Page 38 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

I laughed, low and surprised. He smiled, and the night felt very large and very manageable at the same time.

We ate dessert at the table again after that—something with berries and a custard underneath that I decided I was going to find out how to make—and I asked him what he couldn’t eat.

“I don’t have restrictions,” he said.

“Everybody has something.”

He thought about it. “Beets,” he said finally. “I have never found a situation where beets were the right answer.”

“Beets are good in a salad.”

“I don’t want to debate this.”

“They’re good roasted.”

“I said what I said.”

“Okay,” I said. “What’s the thing you pretend you don’t eat but you actually eat when nobody’s watching.”

A beat.

“Flamin’ Hot Cheetos,” he said with the gravity of a man confessing something during a formal proceeding.

I stared at him.

“I have a bag in the truck,” he said. “Priest knows. We don’t discuss it.”

“Amai Landry.”

“I’ve been eating them since I was eleven, and I cannot stop.”

“You are a person,” I said. “An actual person. I was starting to wonder.”

He looked at me with something I might have called fondness if I was being generous with my vocabulary. “What about you?” he said. “What do you eat when nobody’s watching?”

“Grape soda and Zapps,” I said immediately.

“That’s not embarrassing. That’s just correct.”

“Voodoo flavor.”

He pointed at me like I’d passed a test.

“I don’t apologize for it,” I said. “I ate that in my car on the way to nursing school every Thursday for two years. There’s a gas station on Canal that keeps them stocked, and I have never mentioned that to anyone who I thought might judge me.”

“I would never judge you for that.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s why I told you.”

He held my gaze for a second, and I let him, and then I looked down at my dessert and ate the last of it.

We were back at the house before I registered that we’d left the boat. The drive had been quiet, the same way the first drive had been quiet—not empty, just comfortable, which was a thing I’d learned to notice and not ruin by filling it.

Inside, he stopped in the hallway and looked at me, and I looked back at him.

“First date,” I said.

“How’d we do?”