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“What?” I asked.
“On campus,” Alex said.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “How do you know where I am?”
“Easy, I spoke with your sister,” he said. “She told me you go to school here, and I asked if she could watch Lucy for me for the night. So now I’m here. We need to talk.”
“For the night?” I asked in surprise.
“Yes,” he said. “Can I take you to dinner? I really feel bad about what happened the other day, and no matter what you say, the fact that you haven’t been coming around or taking my calls tells me that it’s a bigger deal to you than what you are saying out loud. So, what do you say?”
“We can do dinner,” I said at last. “It’s been busy for me, I’m sorry. Just with school and everything.”
“I didn’t know you were in school,” he said.
“Business classes,” I said. “I want to be better at what I do, so I’m taking classes when I can. I was a little bit behind with the full-time job, so I was working to catch up.”
“We’ll talk about this more,” he said. “Over dinner.”
“Okay,” I said. “Where are you?”
“Parking lot.”
He gave me directions as I headed out the door, and it didn’t take me long before I found his Mercedes in the parking lot with the other cars. His was, by far, the fanciest car in the lot, and I avoided the stares of the other students as I slid into the passenger seat.
“What kind of food do you like?” he asked.
“Italian is always a win,” I said.
“Good,” he smiled. “That’s my favorite.”
He took me to the nicest Italian restaurant in town and immediately ordered one of the more expensive bottles of wine. When I gave him a look, he shrugged.
“We don’t have the munchkin tonight, so why not?” he asked.
“Fair enough,” I said with a smile.
“I really am sorry about what happened the other day,” Alex said as soon as we were settled into dinner. “I know how embarrassing that must have been for you, and I don’t want it to ruin what we had going.”
“It’s just a lot for me to process, that’s all,” I said. “I don’t exactly deal with that kind of thing in my normal work, so I wasn’t sure how to handle it appropriately.”
“I get it,” he said. “And I feel terrible. But I wanted to talk to you about it, and I want you to know it’s not going to happen again. I care a lot about you, and Lucy loves you, and I’ll beg you to come back if I have to, but I really do want you back.”
“It’s okay, really,” I said. “I might have needed a little bit of time to recover from the shock, but it’s nothing. I can handle it.”
“I just know Lucy really wants to see you,” he said. “And hearing her talk about you has only made me kick myself all the more for what happened. I could never forgive myself if I did something that caused you not to come back.”
“Again, I’m coming back,” I assured him. “If it helps, I can come by tomorrow, even though Saturday is usually my day off. I miss her, too.”
“She’d love that,” he told me with the brightest smile I had seen all night. “Thank you, really.”
The conversation took an even more pleasant turn after we had gotten that awkwardness out of the way, and I had to admit, by the time we were nearly halfway done with dinner, I could only think of what we were doing as being a date. There really wasn’t any other way to describe it, and I surprised myself with the fact I was okay with it.
By the time we got back to my place, I felt better about the incident that had happened. We were even going to laugh about it soon, I was sure. I didn’t care to keep bringing it up, but I had a feeling it would become a joke between us in the future.
As Alex walked me up to my door, I surprised even myself by putting my hand in his.
“This was a lot of fun,” I told him. “Whatever you want to call it, I had fun.”
