Huddle With Me Tonight by Farrah Rochon

many pundits believed would enter the next mayoral race. She popped the last grape into her mouth and went into the kitchen to refill her bowl, then carried it to her computer.
    Paige pulled up the page for her blog and grimaced. They were up to eighteen hundred replies, by far the most her blog had ever received. She had to bury this fiasco with Torrian Smallwood. Despite the traffic to her blog, the guilt of profiting from someone else’s misery wreaked havoc on her conscience. Even if that person had brought that misery upon himself.
    That wasn’t completely fair. Could she fault him for retaliating after the review she’d posted? Other authors had done so. Why should Torrian be held to a different standard?
    Maybe because no other author’s response had affected her as much as his had.
    Her intercom buzzed.
    Paige popped a couple of grapes into her mouth and walked over to the panel next to the door. She pressed the intercom button and spoke into the speaker. “Who is it?” she garbled.
    “Torrian Smallwood.”
    Paige nearly choked on the grapes.
    “Oh, my God,” she breathed. First her cell number, and now he’d found out where she lived. An excited tingle fluttered in her chest.
    “Stop it, Paige. This is stalking.” She wouldn’t feel this shimmer up her spine if the average Joe had found out where she lived. But Torrian was no average Joe.
    The intercom buzzed again, long and steady.
    “What can I do for you?” she spoke into the speaker.
    “You can let me up,” he suggested.
    Paige disregarded the idea. She didn’t care how famous he was, she did not know him well enough to invite him into her apartment.
    “You can say whatever you came to say from where you are.”
    Her voice met empty static on the other end of the intercom.
    A few moments later there was heavy knocking at her door. Paige covered her chest with her hand, her heart beating like a drum within her chest.
    She cracked the door open, but left the chain on. He looked a thousand times better in person than he ever had on the cover of Sports Illustrated .
    “How did you get up here?” she called.
    “One of your neighbors let me in. She’ll be back with her son’s football card in a minute.”
    As if on cue, a woman she’d seen around the building approached. She gushed and fawned and pretty much made a fool of herself while Torrian signed a football card, a football, two magazine covers and a Sabers jersey.
    When the woman finally left, he turned back to her door and leaned in close. “Can you please let me in before that happens again?” he asked.
    “I’m not letting you into my apartment,” she said.
    “Why not?”
    “Because I’m a single woman living in New York who understands the finer points of self-preservation,” she returned.
    “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said in a voice that made her believe it. “I just want to talk. Our phone conversation didn’t go so well, so I thought we could try a face-to-face.” He held up his hands. “I promise I’m not here to do anything other than talk. I would never put my hands on a woman. Unless she asked,” he added.
    Paige studied him through the crack in the door. It would be pretty stupid of him to harm her, especially since thousands of people around the city had witnessed their heated debate on her blog.
    “Fine,” Paige relented. She closed the door and released the chain, opening it and stepping back to let him in.
    Just as she’d been in Mancini’s Grocery, she was momentarily awestruck by the sheer magnificence of the man standing before her. He towered at least a foot above her, and even though he was dressed in a pair of jeans and a pullover shirt, he exuded something that definitely made him different from the average man on the street.
    “Thank you,” he said as he stepped into her apartment, leaving a gentle wave of something subtle and spicy in his wake. She remembered it from their encounter in the produce section. The enticing aroma caused all