“Sorry about her, too,” I say.
“Abby, it’s cool.”
“I can’t believe this is actually happening,” I say, and then I sort of hear myself in my head and laugh. “I know I sound silly, but … I liked you so much.”
Oh my god, is that too much to confess? Do most people know the level of confession appropriate for date one?
“I liked you too,” she says. “I wanted to kiss you last week.”
“I wanted to kiss you then too,” I say, and then I think about how we haven’t yet kissed today. It’s nearly been twenty-four hours since we’ve kissed. “I kind of want to kiss you right now.”
“Kind of?”
We both laugh, and then we’re at a conveniently red light at San Fernando and Fletcher, and we meet midway over the console. It’s crazy how just yesterday this would have only been fantasy and somehow right now it’s my whole world. My hands in Jordi’s hair, her eyelashes brushing my face, Jordi’s lips, Jordi’s lips, Jordi’s lips.
“Can I have a hint?” I ask as she pulls the car onto the 2 Freeway.
“You’re getting your hopes up too high,” she says. “It won’t be that exciting.”
My face feels tight because all it’s doing is smiling and kissing. My face has never had a better day. “I bet it will be.”
“God,” she says, “you’re cute.”
Neurons must be firing or creating new pathways or whatever happens in my brain; I’ve never before had the sensation of someone else thinking I’m non-platonically cute.
Jordi ends up driving us to Highland Park, which is only a couple neighborhoods northeast, though not somewhere I hang out often. Living in LA without driving isn’t that hard as long as you don’t expect to venture much out of your neighborhood.
But with Jordi, I want to explore the whole city.
“This was always my favorite restaurant,” Jordi tells me once she’s parked and we’re walking down the sidewalk. The street’s lined with restaurants, bars, and old-fashioned shops. I love the feeling of being somewhere so new to me that’s also so close to home. It makes the world feel bursting with possibilities. “Mom and Dad always let us choose where we go out to eat for our birthdays, and I’d always pick this place.”
“That’s so exciting,” I say, and she laughs.
“I’m potentially overselling it. It’s little and it’s not fancy. But I was trying to think of the best place to take you, and I felt like it had to have lots of carbs. So Italian made sense.”
“Yes,” I say, as Jordi holds open the door to a place called Folliero’s.
“Actually, wait.” She gently lets the door close and then takes her camera out of her bag. “Your hair in this light …”
“It’s good?” I ask.
“It matches the sunset.” Her face is completely serious as she snaps photos, of me, the building, the sky. “Sorry. Is this annoying?”
I shake my head. “I like watching you work.”
“We can go now.” Jordi puts her camera down but not away, and opens the door once again. “Let’s go have a meal that would make your mom cry.”
It’s funny how something about my mom can also be romantic.
The restaurant’s tiny with brick walls. Jordi and I are seated at a table in the back, and I sit next to her instead of across because I don’t want to stop holding her hand.
“What color is your hair really?” Jordi asks while I’m browsing the menu.
I look up from the list of pastas and grin at her. “How do you know it isn’t this color really? Maybe I was born with pink hair.”
“A pink-haired baby sounds adorable.”
“My hair’s blond,” I say. “Kind of like my mom’s, but not quite so light. But it’s easy because I don’t have to bleach it to add the pink. It just shows up.”
“I tried to do that once,” she says. “But I think I did the bleach wrong, because the tips of my hair turned orange, and the next time I brushed it, a bunch fell out. I took it as a sign to just leave it like this.”
“I like it like this,” I say, and I start to touch her hair, but then the waiter shows up to get us drinks, and then somehow Jordi’s taking photos again. The walls, the table, me.
“How do you know?” I ask. “If something’s a picture?”
“Sometimes I’m just guessing,” she says. “But the thing I love about photography is that for just a moment, you can make everyone else look at the world the way you see it.”
I smile at that before having an idea. I take my phone out and take a picture of Jordi. If anyone saw this photo, they’d know what my whole world looked like right now.
After we split a tiny pizza and attempt to split a giant slab of lasagna, we head back outside to Jordi’s car. I’m pretty sure she intends to actually drive somewhere right then, but I study Jordi’s thin silver necklace glimmering in the day’s last rays of sunlight with Maliah’s necklace advice in my head.
So I don’t buckle my seatbelt right away. Instead, I lean in to kiss Jordi, and not midway over the console like before. At a red light we’d kissed sweet, restrained, almost fully in accord with traffic laws.
I don’t care about traffic laws now.
Literally mere days ago, I didn’t even know if I knew how to kiss. But kissing doesn’t feel knowable; kissing is something you do. It’s like breathing. Jordi’s lips are soft but they’re also rough and it’s gentle except when it’s hungry.
Hunger—this kind of hunger—is another feeling I didn’t know I was ever going to have.
“We should go,” Jordi says as I’m kissing the space between her necklace and her t-shirt collar. “Abby. We’re on a strict timeline.”
“Are we seriously?” I laugh. “You’re such a nerd.”
“Well,” she says, “it’s not that strict.”
“Good.” I focus my attention back on Jordi’s collarbone. I could lose myself here. Jordi probably
