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Turning back to him, I laughed awkwardly, not knowing what to say to that. “Uh, well … don't feel too bad,” I replied, flattening my cloth napkin and straightening the utensils. “Not many people look at me, so I'd say you're in the majority.”
Peter sniffed a laugh and focused on his hands, wringing them out against the tablecloth. “You have no idea how gorgeous you are, huh?”
Accepting compliments was never my strong suit, and I typically replied with sarcasm. This was no exception.
“Oh, yeah,” I said with an incredulous snicker, “I'm smokin' hot.”
“Uh, yes,” he replied, chuckling, “you are. And I'm just waiting for you to realize that you are way out of my league.”
That knocked the sarcasm right out of me as my jaw flopped open. “Are you kidding me?” I laughed, slapping a hand against my forehead. “Peter, do you even know how much I liked you in middle school?”
“Stop it. Seriously?”
“Yeah! God, you had that hot-jock thing going on, and I was definitely into it.”
Peter lifted his folded hands and rested his chin on his knuckles. He seemed to study me for a second, pressing his lips together and pulling in a long, deep breath. Then, he asked, “How could I have been so clueless?”
Shrugging, I wrapped my hand around the stem of the fancy water glass and brought it to my lips. “You can't blame yourself for being a stupid boy,” I offered before taking a sip.
“I guess not,” he said, folding his arms against the table. “But if I could go back and slap the crap out of myself, I'd do it in a heartbeat.”
***
“Well, thank you for taking me to a place with forks and knives,” I said as Peter led the way up the snow-dusted path to the front porch. “Even if I did use the salad fork for my spaghetti.”
He laughed easily, taking each step slowly. “Like I said, a fork is a fork.”
“I'll study a little more before you take me somewhere fancy,” I promised, coming up to stand parallel to him.
Peter wasn't the tallest guy I had ever dated, but our height difference of seven inches was a pleasant one. It didn't break my neck to see his face, nor did he break his back to give me a hug. And when his strong arms wrapped around my shoulders, I sighed, resting my head against his shoulder and giving him a squeeze.
“I called you my girlfriend for the first time yesterday,” he confessed with his arms around me tight. “It kinda slipped out when I was talking to my buddy at work, but … it was nice.”
The admission shocked my lungs into a sharp inhale. It shouldn't have. We'd been seeing each other for a few weeks now, and our phone conversations ran late into the night. But putting a label on it seemed huge and unexpected, and my brain stuttered to keep up as his head turned and his eyes searched for mine.
“I guess nobody asks anymore, but if we were thirteen again, I'd ask you to be my girlfriend,” he said, his lips close enough to mine for me to feel the rasp of his stubble against my skin.
“If we were thirteen again, I would say yes,” I whispered, hardly able to find my voice.
“And what about now?”
He was so nice.Thiswas so nice. I liked our dates and the time we spent together. I liked how he spoke to my parents and how much they seemed to approve of him. Everything about this was good. It was exactly what I wanted, all I had ever wanted.
So, I nodded.
Then, he kissed me. A little timid, gentle peck of his lips against mine. A proverbial toe in the proverbial pool before our lips parted in synchronized fashion, for his tongue to barely touch mine in the sweetest, softest first kiss of my life. It was a taste of what was to come, a whisper of a prelude, and it was just like him.
So, sonice.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Dylan
I'll crack the spine of this book,
And read between the lines.
Forget the pain from the sword,
