Just A Small Town Girl: A New Adult Romantic Comedy Read Online Free PDF Page B

from her shoulders while Steve yelled in the guy's ear, probably talking him out of something - monogamy, sobriety, heterosexuality, his pants. Neither me nor Bog knew exactly what greased Steve's pole, but he had some New York friends who were pretty touchy feely with him and who would maybe be into some kind of freaky three-way scene of Steve's fiendish devising.
     The girls here were model thin and beautiful, the kind who wouldn't look twice at someone like me when surrounded by guys with trust funds and Rolexes. I thought my virtue was safe until this one girl bumped into me. She was short where the others were tall, and where the other girls had bodies like Victoria's Secret models, this one had a little meat on her bones. She looked kind of lost, kind of angry and kind of like she didn't belong; she looked like I felt.
     "You look like you could use a drink," I said.
     She tiptoed up and shouted in my ear over the music. "Forget it. If I need anything right now it's a shirt."
     She was wearing a short black skirt and a draped halter-top in some kind of velvety material. She hugged her bare upper arms as she spoke and for some reason I just knew someone else had dressed her. Just like I knew that the brown hair hanging poker straight down her back was never meant to hang like that - it was already curling up. I gave her my shirt and she looked at me with an odd mix of pity and gratitude. She said her name was Lindsay and she had the most amazing eyes I'd ever seen; at first glance they looked so brown they were almost black, but when the light hit them for a brief moment I saw they were a kind of toffee, topaz color, flecks of chestnut brown raying out from where her pupil shrank.
     "I can't ditch my friend," she said, when I asked her if she wanted to get the hell out of here, and just like I knew someone else had put those clothes on her I knew that deep down she wanted to.
     "You don't have to," I said. "Wanna go blaze one in the parking lot?"
     At first I thought maybe she was just cold. I turned the car heater on for her as she huddled deeper into the seats. "I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to sit in cars with strange men," she said.
     "I'm not strange," I said, lighting up and passing her the joint. "I'm eccentric."
     "Bullshit. The word eccentric modifies like two words in the entire language - 'English' and 'millionaire'." She took another deep drag and held it in her lungs. "Since you're neither," she said, exhaling. "You're just plain weird."
     I was beginning to see why she didn't quite fit the mould. "How do you know I'm not a millionaire?"
     She gave me a sidelong look that said it all.
     "You leave my car out of it," I said. "It's old, but it works."
     "I never said a thing about your car," she said, giggling as she passed the joint back. "Anyway, it's nice. You know what they say about guys who drive expensive cars." She waggled her pinkie finger and said "Com-pen-sating," in a singsong voice that told me we were smoking the stuff that wasn't cut with catnip.
     "Is that good news for me?"
     "Sure. At least, I hope so."
     "You hope so?"
     "Yeah. If you're a stripper then you'd better have something to show 'em, right?"
     She was flirting with me but I couldn't very well tell her to knock it off and toss her out of the car; after all, this had been my idea. And she was cute - really cute. Someone had painted her up as carefully as a doll, but where her lipstick had worn away I could see her lips were every bit as full without it. Some girls wear their make-up thick as masks, like they're terrified the world will see who they really are, but with her it was like the mask didn't fit and kept slipping. I liked the glimpses of what lay beneath - the cinnamon flecks in her eyes, the wide bridge of her nose, the brown hair that kept trying to spring back into curls. Did she have freckles under all that make-up? And did they carry on down to her arms and the tops of her boobs?
     "Just so we're