Abi made a mental note to make friends with this girl if she could, to offer a drink out or something her speed if she was in need of a friend. It’s not like she had a lot to spare in the first place, seeing as her knowledge of people’s names extended to Kat and Ernest. It was a little pathetic, really. “Maybe there’s some risk involved with the w-word but hey, I need to make some new friends around here and it’s not like I’m the most outgoing person here. I could probably ask if she wants a drink or something,” she suggested, sipping her coffee.
She burst out laughing again at the weird compliment; men were all the same, every brain cell going immediately to shit at the slightest hint of filth. “You should know that I have both a dirty mind and a quick one by now, shouldn’t you? If I weren’t so drunk the first time we met, you’d have heard some amazing one liners. And might have gotten to see the body shot in action. Sadly, I don’t do those when I’m sober.” In reality, the last one she’d participated in was when she’d been 21 years old, celebrating legal drunkenness at a bar in Midtown. That had been a crazy night, from what she could remember.
Why the hell didn’t he look his age too? Maybe it was that youthful sparkle in his eyes or the fact that men just got better with age, like whiskey and good cheese. Not fucking fair. “I do not believe that you’re past 50, Ernest. You look early forties, maybe mid-forties if I’m being realistic. What the fuck’s your secret? My grandma said sunscreen, but I think I just genetically tend to look like a 13-year-old girl with bigger boobs and an attitude problem.” It must get mind-fucky here with all the backwarding and forwarding, having to calculate how many days you’d lived in order to know your biological age.
There was a difference in the way he was looking at her now, with his hand on her chest feeling her heart. It was more intimate than she was used to and part of her told her to back away, to put distance between them just in case, but she shoved it aside for once in her life and put trust and faith in him. “I appreciate it, I really do,” she said of his honesty about her work. “Nothing ever gets accomplished with kind falsehoods, I’ve only ever felt like a fool on the other end, you know? I’m not perfect, no writer has ever been close to perfect, but I wanna be the best I can be. No way that’s gonna happen without constructive criticism and stuff like that.”
But then her breath caught in her throat as his hand lingered on her chest, and it sped up again for a whole different reason. His thumb along her jawline left electricity in its wake, his skin calloused and rough enough against her softness to elicit a response. He’d been like that before, in Cuba; those tiny touches that set her alight inside. She missed it as his hand dropped back and it took her everything she had not to kiss him yet. She couldn’t be the one to make the first move twice in a row, could she?
“Damn, if I had the chance to sleep with Ava Gardner, I’d have to at least think about it, right? Have you ever seen a picture of that woman in her heyday?” Abi wasn’t shy about admitting there were just some souls she was attracted to, regardless of anything. “That I have yet to figure out. Maybe some kind of crazy story bartering system? Or just pay me in chocolate cake.”
It was getting easier to open up to him little by little. They hadn’t covered a lot of heavy shit on her end, but she was beginning to think he might worm his way into her soul after a while. God, what a strange thing it was. Was she dating Ernest Hemingway? “I don’t blame them for it, honestly. I think it was… inevitable. You push someone away when they keep trying, they’ll eventually seek comfort in someone else. It hurt for a little while, and you go through the circles of blame but at the end of the day, there’s two people in a relationship and I know it was at least partly my fault.”
She was getting a little het up and antsy, trying with all her might not to kiss him first. Fresh air, or re-circulated air, sounded like a good idea. Abi would be bouncing out of her seat if they had anymore coffee. “That sounds really great, actually. I hope you know your way around here because I definitely do not.”