Page 103 of 10 Rings I Hate About You
I lifted my wine glass. “To peacefully disagreeing.”
She clinked hers against it, eyes bright. “I’ll drink to that.” She took a sip and then said, “Tonight is already far better than my last five dates combined.”
The words landed with more weight than she’d intended. The moment the words left her mouth, I saw her immediate reaction—recalibration and retreat—her fingertips tapped against the table, and she bit her lip.
My hand tightened around the fork I held. The thought of her going out with someone else created an ugly feeling of jealousy within me.
“Not that this is a date,” she added quickly. “Or anything. I just meant?—”
“Right.” The word felt like pressing a finger to a bruise. “Because it’s not.”
“Right.” She looked at her plate.
The quiet that settled between us was different from the comfortable one before. This one was raw and weighted with everything we hadn’t addressed between us sitting just beneath the surface.
She’d felt it too—I could tell by the way she picked up her wine glass and slowly turned it in her hand. Not drinking. Just holding it.
I thought about my dad’s face through the phone screen. “The one you like, right?”
I thought about twenty years of knowing this woman, arguing with her, and watching her from across the rooms we both happened to occupy while telling myself it was nothing.
I’d spent a lot of years being careful. Precise. Saying the correct thing at the correct time for the correct reasons. And somewhere between the wildflowers, the asparagus, and the way she’d looked at my forearms, I’d run out of patience for that particular strategy.
“What if this was one?” I asked quietly.
She blinked. Kept talking. “This food is delicious. I didn’t know you could cook—” She stopped. Looked at me. Really looked at me. “What?”
“What if this was a date?” I repeated.
The question hung in the air. A breath in, caught somewhere between an inhale and an answer—and then her mouth opened, said nothing, and closed again. For Delaney, who always had words, the silence said more than any answer would have.
“It’s okay to say no,” I said. “I’m not trying to make you feel uncomfortable.”
“I … You’re not,” she said immediately, with certainty. “I’m just—you surprised me, that’s all.”
I figured there was no version of this that got any easier by waiting. “I think, in one form or another, I’ve had a crush on you since I was twelve.”
“Marc …” She exhaled my name.
I held very still. The way you do with a nervous animal—make yourself small, make yourself steady, and let them decide.
I tried to ease the rapid beating of my heart. I tried to tell myself that I wouldn’t crack if she didn’t like me. I tried to tell myself that people got rejected everyday, and they were fine.
But this wasDelaney.And I didn’t realize until this moment how much her answer meant to me. I reached for my wine. “So you were saying you were surprised that I could cook?—”
“Yes,” she blurted out.
It took my brain a second to catch up. “Yes?”
“Yes,” she said again, and her hand slid across the table and covered mine. Her palm was warm. Her fingers curved around my hand. “I’m okay if we call this a date.”
Something unknotted in my chest so suddenly it nearly stole my breath. “Okay.” I turned my hand over beneath hers so our palms touched, and let my thumb trace a slow path along the edge of her hand. “Good.”
“Good,” she echoed, and the smile that broke across her face was one that she often kept locked away—it was unguarded.
She pulled her hand back eventually so she could keep eating, but I felt the absence of it immediately. Like a sudden change in pressure.
After that, the conversation moved the way it hadn’t before—freely, and without us having to work at it. She was an only child. I was the second-eldest of four, which she found both impressive and faintly alarming. She asked why I wanted to be a vet. I told her the real answer, not the polished one I gave at fundraisers. She told me about how her aunt had never pushed her beliefs onto her, just offered them and left space for Delaney to find her own way—and how different that had been from a childhood of being managed and measured.
