Deep Blue by Yolanda Olson Page B

scream. Girls don’t cry when foster daddies are touching them in their “sweet place”. All the things I knew were wrong with the world I learned at age five. With a sigh, I threw my napkin down and pushed my plate away. Just reliving the rules of what girls don’t do had been enough to kill my appetite.
    “Troy!”
    I looked up and saw the nice older man greeting someone with a big smile. Someone who decided to sit right next to me even though the entire bar area was empty. Someone who had big, strong arms, and smelled like sweat and dirt. Someone who wore a baseball cap that was now placed on the bar top next to my burger.
    Yeah; I was totally done eating after that.
    “Hey, Roger,” that someone greeted him back with a tired, smoky voice.
    “The usual?” Roger asked him.
    “Yeah. Thanks.”
    I watched him walk toward the small freezer next to the swinging door and come back with an amber colored glass bottle of beer with some kind of blue label on it. He handed it to Troy who thanked him again as he twisted the cap off and let it fall onto the bar top with a long sigh.
    I gave him a quick side glance. He seemed to be tall even sitting down. Dark brown hair that currently looked like a mess due to sweating under a cap, and his face was tired. He seemed easy enough to steal from and I was running low on cash. Thankfully I had found a place to shower the night before and was wearing a white low cut tank top, short light blue denim shorts, and flip flops. If he caught me, I would just step out of them and run like hell. But for now I knew I would have to engage him in conversation to get to that point.
    “Hi Troy,” I said brightly, turning to face him on my stool. “I’m Posy, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you around here before.”
    With a chuckle, he brought the beer bottle to his lips and took a drink before placing it down and turning to face me.
    “It could be because you’re not from around here,” he said with a knowing look. Of course I didn’t hear a damn word he said, because one glance into his deep blue eyes, and I felt like everything else in the world fell away from below me.
    I’ve never seen eyes like that. My God, he’s beautiful, I thought wistfully as I took in his handsomely rugged features; a strong jawline, not quite square and a dimple in his left cheek that I saw when he chuckled.
    “How old are you?” he asked, slightly amused.
    I raised an eyebrow at him before I shook my head and turned back to my burger with a side of sweaty cap.
    “So much for that,” he said under his breath.
    “Excuse me?” I asked, glancing at him.
    He just shook his head and turned his attention toward Roger who was approaching him with a large plate of food. Fries, the biggest burger I had ever seen in my life, poppers of some kind, and a side of mozzarella sticks.
    I looked from his plate to my almost eaten burger and my stomach growled loudly. Fuck, I thought in embarrassment, putting a hand tightly against my stomach. Without so much as another glance toward me, he moved his baseball cap to the other side of him, picked up his plate of mozzarella sticks, and placed them between us.
    “Dig in, little lady,” he said, picking up his burger and almost biting half of it in one try.
    “No thanks,” I replied quietly as my stomach growled again. Troy laughed and turned to look at me. He put his burger down and reached for one of the sticks, holding it level to my mouth.
    “Pride. I know how that goes, but you’re hungry and I don’t like seeing anything go hungry. Obviously the burger isn’t doing anything for you. Maybe these will. Now open wide, Posy,” he said miming an airplane coming in for a landing.
    I stared at him. I hated that he was treating me like a child, but it was obvious to him, that I wasn’t supposed to be in a bar, so he was probably treating me like one to get me to leave. I snatched the stick from his hand and tossed it back onto his plate, as I reached into my back