When he turned his head in my direction again, I quickly turned away, focusing on a conversation between two elderly women who sat at the counter, as I refilled their coffee cups. One was talking to the other and when the woman on the left got up to go to the bathroom, the other one looked at me with lipstick on her teeth, and confessed, “I couldn’t hear one word she was saying to me.” I laughed and looked up when I heard chimes signaling the front door opening.
One of the regulars, Mr. Macchio, walked in. He came from Italy forty years ago, and still had the strongest accent. His loud voice snapped me out of my cologne-drunken stupor. He headed straight for his favorite seat in the corner, motioning to me.
“Hey, Bella…why-a don-cha get me a green-a 17/727
tea-ya today, eh? My wife, eh, she say, I should cut down on, eh the coffee, so I gonna try a green tea, o-key?”
I smiled. “Sure, honey.”
From the corner of my eye, I could see my mystery man turn around and look in Mr. Macchio’s direction as I went to the kitchen to put in the green tea order.
When I came back out, I nearly dropped the tea in a panic when I saw Blue Eyes suddenly get up from his table, plop money down, grab his jacket and quickly walk out. No…he practically ran out. The abrupt sound of the door chimes and wind that blasted through upon his exit were like a slap in the face.
So fast?
My heart was pounding harder upon his exit than it had been when he was here.
Panic quickly transformed into a feeling of emptiness that washed over me. I actually felt like crying, which was pathetic. I had 18/727
imagined him maybe striking up a conversation with me before he left or at least maybe getting his name off of a credit card.
As Stevie Wonder’s My Cherie Amour played over the diner speaker, I had the urge to rip off my apron and follow him out the door. That, of course, would never happen…but I sure did want to.
Without saying more than a few words, this guy had managed to awaken something in me that had been dead…desire.
Not only that, but it was a level of want…of need… of lust…that I had never experienced in my entire life. He had such an effect on me and now, I could quite possibly never see him again.
I swear I felt the room swaying as I walked over to the table still smelling his amazing scent and noticed he left behind more than just his smell…fifty bucks on a bill that was under five-dollars. I almost wanted to chase after him (…again) in case this was a 19/727
mistake. Did he forget change? Who leaves that big of a tip to a flustered mediocre waitress, at that?
Faster than I could think of the answer, I remembered Mr. Macchio’s tea still sitting on the counter where I left it. After delivering it, I then went to the register and sniffed the fifty before depositing it and gave Delores half of the sizeable tip Blue Eyes left.
“What the—” Delores said as I handed her twenty-five dollars cash.
“I know. That gorgeous guy! He left us a fifty. There is your half,” I said walking sol-emnly into the bathroom where I tried to grab my bearings.
I locked the door and sat on the toilet with my head in my hands.
Silly girl…you really need to get some.
Every day in life, people we will likely never encounter a second time, pass us by.
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For some unknown reason, I just couldn’t accept that he was one of them.
For the rest of that afternoon, I fantasized about the beautiful generous stranger and what it would have been like to thank him properly…with my lips.
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CHAPTER 2
CEDRIC
Oh fuck…oh fuck.
Sweating profusely, I ran down Main Street as far away from the diner as I could get.
Where the fuck did I park my car?
I need to think. It’s over there.
I got in and slammed the door.
Silence.
She was so fucking beautiful.
My God.
I had an idea of what she would look like, but never could have imagined her to look as amazing as that. I was imagining a girl…but so much time had passed, I should have known that clearly, she would be a beautiful woman.
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Those gigantic green eyes…
God, I hope my staring wasn’t that obvious. I just couldn’t look away.
Will do…WILL DO? That was the best I thing I could think of to say to her?
And why the hell did I leave a fifty-dollar bill? Way to slip under the radar. I was so flustered and it was all I had in my wallet; I just couldn’t stay for change and risk saying something stupid or unintelligible while I waited for that. I could tell by how fast my heart was beating in there, that if I had stayed, I would have fucked it all up.
My heart rate has yet to slow down.
I had to get out of there. It’s bad enough I have a forty-minute drive back to the agency in the city. Who travels forty minutes for a bagel? Crazy stalker men, that’s who.
I must have been doing eighty-five miles per hour down I-93 when I thought about her name: Allison. It’s pretty just like 24/727
her. But of course, I knew she would be more than pretty. And she smelled like green apples.
She seemed nervous.
Her hand
trembled and her cheeks turned rosy when she approached me and that made me want to rub her sweet face with my hand.
I wonder what her story is, why a girl that looks like that is waiting tables in a diner in the suburbs. Surely, she at least could do better at one of the trendy bars in Boston. She could have anything she wants with a face and eyes like that.
Not
to
mention
her
slamming
body…the way that tight uniform hugged her ass.
Fuck!
She’s the last woman I should be thinking like this about. Yet, all I can focus on now is whether she tastes as good as she smells.
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Snap out of it, Callahan. She’s the one woman you can’t have.
Which is why I want her.
I need to control my thoughts, but I didn’t expect to be so fucking captivated liked this.
I have to see her again when I can calm the fuck down. I just don’t know how I am going to manage it. The next two weeks are jam packed with client meetings.
*** I get back to the office in record time, passing my assistant Julie who immediately points to my office.
“Karyn is waiting for you,” she said.
Karyn.
I had been in a relationship for six months with Karyn Keller, an attractive blonde television reporter I began representing after she walked into the agency and 26/727
demanded to be added to my client roster.
We were immediately attracted to each other and decided to ignore the agency’s non-frat-ernization policy.
D.N. Westock represents some of the biggest names in broadcast news and I was their highest grossing agent and rising star after nabbing one of the hosts of a national morning show as a client. Not bad for a kid from Dorchester.
To say I had humble beginnings is putting it lightly. I grew up on the third level of a triple-decker apartment house in one of the highest crime sections of Boston, the middle child of an Italian mother and Irish father. My parents, older brother Caleb and I and my sister, Callie, who’s ten years younger, shared the two small bedrooms in the apartment. My parents, Paul and Bettina, went with the whole ‘C’ name thing for the kids, which went even further because our last name is Callahan.
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Money was tight, but our parents did the best they could to provide for us. My father worked as a steelworker and my mother was a maid. Even so, no one was surprised when I, the boy who survived an accidental drive-by shooting on my fifteenth birthday right outside our front door, left home as soon as I graduated from high school. Marked with a bullet hole on my left arm, I managed to get into Northwestern on a merit-based scholarship because studying and school came easy to me, plain and simple.