“Same thing.”
“Aren’t you the hockey player who’s known for putting on his gear in the same order each time?” she fires back.
She’s never in the locker room when we dress. “How did you know that?”
She laughs, likereally? “Your teammates tease you about it. I have ears!”
“Fine,” I grumble.
“Which makes you organized, too, then. Is organization still adorable?”
“I’m superstitious,” I mutter.
“Adorably, superstitiously organized,” she says, then squares her shoulders, passing a towering stack of Cheerios. “In any case, when someone at the picnic asks how we started dating, obviously the timeline is going to be quite new since everyone knows I was just dumped,” she says, owning it. “We need to figure out what feels most reasonable.”
We stop in front of a box of Corn Flakes so large it looks like a bicycle could fit in it.
My answer is decisive. “When you realized I was really the man for you and not that jackass who doesn’t deserve you.”
“That’s what you want me to say?”
“Sounds realistic, doesn’t it?”
She pauses, looks down at her shoes—they’re strappy again, and I want to undo the little strap—and seems to give it some thought. “As good as that sounds, I’m not sure it’s on brand.”
“On brand for who?”
She gives an apologetic smile. “My sister. I want everything to look good for her wedding, so I can’t really insult the best man.”
I shake my head. “That guy’s a douche.”
“Why do you think he’s a douche?”
I scoff, since it’s obvious. “Because he broke up with you.It’s that simple,” I say, continuing a few more steps to the granola of our dreams. I grab two boxes, tossing them into the bag. “One for you. One for me.”
“Wow. You’re a good grocery date.”
“I’m a good everything date.” I’m thinking about our origin story as we round the corner, where I spot a mustached guy an aisle away offering cheese and crackers at a sample table. I stop in my tracks. A smile forms as I turn to her. “I think you should say I asked you out every single day since he broke up with you, and you finally said yes this past weekend.”
“You do?” Her tone sounds enchanted, like that’s a delightful way to have been pursued.
“Sounds realistic to me.”
“And it’s kind of romantic,” she says. Clearly, she likes this direction.
Might as well pad the lead. “Why don’t we just say I’ve been pining for you from afar, and I wasn’t going to miss my chance the second you were single,” I say as if I just came up with that on the spot.
Her smile spreads, matching the sparkle in those brown eyes. “That’s perfect.”
She sounds so sweet and happy, and those are beautiful sounds. I want to hear them again and again, so I ask, “What else is on that spreadsheet? We need to figure out where we went on our first date.”
“Well, obviously, we went to Costco for the samples.” She nods toward the cheese guy, who’s wearing some kind of red and white old-timey shirt with an old-fashioned candy store vibe.
We head over to his table, where Remy says hi, then grabs a sea salt cracker with a slice of Monterey Jack and offers it to me. I take the cracker then bite into it, and holy shit, it’s good. “It just gets better and better. Like this date.”
“Guess I haven’t entirely lost my date planning touch,” she says, then snags a sample for herself, thanking the guy, then moaning approvingly after she crunches into it.
“We’re both going to need those too,” I say.
