Page 15 of Opposites (Never) Attract
Oh honey, you don’t know the half of it.
She stepped to the edge of the sidewalk and raised her finger in the air.
“Well, shit,” I said, putting my hat back on my head. “Does that really work? I’ve seen it in movies like a thousand times, but I never thought…”
My voice trailed off as a beat up yellow cab pulled over directly in front of her.
“Damn. They just see you there with your finger in the air and stop on a dime?”
“I’m uptown,” she said, like I should know what that meant. “But you should be able to walk to your hotel.”
“Yup,” I said, and opened the back door of the cab. She got in and I followed, pushing her across the seat with my hip as I got in with her.
“What are you doing? I’m going in the opposite direction.”
“I’m taking you home, Sunshine. I don’t care where that is.”
She huffed. “You know, I’ve been living in this city on my own for nearly fifteen years.”
“Yeah, but I’m here now and I’m taking you home.”
She rattled off her address to the driver, and I told myself, having done the cab thing from the airport, to not look out the window. I was a control freak by nature, so not driving tested my limits.
This whole city tested my limits.
After what felt like hours, to go no more than fifteen blocks, the driver turned down an unusually quiet street without traffic. The trees were big on this street and the big buildings all had doormen out front.
“You can take this cab back to your hotel,” she told me, as the driver pulled up to an open space along the sidewalk.
While she wasn’t looking, I slid a credit card out of my pocket. I’d barely managed to snag the dinner bill in time, so I knew I had to have the card at the ready. I tapped my card to the reader pad and she shot me an exasperated look.
I knew she probably had way more money than I did, but when I went out with a woman, I paid. For everything. Including the fucking shaved truffles!
“Tag! What are you doing?” she exclaimed, when I followed her out of the cab and the driver pulled away. “You’re going to lose the cab.”
“Walking you to your door, Sunshine. I’ll get another one. You showed me how easy it is.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “You’re such an anachronism.”
“Don’t know what that means. Gentleman?”
She shook her head and walked up the sidewalk, and her doorman opened the big glass door to her apartment building.
“That’s Frank, my doorman,” she tossed out over her shoulder. “He makes sure I get inside safely and no unsavory characters follow me inside. That’s you, by the way.”
“This man causing you trouble, Ms. Calloway?” Frank asked her.
Frank was maybe a hundred years old, but he watched me like Sunshine was his girl in a bar back home and I was about to ask her to dance.
“I’m not causing her trouble,” I told the old man.
“I asked the lady,” Frank said.
Sunshine made me twist in the wind as she took her sweet time answering.
“He’s fine, Frank,” she said.
Frank let me go through the door, eyeballing me the whole way.
