“Here, honey!” The older woman waved, and the pregnant woman reached out her hand. “It’s not a safety pin, but it might help.”

When the pregnant woman stepped back toward me, she opened her palm and revealed a small hair clip.

“Do you want me to try to close it up with this?” she asked me, a skeptical look on her face. But before I could tell her no, a deep, calm voice shot through the din of the subway.

“Here.”

It was the giant suit standing next to me, except now he was just crisp white shirt and soft blue tie, his shoulders hitting right at my eyeline. His navy jacket was dangling neatly from his hand. “Here,” he said again, clearly perplexed by my inability to understand exactly what he wanted me to do with his coat.

I looked up to meet his eyes.

Even in my Holy shit, my dress has ripped open straight down the back, and I’m in the one thong I own and never wear, because thongs are miserably uncomfortable, but I bailed on doing laundry last night, so here I am, and to top it all off, I just got let go from my job and I still have at least five more years of student loans to pay state, I could register that he was handsome. The kind of good-looking stranger that causes you to think Whoa when you pass them on the street.

I knew just by the confident, assured way he held himself—shoulders back, chin just slightly tilted to the sky—and by the cut slopes of his jaw and his thick brown hair, that this was a man who had never known an awkward phase. While the rest of us were running around seventh grade with oozing zits and blinding metal braces (I had to sleep in headgear, for god’s sake), he breezed through with ease, all long muscles and creamy, clear skin and enviable cheekbones and dark lashes, from the day he was born.

And then there were his eyes, stern and serious but also big and beautiful. At first glance, they looked brown, but with a second look I realized they were so inky and dark that they came closer to matching the navy of his suit. He had the body of a runner or a cyclist or—it clicked then—a triathlete. I could see him in one of those skimpy running suits now, muscle pulsing against spandex, not caring that everyone in the world could see every angle and curve of his perfectly sculpted body.

“Please.” His voice was caught between concerned and annoyed, and the slight wrinkle between his brow underscored his tone. “Take it.” He even had good eyebrows, the kind that somehow looked well-groomed even though he was surely too cool to wax them.

“What?” I said, my voice shaky. “You want me to take your jacket?”

He nodded and offered a small smile. “Yes.”