“Yes, I do. I like you too much to embarrass you, and I don’t know you well enough to want to see you naked,” I barked.
He studied me seriously for several seconds. “You are pretty confident about that.”
“Yes, I am.”
Yolanda brought out our food but didn’t have time to flirt with Jackson or ask me any more questions. The combination platter looked and smelled delicious. I took a bite and nodded. “It’s wonderful. Why are you so interested in us having an argument and then having makeup sex or playing strip poker, anyway?”
“Gives me something to look forward to. And I could see if you had any tattoos.”
“You might be surprised, and unless you have a heart on your butt with your first love’s initials in the center of it, then I’ve seen your only tat.”
“I might have a surprise in store for you on our eighth date,” he teased.
Why wait until the eighth date?the niggling voice in my head whispered.
Because I want to do this according to the rules,I fired back, and kept eating.
The little voice in my head told me again to wait until the eighth date when Jackson asked me to go to his trailer and watch a movie after we left the café. But the night was still young, and I didn’t want to answer dozens of questions from Rosie and Scarlett. I was selfish and wanted to keep all these memories to myself for a little while longer.
The snowflakes had gotten a little heavier when we left the café. The truck’s headlights lit them up in hundreds of patterns, reminding me of a cheap kaleidoscope that I’d won at a carnival the summer before my mother died. I’d laid out in the backyard and played with that thing until the cardboard came apart in my hands.
When we reached the trailer park, the ground was almost covered with a layer of snow. I still wasn’t worried, because it was three hours until midnight, and that was when the weatherman had originally said the blizzard would hit in our area. Even thinking the wordsour areasounded strange in my head. Living in a place for two weeks did not make it my home, and yet I could practically feel roots beginning to sink into the desert land.
“Welcome to my home away from home,” he said when we were inside his trailer.
He helped me remove my coat and hung it on a rack right inside the door. I took in the place in one sweeping glance—a tiny living space with a recliner sofa facing a television on the wall, a table for two on my left, a galley kitchen a couple of feet from it, and a door leading into a bedroom on the other end.
“This is bigger than Ada Lou’s place,” I said.
“Since I’m going to have to live in it for a while, I opted for one with a little more space.” He opened the fridge and turned toward me. “Something to drink? Sweet tea, beer, water, or I can make hot chocolate or coffee.”
“Water is fine,” I said.
“Have a seat on the sofa, and we’ll pick out a movie together. I have a whole collection that my mother sent me the last time I was on six months’ deployment. Most of them are older, but they sure beat trying to watch anything from the local stations over there. I loaned them out to the guys and ladies I was stationed with, so they’ve been played a lot.”
Some of the hotels I’d stayed in offered pay-per-view movies, but I seldom turned on the television. I really didn’t care if what he had on hand was old or had just come out a month ago. Watching anything with him by my side would be a treat. Perhaps our big eighth-date fight might come along on the second date if we disagreed over what movie we wanted to see that night.
No!I shouted in my head.I’m not ready for that yet.
Even with my mind emphatically telling me no, a visual appeared in my head of us tangled in the sheets on his bed after hot makeup sex. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had an argument with any guy I’d slept with, because two nights had always been the limit. That said, I had no idea if the “after” stuff was as fabulous as he claimed. But I was surely willing to find out—just not that night. I blinked several times to make the image disappear, but I hated to let it go.
“With this comfortable sofa, we can pretend we are in an up-to-date theater,” I said to cool down my imagination.
“I haven’t been in a real theater in years,” he admitted and handed me a bottle of cold water. “I haven’t had time for dates or movies or anything else but getting things up and running on this project since I retired from the army.”
“Does that make me a military-rebound woman?”
“No, ma’am,” he answered. “That makes you a very interesting lady I want to get to know much better. Now, what would you like to watch?This is our own private theater tonight, and we have a remote”—he held one up for me to see—“which means we can pause for bathroom or food breaks. I have popcorn for later, and even a few candy bars, if you get hungry.” He pulled a drawer out from under the middle of the sofa to reveal a whole assortment of DVDs arranged in alphabetical order.
“How long has it been since you’ve seenThe Bourne Identity?” I asked.
“About four or five years,” he answered as he slipped it out and put it in the player. “I expected you to choose a girlie movie like one of the Hallmark shows. You really are an interesting woman.”
“Thank you ... I think.” I kicked off my shoes and pulled my feet up onto the sofa. “I’ve never admitted this before, but when I watch a movie, I study the characters and pretend I’m playing poker with them. I pay attention to their expressions and the way they deliver their lines.”
“Yes, ma’am, youdofascinate me,” he said.
Somewhere in the middle of the movie, Jackson fell asleep. I finished my bottle of water and needed to make a trip to the bathroom. Although I’d seen the movie several times, I hated to miss the next couple of scenes. But I didn’t want to wake Jackson by pausing it, so I left it running and made a hasty trip to the other end of the trailer. When I got back, he had stretched out and pulled a throw over himself. He didn’t even move when I picked up his feet, sat down, and held them in my lap.
