Ticket To Love

“Did he cause any?” Harry asked.

Acey paused for a long moment. “I still think you should check your numbers,” she finally said.

Harry realized the last thing he wanted was to tip this woman off to his sad truth. He reined in his emotion. “The rain’s stopped.”

“So it has.” Acey picked her bags up off the table.

“I’ll throw out your apples because they fell in the street. Wait.” He reached into a silver bowl on the table and picked out two shiny apples, dropping them into one of her bags. “I bought these yesterday.”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“I always buy fruits and vegetables and never eat them. I just end up eating take-out food and letting the produce rot. Please take them.”

“A’right, thanks. I bet you can tell by my appearance that I never waste food.” She rolled her eyes.

Harry took her self-deprecating comment as an invitation to sweep his gaze over her body. She was not overweight. She was as lush and ripe as a piece of fruit herself, and when he turned his eyes back to her face, it was the color of the apples in question. She practically ran from the kitchen. Harry followed her but paused to peel the offending lottery ticket out from underneath its magnet. He went to drop it in the trash, but he’d forgotten to replace the bag this morning, so he chucked the ticket on top of the refrigerator. He didn’t want to have to see it anymore.

“Thanks,” Acey said, edging toward his door. “I mean it. This has been—”

Harry tried to help. “Yeah, it really has been, uh—”

Silence.

“Unexpected,” Acey finished, and Harry agreed. Acey was unexpected, filling his apartment with exuberance and light, which he was sure he’d miss again the second she left.

He wanted to ask her if she would come by again, or go out somewhere, just spend time with him in some way but his promise to himself was still there, humming through him, stopping him. Acey stood a moment, quiet, and with his untrained eye, he could almost see her own inner struggle. He wondered if it was the same, and he wondered at her reasons. He hoped she’d give in first. If she did, if she asked him out, he could cave. But if she didn’t, he knew his resolve was too strong for him to overcome.

She didn’t. She put out her hand. “It was so nice meeting you,” she said.

He shook it. “Y’all be careful going home now, all right? Walk slow on that knee,” he added with a half smile.

“I like that ‘y’all’ thing,” Acey said. Then she blurted, “Oh, I forgot my purse,” and she trotted back to the kitchen. When she returned, she looked at him a bit differently, with her head cocked just slightly to one side.

Harry narrowed his eyes with curiosity.

Acey picked up her grocery bags, stepped outside and said over her shoulder, “See ya around, cowboy.” Then she clattered down the stairs.

Harry grinned. Everything that woman did was noisy.

“I wasn’t stalking him,” Acey called, squeezing water out of her hair and into the kitchen sink. A second quick downpour had caught her two blocks from home, drenching her. She wrapped a towel around her head and entered the living room where Steph was sitting, her eyebrows raised in amused fashion.

“I wasn’t stalking,” Acey repeated.

“Uh-huh,” Steph said, leaning back on the sofa and lacing her fingers behind her head.

“I wasn’t.” Acey tucked the towel behind each ear to hear better. “The supermarket run happened to take me past his building. And then my bag sort of ripped open, maybe because I sort of absentmindedly picked a hole in the bottom of it with my nail.”

“Suddenly this all becomes more believable.”

“Listen, I had to meet him again. So my bag breaks, and he comes running like…like…”

“Like what?”

“Like the hero. Every time I see him, he’s saving the day. In the store, he was all sweet to Rosalia, and he said the nicest thing to Cassandra I ever heard, did I tell you?”

“About twenty-three times.”

“He helps kids, and elderly people, and me.”

“So, is his place papered with hundred-dollar bills?”

“No, it’s…totally nothing. It was like, white walls and brown chairs and that’s it.”

“Doesn’t sound very megamillionaire-ish.”

“No, I thought the same thing. I talked to him and I felt…” Acey stopped. She’d felt, and that was amazing in itself. She’d wrapped up and protected her heart since her bad breakup last year, and she hadn’t really enjoyed a conversation with a man in so long.

“Felt what?”

Acey shook her head. “I just figured, it’s not him. I mean, he’s in this little apartment, doing this freelance grant-writing work for nonprofits that can’t be paying him a whole lot, and if he did win, he’d probably be making some serious changes. But…” Acey paused for drama.

Steph, who knew her sister’s games, waited ten seconds before demanding, “But what?”

“But before I left, I was in his kitchen, and I saw a lottery ticket on the fridge. The date was May twenty-fourth.”

Steph jumped a tiny bit. “Did you ask him about it?”

“Yeah, but I tried to be cool.”

“Ha!”

“Shut up. I tried to start a conversation about it, but he reacted so strangely. He just about said that winning all that money would cause problems, not solve them. He sounded annoyed.”

“Did you recognize the numbers? They’ve been showing them so often on TV…”

“That was another thing. The numbers were folded under. I could read the date but not the numbers.”

“Maybe he’d folded it in his pocket when he bought it and stuck it up there like that?”

“Yeah, well, here’s the kicker. I forgot my purse, and when I went back to the kitchen to get it, it was gone.”

“Your purse was gone?”

“No. The ticket. Gone. Disappeared off the refrigerator. So I peeked in the garbage can. The can was empty, not even a trash bag in there. He’d followed me out of the room the first time, so…”

Steph was nodding, her mystery-writing, clue-analyzing mind jumping ahead. “So you think he swiped it out of your sight? Hid it in a safe place?”

“Exactly. Which got me to thinking on my walk home.”