The Friend Zone(28)

My heart still thrummed in my ears. “Are you serious? The guy who ‘watches the lot’?” I followed her, looking over my shoulder back at the man.

“Yeah, it’s a thing. Kinda the Skid Row version of valet. He picks up trash, keeps the shady guys out. He does a good job. Look, no needles anywhere. And that guy’ll shank somebody for so much as looking at our car. Not that it’s anything to look at.” She gave me a crooked smile.

I shook my head. “You have no survival instincts, do you? You deliver dog sweaters to a felon, hunker down when you’ve got a prowler in the yard. Now you’re paying off homeless guys who ‘watch the lot.’”

“Hey, my instincts are spot-on. The prowler turned out to be a nonissue. And anyway, I already know how I’m going to die.”

We stopped in front of the truck window. The generator made a whirring noise, and the scrape of spatulas on a sizzling grill clinked from inside.

“How?” I asked.

“Spider bite. Or being sarcastic at the wrong time.”

I chuckled as two more cars pulled into the lot in quick succession. A nice SUV and an older model Honda. The rest of my guard dropped.

“Do you like everything?” she asked. “Onions? Hot stuff?” The smell of cooking meat drifted out of the window, and a gray-haired man in a dirty white apron waited for our order as moths fluttered around the light over the whiteboard menu.

“I eat everything,” I said.

She ordered for us, and I paid, putting a twenty through the window before she had a chance to object.

“This isn’t a date,” she reminded me, trying to hand over her own cash. She never let me pay.

“Yeah, but you paid for our protection,” I argued.

She didn’t look pleased, but she accepted my excuse. I watched her standing there, and a twinge of regret that this wasn’t a date washed over me.

I couldn’t believe I had to give her up.

When our food came out, she gave three tacos to Marv and we sat on the hood of the car to eat.

“That was pretty sexy back there when you went Marine Corps on that guy,” she said as she pulled off her heels and chucked them through the open sunroof.

“I wouldn’t have let him touch you.” I wouldn’t let anyone hurt her, ever.

She took a sip of her Sprite. “I know. That’s what was sexy about it.”

For all her claims that she found me sexy, it did me no good whatsoever. She didn’t want me. None of this would continue once her boyfriend was here. I wouldn’t be able to take her out for tacos or show up with pizza. I wouldn’t even be able to sit in her living room with her.

I wondered if this thought had any effect on her, or was she just happy that her boyfriend was going to be home?

Probably that last one.

I sat looking out over the lot, a sucking sense of loss pulling on my heart.

She was like a unicorn. A mythical creature. An honest, no-drama woman who didn’t bullshit and drank beer and cussed and didn’t care about what people thought of her. She was a unicorn, tucked in the body of an attractive woman with a great ass.

And I couldn’t have her. So I should just stop thinking about it.

We finished eating and got back in the car. I didn’t want to take her home. Or rather I did, but not to drop her off.

I considered asking her to go do something else, just to make it last, but it couldn’t be anything that felt like a date. She wouldn’t agree to that. But I didn’t know Los Angeles. I had no idea what was open. And there was only so far I could take this without it verging on inappropriate for a woman with a boyfriend and healthy boundaries. So I reluctantly prepared to take her home.

This was it. The last time I’d have her alone. The final moments.

I’d had all I was going to get.

I turned the key in the ignition and the engine didn’t turn over. My eyes flitted to hers and I tried it again. The cranking turned into a click.

“Shit,” I said, rejoicing internally at the idea of being stranded with her in a dodgy parking lot in the middle of the night.

“Do we need a jump?” she asked, peering at me with her pretty brown eyes.

“Probably,” I grumbled, doing my best not to seem pleased at this development. I got out and flagged down the guys in the Honda still eating in their car. One unsuccessful jump start later and I was calling a tow truck.

“I’m going to give Brandon so much shit for this. Sloan should not be driving this thing,” I said, getting back into the driver’s seat to wait. That part was true, but for the sake of extending our night, I couldn’t be happier that Sloan drove a piece of crap. I had to slam the door three times to get it to shut, and I was more than happy to do it.

“She’s sentimental. This was her first car. Sloan can never bear to part with anything.” She lowered her seat all the way back until she was lying down, and she turned on her side to face me, her arm tucked under her head. “She still has the ticket stubs from the first movie we went to, like, twelve years ago.”

The way she was lying showed off the curve in her hips. I could almost picture her like that next to me in bed. Her lipstick was gone, but the stain was still on her lips, making them look pink and supple. I wanted to put a thumb to her mouth, see if it felt as soft as it looked.

She looked out of place in this shitty car with torn, faded fabric on the seat under her, duct tape on the glove box. Like an elegant leading lady right out of a black-and-white movie, dropped into a scene that didn’t make any sense.