"What was your first date like?" I heard myself ask, not even aware that I was going to ask it until the words were out. Suddenly, I wanted to know.
"Geez, like, very first?"
He thought for so long that my annoyance popped up like a damn jack-in-the-box. Because clearly, he'd been on so many dates over the years that his tiny, pea-sized male brain couldn't filter through them all?
My hand shoved down hard again, gripping the circle outside the wheel so tight that my fingers almost got caught in the spokes. Great. Now I was making rookie mistakes.
"Yeah, first-first date, where you have no clue what you're doing and everything feels huge and important." Or so I imagined. "You know what? Never mind."
My pace was slightly faster than his, but he caught up with a couple of quick steps. "Hold up, Sonic, what's this about?"
"Nothing," I snapped. A curl fell out of my ponytail, and I shoved it ruthlessly behind my ear. "Never mind."
"Stop." He laughed. "Just give me a second, okay? It's not like I think about my first date often. I'm old, and my memory sucks."
I stopped, giving him a look over my shoulder. "You're hardly senile. You're twenty-three."
Levi sighed, propping his hands on his hips. "I was sixteen, and I asked Katie Sue Wright to the movies. She was in my algebra class, and I thought she was the prettiest girl in school. I picked her up, bought her popcorn, and she tried to shove her hands down my pants before the previews ended."
My nose scrunched up. "Seriously?"
"We hadn't even kissed yet." He set a hand on his chest. "I was traumatized."
I snorted. "Yeah, right. I'm sure you put up a valiant fight."
"Considering a young family was sitting right next to us, yeah, I politely yanked her hand out of my Calvin Kleins and told her that it wasn't the place to make a man out of me."
This time, I laughed because I could imagine his horrified expression pretty well. That was only a couple of years before he and I would've met. He seemed so smooth back then, so sure of himself.
Just like that, the proverbial bomb went off over my stupid, senile head.
I blinked. Levi had been turned down. I turned him down.
Holy mother effing shit, I'd turned down Levi Buchanan once upon a time. The fact that he'd asked me, that he could've been my first date, a full five years earlier, knocked the breath from me.
"What?" he asked.
"Nothing," I answered in an absentminded tone. "Just thinking about something I'd forgotten."
Back then, I'd told him I wasn't in the right head space to date, and I hadn't been. It took a solid eighteen months after sitting in my chair for the first time to stop thinking about things like catheters and bed sores and needing to be turned when I slept and learning how to navigate the world. About how to exit buildings with no ramps or elevators. About how to pay attention to the parts of my body that I couldn't feel but still needed to be taken care of. There was no way I would've been a good dinner date back then. It made sense that I said no, at the time. And it brought me his friendship, which I could never, ever do without.
But looking up at him now, I felt irrationally furious with myself.
All this self-pity about Andrew, when he had a perfectly justifiable reason to say no to me, was ridiculous. Here I was, so wrapped up in what hadn't worked out at my request that I'd forgotten about the things I'd turned down. The opportunities I'd been given and had passed up.
"What about you?" Levi asked.
"What?" There was a fire in my belly, stoked higher and higher the more I thought about it.
He started walking, and I followed. "Your first date."
Immediately, I stopped again, gaping up at him. "Give me a break."
Levi turned to me. "What?"
Maybe I didn't have flames shooting out of my eyeballs because he gave no indication he could see the bright anger making my skin melt.
"You know I've never been on a date, you insensitive ass," I snapped. And okay, Levi was apparently my new scapegoat for my internalized anger that I couldn't unload on myself. "And apparently, I never will because men are stupid."
His mouth fell open.
I crossed my arms over my chest and looked away. If there was a list of most irrational creatures on God's green earth, I just took the top spot. But I could no more calm myself down than I could cap an erupting volcano with my bare hands. Oh no, the lava was a-spewing, falling out of my mouth with a hiss and spit and a scratch.
"Jocelyn Marie Abernathy," he said calmly.
I closed my eyes. "Shut up, Levi. I know how I sound right now."
He got closer; I could hear him. His hands landed on my armrests, and I pinched my eyes shut tighter, blocking out even the slightest glimpse of him as the sun beat down on us.
"Look at me, Sonic."
"No."
Then he did the worst possible thing he could've done. Gently, so very, very gently, he ran the edge of his thumb over the arch of my eyebrow where my forehead was probably wrinkled from the effort to keep my eyes shut. If he'd commanded, I could've ignored. If he'd pounded away at my defenses with a hammer or chisel, I would've been able to mute him.
But the gentleness slipped through the hairline crack in my anger like a fog, and I couldn't stop it. He did it again, a slow swipe over my eyebrow and along my hairline, and I felt my face relax with every centimeter of skin that he touched.
When my eyelids lifted, a devastatingly handsome smile split his face.
"What?" I asked suspiciously.
He crouched down so we were eye level, and I hated how that made the backs of my eyes burn. "I'd love to
