“Mmm,” Lilly hummed as she shoved another spoonful of cookies and cream ice-cream into her mouth.
She was stress eating—soothing something inside her soul with sugar and calories. I knew all too well what it was like to give in to the sugar addiction to take away your emotions. The carbohydrate load was good for our minds, clearing away the memory debris that loaded down our thoughts, but the sugar overdose was terrible for our bodies.
I understood, though. I had done the same thing many times in my life. Although, my sugar soothing sessions were usually brought on for different reasons than Lilly’s. She was having a minor breakdown over the fact she was falling hard for the guy she was seeing. Falling for a guy wasn’t something I would ever do.
Lilly wasn’t me, though. She was my best friend as well as my roommate and the manager of Franklin’s Jewelry store where I worked, but she wasn’t a man-hater the way I was. Needless to say, I was around her a ton, so I understood her issues.
I really did.
The differences in her since she gained her new guy friend, or whatever he was, were seriously noticeable, and I hated to see her wrapped in the wrath of depression during what should have been a joyful period in her life.
She was fighting her feelings, which, honestly, was the wisest thing she could do when it came to the opposite sex, but I knew she wouldn’t win the fight. Women were drawn to attractive men, and while I hated to admit it, Devin Michaels, Lilly’s new friend, was super nice to gawk at.
That didn’t mean I wanted what she had.
It didn’t mean my body was suddenly working again or I could feel the urges she spoke of.
Understanding attraction to men was hard for me. I pretended, giggling with my girlfriends about the half-naked men in magazines and the sexy guys at the bars we went to, but the fact was, even looking at naked male flesh made my stomach turn inside out.
The night I dared not think of made it so.
His touch.
His voice.
The memory of his flesh sliding against mine.
Everything about it turned me away from the male gender. They were the Black Plague as far as I was concerned—rotting women from the inside out—dotting their flesh with the pocks of disdain. We were all being threatened by an army of penises ready to bring down the female race.
Needless to say, the events which unfolded over the course of the day were a shock to my misandristic system.
My eyes were shuttering closed, my mind slowly shutting down, and I kept catching myself nodding off at the front counter. Weekdays, when almost everyone else in the world was working, too, tended to be that way. Why two of us worked at the same time on a weekday, I had no idea. I only knew I needed the money, so even though I wanted to call in for the day, I pulled myself out of bed, got dressed, tamed my fiery mane, and went to work.
Tourists passed our door, basking in the comfortable fall weather outside and enjoying the historical beauty of Charleston. I hadn’t always lived in Charleston, but I had lived there long enough to know who was a tourist.
The tourist looked at everything around them as if it was some sort of beautiful creation. Their mouths hung open in love with the antiquity of the town. They pulled out their phones for pictures and walked the sidewalks slow enough to take in everything they passed.
Locals weren’t anything like that. They hustled, bustling past the magnificence of our town with their phones glued to their faces. They weren’t in awe of Charleston’s splendor. They took advantage of their circumstances because the town around them was their home and the world they saw every day.
Growing up, I lived on the outskirts of downtown Charleston, and coming from a smaller town, I had only visited the city on special occasions. My family could never afford the luxuries of downtown, but sometimes, we would drive to town and walk the ancient cobblestone streets, taking in the history that marked every surface of the city. I used to be a tourist—a slow walker—pulling out my camera and snapping pictures of the town’s rustic charm. Memorizing its handmade wrought iron fences and perfectly manicured historic gardens.
Things were different now, though. I was older, and living with my grammy wasn’t an option anymore. Bills needed to be paid, and next to no work could be found in the small town where I grew up. After months of searching, damn near starving, and having our electric turned off, I moved in with Lilly and took the job at Franklin’s Jewelry store. Soon after my move, Grammy started getting disability checks to cover her bills, but I still contributed whenever I was able.
A small boy in blue jean overalls ran up to our door and pulled on the handle like he was going to come inside. I leaned up on the counter, thrilled at the prospect of a customer, but his mother came behind him and tugged him toward the store beside ours.
False alarm.
Resting my chin on the heel of my hand, I sighed in boredom yet again. My eyes gradually closed as the sleep I had missed the night before crept over me.
That was when I saw him.
I didn’t usually notice men, but this man … he was very noticeable, to say the least.
He was tall and dark, his bronzed skin glittering in the noon sunlight. His wide shoulders flexed as he tilted his head to the side to crack his neck, and his thighs stretched in his distressed jeans when he stepped onto the sidewalk just outside Franklin’s.
The button up cargo shirt he was wearing pulled tightly across his chest as he moved. The large watch on his wrist caught the sun when he checked the time, and a reflection dashed across my face.
Men rarely wore watches anymore, but something about it was attractive and distinguished. Wearing a watch told the people around him he didn’t allow his phone to rule his world. He was the ruler. The commander of his time and actions and no digital electronic was going to tell him when and where.
I blinked, shocked I was staring so hard—surprised I was contemplating anything about him. He was like a solar eclipse … dangerous to look at but too hard to look away from. A bad accident that made you rubberneck or an intense movie you rewound to watch over and over again.
He moved like volcanic lava, deliberate and steaming, in no rush to get where he was going, but sure to scorch everything in his path. The tourist women walking the sidewalk melted like shaved ice on hot asphalt as he passed. If I hadn’t found it hard to look away from him myself, I might have laughed at how idiotic they seemed.
But for the first time in a long while, I understood their ogling.
He was beautiful.
Gorgeous like a Greek god but tainted black like the devil himself.