“I smell a winner.” The scruffy looking man leaned rudely close to my cousin and I, utterly breaking the standard subway rules of etiquette. Then again, he didn’t look like the sort to abide by any etiquette.

“Excuse me?” my cousin snorted, curtly tucking her blond hair behind an ear, a move equally cute and adamant.

“I said, my lovely, I smell a winner.” He added an ingratiating grin, flashing teeth surprisingly white for a man decked in raggedy layers of mismatched clothes.

I stepped in, feeling every inch the protective male cousin, “Don’t ya’ think it’s a little creepy, some old dude referring to a teenage girl as ‘my lovely’, or any other little pet name?”

“A fair point, a fair point, my good lad,” he oozed, taking a graceful, bowing step backward. The few other passengers on the gently lurching train hardly seemed to notice our exchange. Such blithe obliviousness is actually an acquired skill for life in the city.

The man flashed a slightly more devilish grin, “But I still smell a winner.”