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“I don’t know if I have a type. But Cynthia is not it.” Cole shrugged. “I’ve never dated anyone for more than a few weeks. Maintaining a relationship was hard when I spent nine months every year at the academy.” He leaned back in his chair, tapping his fingers on the table. “I guess I’d have to keep someone around long enough to know what I like.”
Cole graduated in June from York Military Academy with a degree in aerospace engineering. At the end of the summer, he was going to work at Battle Industries with his cousin.
I wiped my mouth and dabbed at the ketchup on my lip. “So you only dated when you were home from the academy?”
He smirked. “I wouldn’t call it dating.”
“Oh,” I mouthed, and my cheeks grew hotter, feeling a little foolish. I was so out of my depth with a guy like Cole that I asked all the wrong questions.
Cole downed the last of his drink, his eyes on me. “As I said earlier, being curious is okay, Grace. Anything you want to know, you can ask me. All of this is new to you.”
Although thankful for his openness, I frowned, mostly because I felt stupid. Like I was some science experiment created in a lab and just learned how to be human. Cole was my age and didn’t need to have the world explained to him.
“Am I that weird?” I said and wished I had more of a filter around Cole.
Why did I keep embarrassing myself? I wanted to hide under the table and disappear into another world.
“No,” he said without hesitation, putting his hand on the table, his fingers inches from mine. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“I’m not. It’s just… I feel like such a freak. I’ve never had a friend. I didn’t have a childhood boyfriend and never dated anyone. I don’t even know what it’s like to go to a party, drink a beer, or have my first kiss. I missed out on everything. And when you talk about your life, I feel so behind. I missed years of my life.”
Cole studied my face as if trying to extract the thoughts from my brain. We would have been greeted with awkward silence if not for the people talking around us.
He opened his mouth and then stopped himself, considering his following words carefully before saying, “I can help with that if you want.” Cole scooted his chair so close our elbows almost touched. “We can throw a party at my house. And I’ll drink your first beer with you. Whatever you want to do, we’ll do it.”
Everything but the kissing part. God forbid he broke my grandfather’s rules.
I smiled. “Thank you, Cole.”
He patted my hand, and when his hand lingered for too long, he pulled away. Unfortunately, that happened more often than I would have liked.
The waitress removed our empty plates from the table and asked if we wanted dessert. I was stuffed, but Cole insisted we get the best banana split in the state and ordered one to share.
The sundae was the size of a fish bowl and came with two long spoons almost the length of my forearm.
Cole dug in first, with a big-ass smile plastered on his lips. “You’ve traveled the world with your dad,” he said between bites. “What was your favorite place?”
I chewed the banana and licked my lips clean of whipped cream, which drew Cole’s attention to my mouth. A beat passed between us, where he stared, and I couldn’t breathe until he pulled his eyes away from mine.
“Um,” I said as I thought over his question. “I guess my favorite place was Germany. We lived there for a year before he got reassigned to another duty station.”
“You missed out on some things, but that must have been fun traveling all the time, living someplace new.”
I rolled my shoulders against the chair. “I guess. We didn’t stay in one place as long as other military families because of me.”
“The Colonel’s a pilot,” Cole cut in. “So that gave him some flexibility. The Founders made sure he always had somewhere else to go.”
I nodded. “He taught me how to fly a plane when I turned eighteen.”
Cole gave me a shocked but impressed look. “What else did you learn from the Colonel?”
“We’ve never had a normal father-daughter relationship.” I licked my spoon clean and dropped it onto the cloth napkin so he could eat the rest of the sundae. “He showed me how to hunt, fight, shoot, and many other skills. I also went to a survival camp for a few weeks every summer. It was in the middle of nowhere and run by his friend from the Marine Corps.”
“That sounds like fun,” Cole said with a genuine smile as he scooped the last of the ice cream onto his spoon.
“Yeah, I guess. But I missed out on all the normal kid stuff. I wasn’t allowed to have friends outside the classroom. That meant no school dances, no movie nights, no parties, and not having any social media accounts. We couldn’t risk my face popping up online, especially not with the artificial intelligence software they have now.”
“It’s too risky,” Cole confirmed. “The Colonel did the right thing. He kept you safe all this time because he’s smart.”
