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“Would they be opinionated about me?” Not that I was going to meet his family.Slow down, Kennedy.What was wrong with me?
“Yes,” he said. “But their opinions will be that you’re too good for me. They are going to love you when they meet you.”
“How do you know that? We just met.”
He shrugged, his bicep flexing against my shoulder. I breathed in the faintest scent of his spicy aftershave, which made me want to push my face against his throat to smell it better.
He might smell even better than chai tea.
“I feel like I know you already,” he said. “Strange as that may sound.”
“Well, I’m a few beats behind you,” I told him. “So tell me all about yourself.”
As we walked, he told me about his life. He loved to cook, he had two dogs at home who judged him even more than his sisters did, and since he didn’t play hockey anymore, he’d taken up martials arts to stay fit.
He had stayed very fit.
“My childhood was pretty chaotic,” he told me. “Hockey was my safe place when I found it. Like a found family with the team, you know? A coach who felt like a father to me. My relationship with my own father was…complicated.”
“It sounds nice,” I told him.
“I started karate my senior year when I needed to blow off some steam. I was starting to feel angry all the time…” He shook his head. “It really helped. But I was terrible at first, even though I was pretty good on the ice.”
I had the feeling that he had been better than pretty good on the ice. It was just an impression I had based on the way he carried himself.
“Tell me a story about you being bad at something,” I teased him. “Because it’s hard for me to imagine.”
“Oh, is it?” His grin brought out a dimple in his cheek. “Well. When I started, the other students were breaking boards and doing flying kicks. Not a lot of people start off when they’re my size—I was standing in line with fifth graders.”
I grinned at the mental image of him towering over his class.
“But I was determined to get better, so I started practicing in my backyard. One day, I decided to try a flying side kick on a soccer ball hanging from a tree. I took a running start, leapt into the air…and sailed right through it. Into a trash can.”
I laughed.
“We didn’t have a very big backyard,” he said. “Not big enough for me. And we also didn’t have enough privacy for me, because as I extricated myself, my neighbor called over the fence, "That’s not how Bruce Lee did it!"
I giggled, and he looked down at my face, smiling with a twinkle in his eye. “I’ve never told anyone that story before. It’s just between you, me, and Old Man Johnson.”
“It’s nice that you told me, then.”
“Anything to see this smile,” he murmured.
And it felt like he meant it.
Our date seemed like one fun thing after another. He took me to the best diner ever, where they had pancakes that melted in my mouth. I rolled my eyes heavenward and let out a moan, and he stared at me as if he might eat me up instead of his burger.
But I didn’t mind. There was something about the way he looked at me that made me feel seen. Powerful.
Then he took me for ice cream.
“What should I get?” I asked as I perused the menu.
“You could let me order for you,” he said mischievously.
“Okay,” I said. “I don’t think you can do it twice in a row.”
“Try me,” he said before heading to the counter. He ordered two vanilla soft serve, chocolate dipped cones with chocolate sprinkles.
