Save Me from Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin #1)(5)

“No, why’d you hit me?”

“Because you had it coming. Can I get that phone now?”

He raised himself slowly off the shattered coffee table. “My jeans.”

I went over to his pants and found the phone. I didn’t need the passcode for the number I was dialing.

“Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”

“This guy I’m with,” I said. “I think he was in a fight. I think he lost.”





3


I was hungry. I rode around until I found a twenty-four-hour diner a few miles away. Three black guys were walking out, laughing as they got into a Jeep. One of the newer models, headlights narrowed to squinted strips. They saw me as I took my helmet off and one called out, “Damn, girl, you got style!”

I grinned at him and gave them a wave as they pulled away. Inside, a sign by the front said SEAT YOURSELF so I did, at a booth in the back. The place was mostly empty. It was past one in the morning. A slow period for diners, after the graveyard shift had been in to eat, and before the drunk crowd headed in after the downtown Oakland bars closed at 2:00 A.M. The waitress came over almost immediately and I ordered coffee and one of the big Lumberjack breakfasts, eggs over easy and sausage and bacon and hash browns, a short stack of pancakes, and buttered sourdough toast. I read until the food arrived and then tore into it, still reading. Ordered more coffee and got three refills on my ice water, feeling the last effects of the whiskey slowly trickling away.

There was a table of four men nearby. White guys in their late twenties or early thirties. They were throwing a few looks my way. I didn’t care. Kept eating. The food tasted good. I was hungry.

The four guys were whispering and laughing to each other. I seemed to be the subject. One of them finally walked over. He was handsome, with a slender build and three or four days of tobacco-colored stubble. Curly brown hair cut short, wire glasses. He wore a corduroy jacket and with bemusement I saw a little golden cardboard crown atop his head, like what Burger King gave away to birthday kids. “Permission to approach the bench,” he said.

I finished chewing and put my book aside. “And why would you want to do that?”

He came a step closer. “My friends said you wouldn’t talk to me.”

“Sounds like they think very highly of you.”

He giggled. “I mean—you’re really pretty and you seem really focused. I’ve learned that’s a bad combination if I’m trying to talk to a girl. For me, I mean, not the girl. The pretty, focused ones usually ignore me. Actually, even one out of two and it doesn’t work out so well.”

I sighed. “Look. You’re talking to me. And I’m talking to you. You win the bet. You can go back to your friends now and tell them that the really pretty focused girl talked to you.”

I picked up my book and my fork. Went back to the eggs.

“Look, I wasn’t trying to bother you.”

“It’s okay,” I told him. “You didn’t bother me.”

Then he surprised me. “‘Infinite resignation is that shirt we read about in the old fable. The thread is spun under tears, the cloth bleached with tears, the shirt sewn with tears; but then too it is a better protection than iron and steel.’”

I put my book back down. The cover visible again. Fear and Trembling.

“Okay, hotshot,” I said. “You’re a Berkeley grad student and you can quote Kierkegaard. I’m guessing philosophy?”

Now he was surprised. “English, actually. I just have a soft spot for long-dead Danish existentialists. How’d you know the rest?”

“Because you’re up too late to be a professor and you’re too polite for an undergrad. And if you were at Stanford you’d be going out in San Francisco, not Oakland. So that leaves Berkeley.”

“Those are a lot of assumptions.”

“Everyone makes assumptions. The only question is if they’re right or not.”

He frowned. “So I’m of little to no mystery to you? That’s depressing.”

“I do have one question.”

“Yeah?”

“The crown,” I said. “Can’t figure that one out. Very mysterious.”

He rubbed his head self-consciously. “I finished my dissertation today. We’ve been celebrating.”

“Congratulations.”

“Well, it still has to pass. But this is a step, anyway.”

“Who did you write on?”

“William Hazlitt.”

“The Fight. A favorite.”

“Wow,” he said. “Nobody knows Hazlitt anymore, except maybe his Shakespeare stuff. But nobody knows The Fight. Are you in school, too?”

“Nope. Just a working girl.”

“Working where?”

“I work in a bookstore.”

“Around here? I know them all.”

“Then maybe you’d know this one.”

He glanced around the nearly empty restaurant. “So why are you here tonight?”

“You mean I don’t look like I just finished a dissertation?”

He grinned, showing white teeth. “You’re way too sober to have done that.”

I liked his smile, I realized with mild surprise. “Okay. Fine. You can sit.”