Takedown Teague (Caged #1)(7)

“Are you just stupid?” I probably would have gone on, but she wrapped her arms around herself and glared up at me.

“Stop yelling at me!” she screamed. She turned away, but I saw her reach up with the back of her hand to swoop underneath her eyes.

Shit.

I turned slightly away from her and practically bit down on my tongue to keep myself from saying anything else. I brought my fisted hands up against my stomach and tried to pull the tension inside of myself, work through it, and calm down. I could hear her crying combined with choked breaths and sniffles.

“Fuck,” I mumbled under my breath. I was starting to come off the fighting high I had been on—the tears might have helped with that—and my stomach felt tight.

After three long, deep breaths, I looked back to the girl on the ground and saw her frantically rubbing at her eyes and cheeks. She didn’t look at me as she reached out and pulled her mostly empty bag close to her. She looked inside and then looked around her at all her things on the ground.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. I wasn’t all that great at apologies, and I figured now wasn’t going to be much different. I’d obviously upset her with all my shitty comments, though. “I didn’t mean to…I just…”

I stopped talking. I didn’t know what to say, and I felt bad about yelling at her. She looked at me all red-eyed with tears staining her cheeks.

“Just don’t do that shit anymore.” I let out a big sigh.

She nodded once and then reached out to grab something off the ground near her and shoved it back into the bag. From the amount of stuff scattered all over the street, my estimate on the size of the so-called purse wasn’t too far off. There was an umbrella, a little flashlight, a bunch of tubes and bottles, and at least a half dozen pens. As I looked around some more, I saw a small notebook, a paperback book, keys, a bottle of hand lotion that was nowhere near travel sized, a stack of tissues wrapped up in a Ziploc bag, two sets of earbuds, and a checkbook. There was also a whole pile of ponytail holders, bobby pins, and those little hair-holder-things that looked like teeth.

There was shit from her bag from one side of the f*cking street to the other.

She started crawling around, gathering it all up, and cramming it back inside, which gave me a fabulous view of her ass in the short-shorts style waitress uniform the place up the street usually demanded. I could kind of see how she might have thought she could use the bag as a weapon—there had been more stuff in there than really should have been able to fit. I looked around on the ground to see if there was an actual kitchen sink, or at least part of one, but I didn’t see anything metal. There was something that looked like a small rock, though.

“How do you even carry that thing around?” I asked.

“What?”

“That…that purse-bag-thingy there,” I said, pointing and shaking my finger at it. I wouldn’t have admitted it, but the whole idea of the thing scared me, and I wasn’t sure why. I felt like if I got too close to it I might get sucked in, never to be seen again. “It’s insane.”

Her eyes became little slits as she looked up to me.

“There is nothing wrong with my purse!” she growled.

“It’s huge,” I said.

“It has everything I need in it.”

“It has everything you and ten of your friends could need for a week,” I replied with a laugh. “I know there are people who carry Chihuahuas in their purse, but you could fit a Dane in there.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Okay, a decent-sized schnauzer, then.”

I got another glare, but this time it sort of made me smile. As the corners of my mouth turned up, I couldn’t help but take it further.

“A pair of poodles?” I asked. “They could sit under the umbrella and read to each other from the book.”

“Not really.” She seemed to be actively trying to keep her frown on her face now, and her tone had definitely changed.

“I bet there are lost works of art in there,” I teased. She just shook her head. “Undiscovered sonnets.”

“You are very strange,” she said, but she had cracked a bit of a smile.

“I could be a lot worse,” I said. She went silent as she looked back down the street and a shudder ran through her body. “I’m gonna get you home, okay?”

“Home?”

“You live around here, right?”

“Um...well, yeah,” she stammered. She looked in the direction she had originally been walking.

“I could walk you home,” I suggested. “Make sure…well, just get you home.”

“How can I trust you?” she said cautiously.

“Trust me?” I asked, trying to decide if I was offended by the very notion that I was somehow not trustworthy. I mean, I had certainly just saved her from a rough night, and most likely a whole lot worse than a little pushing and shoving. I raised both brows at her. “Well, if I was going to rape you and kill you—which was probably their plan—I would have just insisted on going first, not chase the other guys away.”

Her eyes went wide, and she dropped whatever she was holding onto the pavement. She quickly scrambled after it while I ran my hand through my hair and tried to get myself back together.

“Sorry,” I muttered again. I closed my eyes and rubbed my fingers into the sockets before looking back at her. “I think, all in all, you’re better off with me than you are by yourself.”