The Girl Who Would Be King(12)

“Felice tells us you have a pretty impressive haul from that jewelry store last night – you got a crew that help you with that?”

Felice returns to the table and gives me the beer. I take a drink before answering. It tastes bitter; it’s actually kinda terrible. “No. I work alone.” I say flatly.

“You’re a pretty young thing to be working on your own, don’t you think?” asks the less cute of the two younger guys.

“No. I don’t think,” I say, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. This causes the youngest and cutest one to chuckle again.

“I’ll bet,” says Melvin looking me up and down. I look at him with the hardest look I can come up with and then shrug my shoulders like I don’t care what he thinks.

“It seems to be working out pretty well so far,” I say. The table gets silent again and I drink the rest of my beer as fast as I can. “Actually, I don’t even know what I’m doing here. I don’t need to be grilled by a bunch of nobodies.” I walk away while the rest of the table argues and I listen for them over the din of the restaurant. Felice is asking why they’re such morons and rambling on about something involving me and decoys, which I don’t like the sound of at all. As I walk back into the Nevada night, the cute one follows me.

“Wait up!”

“No,” I say, not easing up on my pace.

“Lola, c’mon, hold up.” He jogs the rest of the distance between us and I roll my eyes and sigh heavily so he’ll know he has inconvenienced me greatly. I slouch my shoulders dramatically and stop.

“What the hell do you want?” I ask. Looking into his pretty eyes though, I suddenly regret throwing the ‘hell’ in there; he’s exceptionally cute.

“Don’t take them too seriously, y’know, they just don’t love outsiders. I think you should come back in there. Felice thinks you’ve got some talent.”

“And why do you care what Felice says?”

“She’s my sister and she’s pretty smart too. Been playing the game longer than me. She got me into it actually. She thinks you’d be an asset.”

“I don’t think so, I’m not too into being a decoy anyway, not my style,” I say, looking off into the distance, trying to seem detached. He does a double take.

“How did you hear…” he trails off looking at the restaurant and then back at me.

“Let’s just say your sister isn’t wrong; I have some talent.” I cross my arms over my chest trying to look tough and then change my mind and put them on my hips. “What’s your name, anyway?”

“I’m Adrian.”

“Alright, see you, Adrian. Good luck.”

“Wait,” he says.

I stop again. “What already?” I ask, exasperated.

“We won’t go back in there, but come get a coffee with me,” he says, flashing a lopsided and crazy charming smile at me. This softens me a bit. Nobody has ever asked me to coffee before.

“Alright, but just coffee.” It seems like the right thing to say. He smiles the cute crooked smile again and we walk side by side towards a coffee shop a few blocks away. My hand brushes his once and the electric feeling that pulses through me is new too. It is a nice kind of new though, unlike most crap in my life.

Over coffee I decide Adrian is the most attractive person I’ve ever seen in real life. I myself am not particularly pretty, just kind of normal pretty, maybe. I’ve come to accept this, though I secretly hope that with age I will become prettier, beautiful even. But even at normal pretty I’m kind of extraordinary to look at. At 16, I’m already almost 5’10” and I have this really long, lithe body and slender legs. I don’t have much in the boobs department but the shape of my body is pretty, and I have this wild, curly-ish dark blonde hair that men are always ogling. I have big light blue eyes and a nice mouth, though my teeth are not as straight as I’d like. I’d begged Delia for braces one year, when I realized there could be something done about my teeth, but she’d laughed herself practically into a coma at the idea that I wanted to put metal inside my mouth for a couple years.

Adrian had either put metal in his mouth or just been really really lucky in the genetics department, because, though his smile is a bit lopsided in an adorably cute way, his teeth are perfect, like a movie star’s.

We slide into a vinyl booth and order coffee and pie. I don’t know why Adrian gets pie, but I get it in the hopes that it will cover up the flavor of the coffee. Once the waitress has left we’re just sitting there staring, the silence heavy between us, and I’m beginning to think this was a mistake, despite his movie-star smile and charm.