Ethan gulped. Like a true scientist, he wanted to regain control of the variables. To take her somewhere he knew the food was, if not good, then at least palatable. Where he could hopefully get her to relax without having to worry about anyone else. More than that, though, he wanted Naomi all to himself, even if he wasn’t sure he could handle her now that she’d arrived.
So much of their time together was public, crowded, belonging to the people they served rather than to each other. Before they’d established this plan to date, he never would have dared try to monopolize her company like this. But since she’d agreed, since they’d both admitted that the feelings between them were serious enough to risk a potentially awkward disillusionment, he decided to indulge.
Naomi moved to preheat his oven, her shiny dress throwing light like confetti across his kitchen.
There was an urgency under his skin every time he spoke to her. Hell, every time he thought about her. She was the very definition of out of his league. It was like something in his biology sensed that herliking him back was too good to be true, and he needed to act fast. Beneath the frantic beating of his heart was also a quiet hum of comfort, a sensation that scared him even more.
“What are the chances that if I put on Miles Davis, some of his suave factor will rub off on me?”
Naomi gazed at him over her shoulder. “I think you’ve got a better chance of my suave factor rubbing off on you.”
Those words in her lush voice made him fumble the pan he held, earning him one of her laughs.
Was there a German word for water rising over your head, but in a way where you wanted it?
Naomi asked him questions about his house while he made a mediocre Caesar salad out of items left in his fridge. None of his answers were particularly witty or charming. He was probably boring her. Pride blown to smithereens, Ethan tried to conjure up tips from the seminar series for navigating first dates, but they’d already gone so far off book.
According to Naomi’s second lecture, they were supposed to be in a restaurant right now with other people and bad lighting, atmospheric elements that presented barriers to the kind of hungry intimacy that seemed to fill his kitchen and spill out into the living room.
He wasn’t supposed to have her in his home this soon. Likely because now the evening kept presenting him with extremely inconvenient details. Like the fact that she was less than forty feet from his bed as they sat down at the kitchen table. Or the particular pink shade of her tongue as she licked sauce off her thumb while they ate.
“Do you want to watch a movie?” Ethan blurted out later as he cleared their plates. He didn’t particularly want to watch a movie, but he definitely didn’t want her to leave.
“Sure,” Naomi said, lowering herself down onto his couch in a way that made her silver dress curl dangerously high around her thighs, the material moving like water against her skin.
Ethan told himself to calm down and hunted for the remote.
“What kind of films do you like?”
She let out a little low huff and then folded her palm across her mouth.
“What?”
She didn’t remove her hand. “Nothing.”
Ethan dropped onto the couch next to her, close enough to smell her perfume but not nearly as close as he wanted to be.
“Come on, tell me. You’ll give me a complex. I thought that question was benign.”
“I’m sorry.” Finally, she let her hand fall into her lap, fingertips resting at the hem of her dress, toying with the fabric where it met her bare skin. “It was just the way you asked that question. I got this ridiculous idea.”
“What kind of ridiculous idea?” Something told him he wasn’t going to like her answer.
Naomi curled her lips together, obviously weighing her next words. He’d noticed she was careful around him in a way she wasn’t with other people.
Which one of them did she think she was protecting?
“I almost made a joke about how the kind of films I like are ones with fucking in them.”
He swallowed thickly. “Well, that’s okay.”
Naomi pulled her hair over her shoulder. “And then, because bad ideas are infectious, I started thinking about how wild it would be if we watched one of my performances,” she said, but not like a dare or even a real suggestion.
She said it like,Wouldn’t that be silly, high and light and like never in a million years would he agree.
Ethan had suspected before that she saw him as neutered somehow, and her answer now proved it. She painted him with an unnecessarily virtuous brush.
Annoyance flickered in his chest.