AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Instead of recoiling in disgust or raising his eyebrows in disapproval, Levi just nodded and flipped the pancakes. “When my wife and I were first dating, and young and stupid and hotter for each other than we should have been, we had unprotected sex. I remember being relieved that she wasn’t pregnant, too.”
“Thank you.”
“For the pancakes?”
“For not telling me how stupid I was at nineteen to be having unprotected sex.” She’d been moralized against by those who thought she was justly punished for having sex before marriage and moralized against by those who had forgotten all the stupid things they’d done when they were nineteen—because the effects of their stupidity hadn’t lingered.
“Oh, I figure you know it was stupid. Just like I know it was stupid to water-ski drunk. Doesn’t mean I didn’t do it when I was nineteen.”
She laughed, something she hadn’t thought she’d do during one of these conversations. “You could have drowned!”
“Yeah.” Levi pulled the oven door open and set two more pancakes on the plate. “That only occurred to me later, after my sister yelled at me. I had only been worried about impressing the girl I was with.”
Mina looked at her cup and rolled it nervously between her palms. “I had wanted to impress the guy, too. Be all cool and casual, like I wasn’t worried about things. Easy. Not easy to have sex with, but easy to be around. Not one of those demanding chicks.” She paused as something clicked in her mind. “Of course, at the time, I confused the two.”
“Okay. So you did something stupid when you were young.” He scraped the last bits of batter into the pan. After watching him make batches and batches of perfectly round pancakes, she was charmed to see two blobs spread out on the griddle. The imperfection made him seem more human. “What else do I need to know?”
“Um—” she shrugged “—if we get to that point, sex will be low risk, but never no risk. My virus count is very low, and I haven’t missed a dose in, God, years, but even with condoms, there’s always a chance.”
“Okay,” he said, nodding and flipping the two imperfect pancakes. “Where do we go from here?”
“Well, I’ve told you all of this, but I still don’t trust you. You both walked out on me and shared my health information. The latter is a very big deal. There aren’t enough pancakes in the world to make it a minor mistake.”
“How about a date?”
“Did you hear what I said? I don’t trust you.”
“You have good reason not to trust me. You don’t know me. If you go on a date with me, then you can get to know me.”
“You make that sound easy.”
He shrugged, then leaned down and pulled out the pile of pancakes from the oven. Perfect, round, delicious-looking pancakes. She wanted the two funny-looking ones he’d just made.
“It’s not easy. But I want to get to know you better, and the only way to do that is to ask. So go out to dinner with me.”
“Okay,” she agreed, the pull of the couch from last Sunday more than she could resist.
“Great.” He looked up from the pancakes he was placing on a plate, a satisfied expression on his face that burrowed deeper in her soul than any smile. “Now, which one do you want?” he asked, holding out both plates.
“That one,” she said, and he offered her the plate with the imperfect pancakes on it.
CHAPTER TEN
MINA HAD NEVER planned a first date and then sat down with that person and shared breakfast. Having had roommates, she’d shared kitchens with men pre–first date before, but those had been men who had slept with her roommates, and those were often one-night stands. This breakfast was much nicer. They’d returned to their previous status of Levi asking questions and Mina doing all the talking.
The singularity of it all had Mina skipping the farmers’ market later that day in favor of sitting at her desk and sketching. As was her habit, she read over the last sketches she’d done. Her sketchbook wasn’t a journal, per se, but a running story told in comics of a woman just like herself going through the things Mina was going through. She’d started it soon after her diagnosis. The counselor whom her college had found for her had recommended it as a way to understand what was happening to her, and she’d kept it up. The Adventures of Mina + continued, and probably would until, well, until one of the complications of the disease caught up with her and she died.
