could fit a whole Butterball turkey in it.
My hands were still a little shaky. The fight hadn’t lasted more than about a minute and a half, and I had way too much built-up adrenaline. All my muscles were tight, and my hands were still clenched into fists. The desire to beat the shit out of something hadn’t ebbed nearly enough in such a short amount of time, and all the energy from my arms and legs seemed to back up into my brain.
I had an instant headache and wished there were a twenty-four hour gym somewhere close-by. As it was, there was only one place for me to vent my building energy.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I heard myself shout. My hands continued to tighten into fists as the girl startled and gasped, and her wide eyes focused on me.
“I was just walking home…”
“In this neighborhood? At this time of night? Do you have a fucking death wish?”
I really had no idea why I was shouting at her. I just couldn’t believe how fucking stupid she was. Everyone knew how dangerous this area was in the daytime, and now it was past two in the morning. The fact that this obviously young, attractive girl—well, far more than just attractive—was wandering around this area in the middle of the night pissed me off.
“You know, if I had come out of the bar two minutes later or happened to have my back turned when those guys started after you, you’d be getting double-teamed in the alley about now!”
Her face went pale in the light of the distant streetlamp, and she looked a little sick. That didn’t seem to stop my mouth, though.
“Are you just stupid?” I probably would have gone on, but she wrapped her arms around herself and glared up at me.
“Stop yelling at me!” she screamed. She turned away, but I saw her reach up with the back of her hand to swoop underneath her eyes.
Shit.
I turned slightly away from her and practically bit down on my tongue to keep myself from saying anything else. I brought my fisted hands up against my stomach and tried to pull the tension inside of myself, work through it, and calm down. I could hear her crying combined with choked breaths and sniffles.
“Fuck,” I mumbled under my breath. I was starting to come off the fighting high I had been on—the tears might have helped with that—and my stomach felt tight.
After three long, deep breaths, I looked back to the girl on the ground and saw her frantically rubbing at her eyes and cheeks. She didn’t look at me as she reached out and pulled her mostly empty bag close to her. She looked inside and then looked around her at all her things on the ground.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. I wasn’t all that great at apologies, and I figured now wasn’t going to be much different. I’d obviously upset her with all my shitty comments, though. “I didn’t mean to…I just…”
I stopped talking. I didn’t know what to say, and I felt bad about yelling at her. She looked at me all red-eyed with tears staining her cheeks.
“Just don’t do that shit anymore.” I let out a big sigh.
She nodded once and then reached out to grab something off the ground near her and shoved it back into the bag. From the amount of stuff scattered all over the street, my estimate on the size of the so-called purse wasn’t too far off. There was an umbrella, a little flashlight, a bunch of tubes and bottles, and at least a half dozen pens. As I looked around some more, I saw a small notebook, a paperback book, keys, a bottle of hand lotion that was nowhere near travel sized, a stack of tissues wrapped up in a Ziploc bag, two sets of earbuds, and a checkbook. There was also a whole pile of ponytail holders, bobby pins, and those little hair-holder-things that looked like teeth.
There was shit from her bag from one side of the fucking street to the other.
She started crawling around, gathering it all up, and cramming it back inside, which gave me a fabulous view of her ass in the short-shorts style waitress uniform the place up the street usually demanded. I could kind of see how she might have thought she could use the bag as a weapon—there had been more stuff in there than really should have been able to fit. I looked around on the ground to see if there was an actual kitchen sink, or at least part of one, but I didn’t see anything metal. There was something that looked like a small rock, though.
“How do you even carry that thing around?” I asked.
“What?”
“That…that purse-bag-thingy there,” I said, pointing and shaking my finger at it. I wouldn’t have admitted it, but the whole idea of the thing scared me, and I wasn’t sure why. I felt like if I got too close to it I might get sucked in, never to be seen again. “It’s insane.”
Her eyes became little slits as she looked up to me.
“There is nothing wrong with my purse!” she growled.
“It’s huge,” I said.
“It has everything I need in it.”
“It has everything you and ten of your friends could need for a week,” I replied with a laugh. “I know there are people who carry Chihuahuas in their purse, but you could fit a Dane in there.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”