Page 19 of The Dating Charade
“Are you asking me out?” Jett grinned as Cassie bit her lip. “But, all that’s to say, given our lifelong history together—”
Cassie chuckled. “Lifelong, eh?”
“The decades ago we first met,” he forged on. “I only have two questions left. First, what are you doing Wednesday?”
“Wednesday? Aren’t you supposed to let me wallow in anxiety and self-doubt for a couple of days before calling for a follow-up date?”
“Believe me, I’d be asking about tomorrow if I wasn’t working. But if you want me to wait a week or two . . .”
“No, don’t make me suffer on account of me,” Cassie said hastily. “I can’t think of a thing on my schedule for Wednesday. Count me in. Your second question?”
He crossed his arms with superiority. Paused. “Do you still have game?”
Cassie squinted. “You mean, can I still play ball?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
“Oh, I can play ball. Just tell me when and where.” Cassie met his challenge with equal force. Half the afternoons a ball swished through the net at the Haven, Cassie was out there with the girls, sweating drops on the concrete pad.
“GP High. Six p.m.”
Her brow raised. “You want to break into our high school?”
He shrugged with the nonchalance of a guy who was about to say something cool and knew it. “The athletic director owes me a favor.”
“Ah. I see. What’d you do, save his house from burning to the ground?”
“Yes.”
Cassie started, then began to nod. “Oh. Literally. Good work, then. Keep it up.”
He rested his hand on the top of her car door and paused, the door separating their bodies but their faces suddenly not so far apart. “Till Wednesday, then.”
The exposed skin of his neck was red from the chill, and beneath his form-fitting jacket sat a pair of dark jeans that complemented his green, button-down oxford. Any drift of cologne—if he wore any—was overpowered by the thousands of pines surrounding them, infusing their world with shouts of Christmas.
Nat King Cole’s melody, “Almost Like Being in Love” came over the outdoor speakers, drawing them toward one another like the red-velvet ribbon draped around the large Christmas trees in shop windows.
“Till Wednesday,” Cassie repeated softly.
He inched toward her, and then, bumping into the driver’s side mirror, looked down to the door between them, which was currently working as hard as an elderly chaperone separating them at a middle-school dance.
“I probably could’ve thought that through better.” Cassie gave the chaperone door a friendly pat.
He laughed, the mood breaking like a sunny March day on a frozen lake as he moved to the driver’s side of his truck. Taking a half step in, his body lifted above the frame. “See you on the court, Everson. Bring your A game.”
“It’ll be my pleasure, Your Royal King of the Mountain.”
They both climbed in and shut their doors. Started their cars.
Cassie’s face hurt from smiling. For ten minutes she drove with that smile—a slaphappy grin. When a car cut her off turning into Food City, she had nothing but a Merry-Christmas-to-all grin to give him. As she slowly passed the lights of an ambulance and two feuding citizens beside busted cars, her wide and vibrant smile met them, and with understandable misunderstanding both citizens threw a few choice words toward her before turning back on each other. But there was nothing to be done about it. The smile wasn’t going anywhere.
What if he was the one?
Her eyes were forced into a squint with the sudden and impossible burst of smile within a smile, as if it could get even wider. It was terribly embarrassing to even think these thoughts in the privacy of her car. But . . . wouldn’t it be something? Everybody who ever got married had a first brush of meeting. What if she was just aware that this was hers? Instead of holding hands one day looking back at the fond recollection of their first date, telling each other cute little things like, “I never would’ve believed that night would change my life” or “If I had known that was going to be the start of everything,” perhaps she gripped the steering wheel now, fully aware that this night was it. The first page of a hundred chapters together.
Wouldn’t it be something?
Cassie turned on Profit and glanced over to her office. Girls Haven sat quiet, dark but for the blinking lights of the Christmas tree in the game-room window. The fire-engine stunt had been the hit of the season with the girls, many of whom she’d driven to cash in their gift cards on extra-vanilla, extra–white chocolate, extra–whipped cream, sure-why-not-add-peppermint-sprinkles triple-shot lattes that afternoon.
