It made me feel very much like a teenager, and I wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. I looked at myself in the mirror as I considered this. I was wearing a knee-length black dress with lace trimming on the skirt and around the sleeves. I wore my hair down in soft waves, curled my eyelashes, put on dark red lipstick, and decided on the silver necklace over the gold one. I picked a pair of dark dangly earrings with silver details before deciding that I looked just fine.
I only had a few more seconds of staring at myself in the mirror when I heard the car pull up outside my house. I walked toward the door, peeped through the looking hole, and straightened up my dress as I wondered if he was going to come knock on my door.
He did. I watched as he walked over to my door, wearing tight jeans and a long-sleeve gray shirt which showed off his muscles, even through the distorted image of the peephole. I didn’t want to seem overeager so I walked back to the living room, sat down on the sofa and grabbed a book before he rang the doorbell.
I took a second to stand up and walk over to the door. I opened it and smiled at him. He smiled back at me from the threshold, his eyes shining. “Hi,” he said. “I was a little early so I was sitting in my car like a creep, then I worried the police was going to get called on me because this is a nice neighborhood.”
“And you’re a suspicious man.”
“My car costs less than ten grand,” he replied. “I’m most definitely a suspicious presence here.”
I smiled. “A fresh presence, you mean,” I said. “Plus, I mean, after the state you said your car was in, I figure…”
He shook his head, holding his hand up so I would stop talking. “No,” he said. “That was a car. I didn’t say that it was my car.”
“Whose car was it?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t you want to talk about something more interesting?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said. “That seems very interesting to me.”
“Let’s go get some dinner,” he said. “Maybe food will quiet you down.”
I snickered. He grabbed my hand and I felt his grip tighten around me. He pulled me out of the house and pulled me toward him on the porch, his arms finding my waist. He pressed his forehead against mine and I felt his breath tickling the skin on my nose.
“I want to kiss you,” he said.
“Don’t we usually leave dessert for after the date?” I replied, tilting my head up slightly to look into his eyes. “Isn’t that what we do?”
“You think that kissing you is dessert?”
I laughed, moving away from him. “It’s not normally an appetizer,” I replied. “I’m considered very sweet by most people.”
“I’d like to meet them and tell them the truth,” he said.
I laughed, throwing my head back. “We should get going,” I said. “Don’t we have reservations somewhere?”
“Reservations? Who do you think I am, a Kennedy? We’re going to Denny’s.”
“What?” I said, laughing.
“No, I’m joking,” he said. “But we have no reservations anywhere. I thought we would do something a little more interesting than that.”
“So a slightly higher end restaurant. Like…”
“No,” he said. “No restaurants. We’re going to go pick up food, but we’re not going to eat it around other people, because trying to socialize in restaurants is the worst.”
“So where are we going?”
“You’re just going to have to trust me,” he said as he opened the passenger side door so I could climb into the car. “Do you trust me?”
“Don’t make me answer that yet,” I said as I closed the door on him.
I saw him laughing as he walked over to the driver’s side of the car.
He put the key into the ignition and the car sputtered as he started it. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t get you home too late.”
“I do turn into a pumpkin after midnight.”
“Oh, I would like to see that,” he said as he sped away from my street. We talked about the weather for a little while, then about where he had ordered food from, and the longer I was in the car with him, the more comfortable I felt. It was weird, knowing I could just fall back into feeling like everything was good and easy with him, and it didn’t take very much. I felt as comfortable as I had when I was a kid, as if nothing had happened between us.
As if nothing bad had happened between us.
But it had, and I couldn’t just forget that. Even though it was clearly far too easy for me to.
We drove out to a field in the middle of nowhere after stopping by a restaurant to get curbside pick-up. The smell of food wafted in from the back and my mouth watered as my stomach growled. We were way out in the sticks when he turned off into an unpaved street, which didn’t have any street lights illuminating it. The only lights we could see were the headlights from the car, and as we drove further away from civilization, it kept getting darker and darker.
I looked at his face. “Where are we going, exactly?”
He smiled, and I saw his teeth shine in the darkness. “I’m going to take you somewhere fun,” he said. “Do
