The Beginning of a Long Short Story

I have been doing a TON of reading lately... and it finally helped inspire me today while I was on my plane from Boston to Kansas City.
I actually have a plot line figured out and characters and their development and personal growth blah blah... I'm betting this will be like a 5 or 6 part blog series!
Wow! I know my 0 readers are super excited! Anyway... Here goes...
This is really rough. Not even I have looked through it to edit any typos or run-on/awkward sentences... whateverrrrrr

Chapter 1

“So what about you?” He said, smiling mischievously, leaning in a little closer to her over the small café table that separated them. “You keep turning the conversation away from yourself.” She tried not to smile, tried not to act surprised. “Oh, I didn’t realize I was doing that…I was just so very curious about you.” She lied. She knew exactly what she was doing. She was so sick of revealing too much to anyone, especially a handsome young European with piercing dark eyes. All too many a time in the past she had learned the hard way that men like this — no, men in general — used this same language, these same gestures, all the same tactics to chase after one thing. And when they didn’t get what they wanted, they abandoned ship. Although she had surrendered to them all of her precious love, time, pride, dignity, money and anything else they may have demanded, it was never enough to make them stay. She’d rather stay elusive, never giving away enough to let them past the wall she had slowly begun to build around her repeatedly damaged heart. Maybe knowing nothing about her could make her more alluring, not that she really wanted that either. She had finally prepared herself for eternal solitude.

“I really want to know. If you are trying to play the elusive card, you’ve played it so well to the point where it's no longer too alluring.” Her plush lips parted flashing a slight, flirtatious smile. How did he know her strategy? Was he honestly interested in what she had to say? She tucked a piece of her soft blond hair behind her horribly tiny ears, and in these small few movements she revealed more of herself than she had in so long.

Oh, God! Oh, God! What am I doing? Don’t let him fool you, Chloe. God, get me out of here. Why did I agree to this?
“I’m not very interesting. No stories of the effects of communism on my family, no rich history, no royalty in my blood, nothing to capture your interest for long I’m sure, Daniel.”

What she was trying to say is, “You’re wasting your time on me, Daniel.” As much as she was determined to cover up all of her pain and act as if she were some impenetrable threshold, he could see straight through that. He wondered if she were starting to realize that. Good. He wanted to frighten her a little, break the stereotypes she had placed on every man based on the few poor examples of them she had known.
“I’m not leaving until you give me something.” He looked deep into her eyes with great intent. He could see his own dark irises reflected in hers — oh, they were so blue and so full of unimaginable sadness. Did she know that her elusiveness added to her heartache?

She was beginning to grow irritated. What does he want from me? She wasn’t used to being pursued in such a manner. He was a frequent visitor to gardens where she loved to sit and read. She needed this quiet time in nature with God after seven hours of teaching crazed pre-pubescent 12 and 13-year-olds. She was typically the only one there, and that’s what made the spot so appealing. Daniel changed all of that.
It was rare that anything moved Chloe to tears, but one particularly gloomy afternoon, when the world seemed hopeless and her female cycle was at just the right spot, a particular novel did manage to provoke some precipitation. Little drops of liquid embarrassment she thought. Her face turned red as Daniel walked up behind her and asked if she was prone to crying in public. If that was a pickup line, she was far from impressed. His presence at the gardens enraged her, but there was also something about him that was almost believable, something real and trustworthy. She knew how unlikely that was though from past experience, but he somehow convinced her to come with him for just one meal. He had asked her out for Vietnamese food, secretly her favorite, but she would never admit to him that they shared something in common. She reluctantly agreed. Men had used her enough in the past, she might as well get a free meal every now and then; cooking dinner for one every night over the past year had gotten old anyway.
So here they were, tucked away in this exotic ocean side café with rotting floorboards, but a beautiful aroma of ocean breeze and exotic spices filled the air.

“What do you want to know?” she asked, trying not to let her irritation show too much. “Anything! Well, nothing boring. I want to know who you are really. How did a beautiful American girl end up here in Málaga? What are you afraid of? What was the cause of your last real cry? What is the last thing you think of before you go to sleep? Where are you going? Tell me your hopes and dreams. What are your nightmares?”

Was this guy for real? What happened to, “Are you in school? What are you studying? How old are you? From where in the US do you come?” Those were questions she could handle, questions with only one answer, questions on which she could elaborate long enough to last over one meal if she had to, and questions she could answer without having to reveal who she really was, where and what she had really come from, and who or what she was now.

She didn’t laugh this time. She pursed her lips. Her mind ran wild trying to make a hasty decision. He saw the invisible walls she had built, and wasn’t going to let her hide behind them. Of course…she didn’t want to be alone forever, but she had herself and God, and her two close friends — and that had been good enough for now. God was easy. He loved unconditionally, and around him barriers were impossible. He knew it all no matter how hard she tried to hide. But MEN — tangible men — were a different story. Unconditional, monogamous loving relationships were something she thought even women nowadays didn’t believe in. Plus, there were few people who could handle Chloé’s truth.

“Daniel, I can’t do this. I don’t need you to pretend to care about my emotions to get something else from me. And even if you were genuinely interested in how I feel and what I have been through in life, I highly doubt what I have to say would add to whatever you found appealing enough about me to ask me to dinner.”

Her cheeks grew red hot as her heart throbbed within her chest. It was so incredibly hard for her to be so blunt, especially when a part of her just wanted to let everything out to someone, but no man was trustworthy enough.

Daniel had known Chloe would be a challenge, and that was part of the great appeal, but he had no idea just how much of a challenge this was going to be. And he continued to tell her this.

“So you just want a challenge? Someone whom it takes longer to crawl into their head and heart until they finally think you love them and then throw them off to the side like a dirty dishcloth a few weeks later simply for bragging rights?” She was absolutely frustrated and offended, and as she clumsily stood up to leave the restaurant post haste, she knocked over the entire rickety table sending rice and curry all over. She didn’t care. She’d already made a fool of herself; she might as well leave in typical Chloe style. She would have to find a new garden for reading, but that wouldn’t be so hard.