what to say next.
When she doesn’t say anything for a couple of minutes, I tentatively walk over to her so I can smell the intoxicating smell of her skin, the memories of last night hanging in the air, her perfume mingled with my cologne, our skin, our sweat.
“What are you afraid of?” I say again, softer this time. I move a lock of her hair behind her ear. She lets me and I know she’s tired of fighting, at least for now.
She looks up at me with those haunting grey eyes, still hardened, but a little emotion swimming through them now.
“Myself,” she says.
We stare down each other, neither of us bending only the sounds of the mid-morning Chicago traffic humming in the streets below, the cries of service workers and distant screams of sirens echoing under the train lines.
“Let me feed you,” I relent.
She let’s out a strained sigh.
“Just breakfast and after that you can make your dramatic-ass exit. If you still want to.”
This gets a smile out of her. “Fine,” she relents.
Judy’s has seen it all and then some; crying into coffee, raging over pancakes, screaming through scrambled eggs. If the walls of that place could talk, they would tell you more about the “real” city of Chicago than any pumped-up tour guide could. Whatever Alana’s problem is, Judy’s is the answer.
A lardy waitress, with severe eczema across her chest and a bad eighties haircut, shows us to our table. A powder blue booth in the corner, away from the other customers. Private, just how I like it.
She slaps two laminated menus on the table.
“Coffee?” she barks aggressively. We both nod. She grunts and drags her intimidating figure away, wheezing heavily as she goes.
My gaze goes over to Alana. Her newfound vulnerability is incredibly sexy. The way she bites her bottom lip when she’s thinking. The flick of her middle finger, as she wraps a long, wavy strand of hair around it, batting her eyelashes slowly, giving everything and nothing away with that silver gaze.
“You know how gorgeous you are, right?” I grin, devilishly. She rolls her eyes.
“Get over yourself,”’ she says, glancing over the menu. She tosses it to the side as quickly as she picked it up.
A large trucker with greasy red hair belches loudly somewhere over her left shoulder, as a spider scuttles across the dirty window next to our booth. She breathes in sharply through her nose, and if I wasn’t so distracted by the way her nipples poke through her shirt, I probably would laugh at how disgusted she looks.
The waitress returns with the coffee.
“Thanks,” my eyes flick to her name tag, “Rhonda.” She looks at me like I’d just spat on her mother’s grave.
“I hope the food is better than the service,” Alana says, openly irritated.
“What’ll it be?” Rhonda says crossly.
“Sausage and eggs…with a side of bacon.” I wink across at the girl I still can’t believe I was inside of only a few hours ago. My dick twitches just thinking about it.
“And you?” she barks at Alana.
“As bad as it looks, the food better be awesome,” she warns me half playfully.
“Strawberry pancakes,” she sighs, handing the waitress the menu without looking at her. “God she’s a bitch,” she says before she walks away.
“If she spits in our shit, you’re paying for it,” I tell her. Her eyes study me for a minute as if she’s trying to figure me out. I thought it’d be obvious.
“You like me,” she smiles and the twinkle in her eye makes me blush.
“Not as much as I like this place,” I retort, settling back into the booth. “It’s got more…character.” She lets out a loud, sharp laugh.
“If you only knew,” she mutters.
“There’s a lot I don’t know about you. Why don’t you tell me?” I ask, with a nonchalant shrug.
“Why Ian? Why do you care?” she asks, her walls back up the instant I saw her letting them down. She folds her arms across her chest defiantly. I roll my eyes and sigh, running my fingers through my hair.
“I wish I fucking knew!” She doesn’t reply, her face stony, her gaze like ice. “Jesus, you’re frustrating.”
The tiniest hint of a smile is on her face.
I lower my tone a little, aware that a few diner patrons were glancing our way. Not that a domestic is an anomaly in this part of town.
“Look, I like you. I like you a lot. Don’t ask me why, or how, or what this means, because I’m gonna be real with you…I don’t really get what’s happening to me. This isn’t me. I’m not like this. But, to be completely honest, and not a fucking cliché…I’m totally crazy about you…”
She looks at me a little while longer. Her eyes searching mine for what I assume was any kind of sarcasm; any sign of my outburst being nothing but a big joke at her expense. I can’t be any more real right now.
“I don’t care if you’re crazy as hell,” I whisper, taking her hand from across the table. “I don’t care if you’ve got a fucked-up past, or a guilty conscience. I want to know it, everything about it.” A flush creeps back on her cheeks and she smiles almost shyly, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear.
Rhonda returns with our food. All this caring shit has made me hungry. I rip into my toast and slather ketchup all over the grits. Even Alana seems to be coming around, spearing a tiny piece of pancake and sniffing it suspiciously.
“So,” I continue, with a mouth full of eggs. “Give it to me.”
She knitted her brows in confusion.
“Help me understand who you are.”
She sighs and pauses over a long stretch that feels like a century.
“I’m me. Unapologetically,” She taps her fork against the side of her plate.
“You daddies little girl?” I tell her with a grin.
She glances up and straight back down.
“He’s dead.”
I swallow hard.
“Or might as well be.” She gives a half shrug.
“It’s no big deal.”