Build Me Up (NaNoWriMo)

Day 6 (602 words)

While she was subtly looking for sweat stains, Ford turned slightly and made eye contact. Kristen quickly snapped her head around to spear a fry with her fork. She could sense he was still there, but when she casually glanced back over at him, he was pulling out a chair over at the bar. So much for her tingling spider sense.

The bar stools had half-backs, but Kristen still got a good view of how the contractor’s jeans stretched over his backside and thighs, and the way his shirt stretched over his shoulders. Was there a special store for stretchy clothes in Greenport? Like, not vacationing-seniors-in-sweatpants kind of stretchy but like sexy stretchy?

Sexy stretchy? Kristen mentally cringed. What was going on with her? Surely she couldn’t be that starved of physical interaction with the opposite sex, right? After all, it had only been a couple… okay, maybe more than a couple, of months since she last… Darn it, she had to stop thinking about that. One more year of celibacy wouldn’t kill her. In fact, it might even make her a better person, more in tune with nature and intellectual stimulance and… oh man, those jeans fit him well.

Ford got himself comfortable on the bar stool. He’d noticed the woman – Kristen, was that what Hallie called her? – looking at him. He wasn’t entirely sure if he should take it as a compliment or not. He got the impression she was sizing him up for some reason.

Maybe he’d been rude, refusing her offer to join her because he had plans and then coming back and sitting down at the bar instead, but he didn’t know her. If she was so desperate to get to know people, there were plenty of fish in the sea. Crustaceans, too.

Not that Kristen-or-what’s-her-name wasn’t attractive. When she wasn’t sneering or scowling, that is. To her credit, though, she’d apologized for her part in their earlier encounter, so maybe he should give her a chance. Except he didn’t need the hassle. He already had a girl in his life – one he was responsible for even when she wasn’t around. And right now he had no idea where she was.

“Here’s your burger,” Hallie said and slid a plate in front of him. “Beer with that?”

“Might as well.”

Hallie nodded and walked around the bar to grab a bottled beer from the fridge. “What happened with Annabelle?”

“She’d already left with Donny Preston,” Ford sighed and took a swig of the uncapped bottle.

“So you’re fancy free, huh?” Hallie said, propping her elbows on the counter and somehow managing to push up her breasts in the process. He wouldn’t be a man if he didn’t at least glance at the view, but he wasn’t feeling in a easy, breezy mood. Hallie was too young to understand that he wouldn’t be able to relax when he didn’t know where his daughter was.

“Something like that,” he mumbled and took a hearty bite of his burger. It had the dual purpose of satisfying his appetite and avoiding having to answer questions. Hallie seemed to get that he wasn’t in the mood to chat, or she was distracted by something shiny across the restaurant, because when he looked up from his plate, she was gone.  

Kristen paid her bill and headed out, glancing over at the taciturn contractor sitting by the bar as she went. She would go back to the room and do her new drawings, then she’d send them off to Bankhead for approval, and then she’d get some sleep before she contacted Ford Hamm again.