I took his lack of response as agreement. He was still too proud to admit he was afraid, but he wasn’t going to—
“Perhaps.”
Oh.
Well, maybe I had misread him. Maybe this really was the start of a coffee date and not an interrogation.
“But don’t ever fucking bring that up around the Reapers.”
Can’t change him entirely. But that makes sense. Long as he’s real with me.
“Fair enough,” I said. “The point is, you have reason to fear me. And I know I can be a real bitch at times. I’m not like most women. I’m not as sweet and cuddly and soft as they are. I have a real hard edge. But I’m also caring and honest to a fault. If you and I give this a shot, you’re not going to be dating some bitch that mocks you or destroys your psyche. I might talk shit with you, but I won’t ruin you like those girls did before. OK? Do you believe me?”
Connor showed no hesitance.
“Yes.”
That, right there, was one of the best things that could have happened. Not just the yes, but that it was an unequivocal yes, like he’d already decided even before showing up to coffee that he believed me. I’d worried for nothing.
“Good,” I said, not even trying to hide my enormous smile. “Grab yourself a drink. If this is a date, after all, we might as well get comfortable.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said teasingly.
I watched him get in line to order a drink, and even just from where I stood, watching him in line, there seemed to be something lifted off of his shoulders entirely. He hadn’t magically transformed into a cheerful, exuberant guy. If he had, I would have wondered if he’d gone manic.
But he no longer walked around like he had the darkness of the world on his shoulders. He no longer carried that mysterious, haunting look to him. Yes, that look had made him the cliche hot and mysterious guy, but now, he was something even better—the hot and willingly open guy…who was with me.
Connor came back with a black iced tea, drawing a raised eyebrow from me.
“No coffee?”
“Nah, I’m not a big caffeine person,” he said. “I’d rather wake up on my own. That, and construction has a way of waking you up even if you don’t want to be.”
I can imagine. The store forces me to be alert before dawn far too often.
“Well, regardless, that was nice of you to get a drink,” I said. “And now comes the fun part.”
“Which is?”
I leaned forward and motioned for him to give me his hand. Again, without really any hesitation, he did so. I squeezed it.
“We have an actual date with actual conversation and actual moments of vulnerability,” I said.
And once again, Connor smiled and immediately agreed to it, far too fast for it to have been thought through.
The ironic thing was, now that we had established that, there wasn’t the need to engage in anything serious. We talked about what it was like for me in my childhood, we talked about our favorite vacation spots, and we talked about plans for Connor’s future housing situation, but it wasn’t like we had deep conversations on why Connor liked Mexico for vacation or why I liked my grandfather more than my father. We could just be.
And that, more than anything, was Connor “playing his cards right.” Not to be vulnerable every single moment. Not to have every conversation revolve around something serious or something dark. But to just have the whole time feel happy, cheerful, and natural. To have the conversation move with ease. To feel present without getting stuck inside my head.
That, I realized some time into the conversation, was the difference between Connor and other bad choices I had made. Not that he was more or less hot—though, let’s be real, I found him far hotter than anyone else I’d gone out with—but that he was by far the easiest person to be around. It sucked that it had taken some time for us to reach this point, but I wasn’t going to regret it, not when the coffee date was going so well.
Maybe an hour and a half into the date, I suggested that we hit up Reapers for drinks. The idea, in my mind, was that we’d replace the bad memories from before with good ones this time; Connor seemed to agree, and so we rode separately over.
But there was also something else that came to mind as we rode down.
I lived near downtown Albuquerque. My place was only about ten minutes outside of downtown. And unlike Connor—for at least the next several months—I didn’t have to worry about roommates. Which meant that when things got frisky and hot…
When?
