I wasn’t sure which.
My phone buzzed.
Jacks: Should I bring anything tonight? Wine? Dessert? A detailed PowerPoint on proper cuddling techniques?
I laughed, the sound too loud and strained in my empty apartment.
Me: Your presence is sufficient, but if you happen to have a dessert, I won’t say no.
Jacks: Key lime pie from that bakery on Howard?
Me: I might actually kiss you again for key lime. Let me get the wall ready.
Jacks: Ha. Right. Your wall. Hope it remembers me. See you at 7, hockey star.
Me: See you soon.
I set the phone down and pressed my palms against my eyes.
This was real.
This was happening.
I, Skyler Shaw, captain of the Tampa Bay Lightning, was about to have a dinner date with a man, a man I’d kissed, a man who made me feel things I’dnever felt with anyone, male or female, in my entire life.
And I had no roadmap for any of it.
With Brooke, and with every woman before her, there had been a script, a well-worn path that I could follow without thinking. The moves were simple: Ask her out, pick a nice restaurant, make conversation, and kiss her good night. All I had to do was follow the steps in the expected order, hit the expected marks, and perform the expected version of myself.
It had always felt like performing.
I hadn’t realized that until now.
With Jacks, there was no script or template or plan. I had no culturally mandated sequence of events telling me what came next. There was only us, two people figuring it out in real time, making it up as we went along.
And it was terrifying.
It was also the most alive I’d felt in years.
At 6:58, a knock on my door nearly had me peeing all over the couch . . . which would’ve done very bad things to my pre-date planning—not to mention my jeans.
He was two minutes early.
I smoothed my sweater, took a breath that did nothing to calm my nerves, and opened the door.
Jacks stood in the hallway holding a whitebakery box and wearing a dark green button-down that made his eyes look like warm honey. His curls were damp, like he’d just showered, and he’d trimmed his stubble into something more intentional than his usual bar-worker scruff.
He’d dressed up.
For me.
Something swooped low in my stomach.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
We stood there for a moment, grinning at each other like a couple of idiots separated by a doorframe, neither of us sure how to navigate the transition from “texting friends” to “people who’d spent two hours making out on a couch yesterday.”
