Of coursehe replies, as if it should be obvious.But I don’t think they’d have much luck if they tried to chat you up, so my guess is they decided they might have better luck if you were feeling a little more …
The three dots blink and she knows he’s choosing his words carefully.
… relaxed.
She stiffens.They were trying to get me drunk?
E, to be fair, you were already quite drunk. But what they did was messed up.
But why? Why didn’t they just talk to me?
Don’t take this the wrong way, but …
She waits while he works out how to say what he wants to say, sure she probably is going to take it the wrong way. Or maybe it’s the right way. All she ever wants is to be one of the crowd, to fit in. And she tries so hard … So why does she always feel as if she’s on the outside looking in?
What?she stabs into her phone, irritated.
Sometimes, you can be a little intimidating.
She laughs out loud. That’s utterly ridiculous. She’s not like Meg, strong and feisty and full of fire … God, how she misses her. Erin Ross is sugar and spice and all things nice. In other words, the boring goody two shoes who sucks the fun out of everything.
I’m not intimidating. Don’t be stupid.
You are. A little …
What are you talking about?
Not intimidating in a bad way.
She snorts.There’s a good way?
She doesn’t know how, but she senses he is chuckling. His reply comes back lightning fast.
You’re very nice to look at, and you’ve got this air about you. Sort of aloof, untouchable.
She makes a face. She didn’t realize Simon believed this about her. She thought he understood who she really was. She types furiously.
In other words, I’m a stuck-up bitch?
No!
The answer comes back so fast she hasn’t even taken her thumbs off her phone keyboard.
Then what?
I don’t know how to explain it, but there’s something about you that’s a bit too good to be true, something that makes us lesser mortals feel as if we might not be worthy.
She blushes, and she’s glad he can’t see the soppy smile on her face. She’s pretty sure nobody else thinks that way, but the facthethinks that way … It’s everything. But she’s not ready to tell him that yet, so she steers the subject back to the matter in hand.
So what were these guys doing?
One of them was sitting next to you, and when anyone pulled an ace from the cards … That one was waterfall – everyone has to drink but you can’t stop until the person to your left finishes, remember?
To be honest, I’m a bit fuzzy about the rules.
Well, one of those guys was sitting next to you and I’m sure he was drinking as slowly as he could to make you keep drinking, mostly because you hadn’t quite got the hang of sipping it slowly when that card was pulled.
Great. Now she wasn’t just untouchable, she was an idiot.
