The Detective and Her Bachelor

Chapter 8

Why is it wrong to be anti-social in the early morning hours? Why is it considered rude to shut down a conversation when all social cues are being ignored? The night owls instantly get a bad rap for not being ready for the rest of the world as soon as they open their eyes in the morning. 

For needing a hot minute to process the mere fact that they are awake and their brain hasn't booted up to give them orders for how to breathe, walk, or function as a human being yet. 

Morning people run the world in the early hours. They can do miraculous things like being social as the sun comes up. While night owls are still stumbling around like a cat with its head stuck in a box, attempting to get to a caffeine source, hoping to catch up. 

Yes. I had been rude to Ace Walker. But why should I apologize for telling a guy to shut it when he was trying to talk to me so early in the morning? I should be allowed to sit inside a coffee shop and think without someone forcing me to use more brain functions than I am capable of at such a ridiculous hour. 

I tried to think of something to say to Ace Walker after retracting my apology in such a public place. To fill the long pause that followed my non-apology. To fill the silence with a joke, or a flirtatious comment. But my mind came up blank, afraid of making things worse. So we sat in that silence for a looooooong moment. 

I could feel the cameras, the eyes in the shadows watching the trainwreck of our "first meeting," and wanted to crawl under a rock and die. I actually saw the clipboard lady in the distance facepalm, and I could only imagine how much more angry Decker was. The entire first conversation with the Single Stud had been twenty seconds long, and it had already gone up in flames. 

"Okay, Scowler," Ace said, a grin tugging at the side of his lips as he plucked up the reigns of the conversation I had charred into a pile of ash. 

"Delle," I corrected, wanting to ditch the nickname he was attempting to pin me with. 

"Delle," he amended looking back at me, his own eyes unreadable. "Tell me about yourself. When you aren't ripping people's heads off for striking up a conversation with you, what do you do?"

I raised a brow. "You... want to know what I do?" 

He crossed his arms, tilting his head to the side, causing a single ink black strand to fall across his forehead, escaping the slicked hairstyle. "It's not a weird question. That's what one on one conversations tend to consist of. Learning about the other person." 

Ace searched my face, a slow smile spreading across his lips, amused as he watched my tiny flinch at the idea of sharing. He is picking up too much of my uncomfortable tells. Is he more observant or is he throwing off my ability to deceive? I wasn't sure. Either way, I had to give him something other than staring back at him like he was Public Enemy No. 1. 

 "Wow. You are not a sharer, are you?" he continued before I could get my thoughts straight.

I searched his face, trying to read him. Trying to pick apart his smile and finding it strangely difficult. He went from smiling one moment to becoming unreadable the next. "Don't you want me gone?" I asked, avoiding his question and trying to figure out why I hadn't been escorted out already.

"I'll take your non-answer as a yes, he replied, smiling vanishing again. "And no one gets told to leave until it's officially decided..." He gestured to the cameras around us vaguely. "They have a whole ceremony and everything later this evening."

"That's..." Barbaric. Dramatic. Creepy. "...good to know," I managed, trying not to picture a sacrifice ceremony where they threw a crying girl into an open volcano to honor the Reality TV Show's Sacrifice gods. I pushed away my shudder. "How can you decide if someone is worth your time after one conversation?"