Page 18 of What We Broke

“What about you?” I ask, changing the subject. “Regular at the club?”

“Is that your way of asking me if I sleep around?”

“I couldn’t give a shit if you sleep around,” I say truthfully. “I was just starting a conversation.”

“Sorry,” he says, guilt tingeing his apology. “This is all a bit new to me. I’m a little out of my element here.”

I narrow my eyes at him just as we reach the diner.

“This,” he says, pointing to the twenty-four-hour grease bowl. “Usually I’m already in the back of a cab and I’ve got some guy’s hands on the back of my head as I clumsily take him down my throat. This,” he repeats. “Is nothing like that.”

While the image of me and him in the back seat of a car and his face in between my legs is enough to make my usually neglected dick stir to life, I know I don’t want our night to go exactly like all those others.

When I asked Leo to leave the club with me, I didn’t have a single thought past wanting to be near him.

I’m attracted to him, caught up in whatever it is about him that made me go against all my rules. And as he continues to unknowingly drop clues about himself, I’m even more certain bringing him to the diner first was the right decision.

There is no denying that, just like every man before me, I want him in my bed. But I know the quicker that time comes around, the closer I am to ending the night. He is a one-and-done man, and everything inside me is telling me this is more than that.

Wordlessly, I reach for the door and open it, gesturing for him to go inside.

He leads us to the back of the diner, sitting at a small two-seater table that would barely fit two plates of food on it if we were both eating.

As soon as I lower myself to the chair, a server appears out of thin air, a young woman who can’t be older than twenty-one, yawning as she places two large menus the size of my head in the middle of the table.

Leo grabs them, and I watch his eyes do a quick perusal before passing them over to me.

“Do you know what you want?” I ask, dragging the laminated cardboard out of his hands and glancing down to choose from the list of items. It’s very basic, and for that I’m grateful because I have a terrible time choosing only one thing to eat. “I think I’ll just have—”

The server returns just as Leo plucks the menus back out of my hand and gives them to her. “We’ll have the whole breakfast menu and two Cokes.”

Choosing not to bring any attention to the fact that he said “we’ll have” instead of “I’ll have,” I lift a finger in the air signaling the server to wait a second. “Could I please change that to a Dr. Pepper and a Coke, please?”

“Please tell me you did not just say Dr. Pepper.” He groans.

“What’s wrong with Dr. Pepper?”

“Everything.” He covers his face with his hands and shakes his head. “It tastes like sugar and cough medicine.”

“I happen to really like sugar and cough medicine.”

“So that’s one of each item from the breakfast menu?” the server interrupts, reminding us she’s still here and waiting. “And a Coke and a Dr. Pepper.”

“Yes, thank you,” I say.

She retreats to the kitchen, leaving us alone, and I trail my eyes over yet another version of my mystery man. The light in the diner is harsh and unflattering, but somehow he’s even more gorgeous every time I look at him.

My eyes meet his, and I watch his Adam’s apple bob in his throat. “Don’t,” he says.

At first I don’t think I hear him correctly, because his request doesn’t make sense, but when he averts his gaze I press the issue. “Don’t what?”

When he was dancing in the club he looked so carefree and untroubled, but the man sitting across from me is different. He’s reserved and a little unsure, and I want to know why.

“Look at me.”

“It’s kinda hard not to,” I admit. “From the second I saw you in the club, it’s been hard to do anything else but look at you.”

It was slight, the flush that traveled up his neck and bloomed on his cheeks, but I caught it.

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