AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She dropped her braid, squinting at me in confusion. “Don’t?”
“Don’t ever apologize for being yourself. Not when you’re so damn amazing.”
“Amazing?” she repeated incredulously. “Because I scarfed down half a piece of salmon in under a minute?”
There was no way I was going to let her think this was about fish and date etiquette. “Because you dive right in, take no prisoners, and it’s a beautiful and sexy thing. You’re an incredible woman, Natalee.”
The last time I’d attempted to bare my heart, she looked ready to bolt.
Take two was no different.
Panic flashed in her eyes and I wanted to strangle myself for not playing it cool. Playing it cool was my thing. But with her, I was all thumbs.
And then I realized that once again, I was making it about me. Maybe her panic, her hesitation to let me in, to let me state the obvious, was because she’d heard those lines before. Because she’d been hurt. By me, on New Year’s Eve. By whoever came before me. And now, she was questioning everything. Wondering if this was all some elaborate game.
So I spoke from the heart, because that was all I could do. “It means a lot to me that you came here tonight. It’s not something I take lightly.”
She started back in on the salmon, her movements jerky and nervous. “Me either. But you should know—if some Titanic type shit goes down, I am so not offering you space on my raft.”
I brought a hand to my chest like she’d injured me. “That’s cold blooded, Nat. Though this ship was named after a cold blooded woman, so I guess it’s serendipity.”
“Ah, Sampson and Delilah,” Natalee mused, taking a swig of her white wine. “Lauren told me this used to be your grandfather’s boat. That he designed every square inch of it. Was he religious?”
“Not especially,” I confided, recalling the story from bits and pieces shared by my mother and coyly garnered from Grandpa. Mom hated the name. Hated to admit that she came from humble beginnings instead of royalty. “My grandmother was a singer. ‘Delilah’ was her stage name.”
Natalee put down her glass, rubbing her hands together excitedly. “Now this sounds like a good story.”
She was so riveted, hanging on my words. I felt like someone had lassoed the moon and brought it close enough that the luminescence kissed her skin. The stars glittered in her eyes. This was the first date I wished I’d given her. The romance that I used to run from like all hell would break loose if I let my guard down.
Sharing this with her wasn’t scary. I wanted her to know me. And I wanted to know her.
“My grandfather was in the Navy, and was home on leave. He always kept to himself. Kept out of trouble. One night he let his friends talk him into going to this club. His friends paired off and he was just about to call it a night when this smoky voice crooned from the stage. Everyone was entranced by my grandmother, but she sang every song to Grandpa.” I chuckled to myself, remembering that the first time I’d heard this story I’d definitely plugged my ears and rolled my eyes at the sappy parts. “They courted for a few weeks before he asked her to marry him—and they were married for fifty eight years.” The nerve beneath my eye twitched and I cleared my throat. I even took a few gulps of wine, but it did nothing for the burn. Nothing for the wave of nostalgia and missing them.
“Fifty eight years? Wow,” Natalee said softly. “That’s amazing, Jason. Stories like that make you believe in love, you know?” She found my eyes in the dark and I could hear her unspoken question.
Do you believe in love, Jason?
She broke away, taking a bite of her salad and retreating back behind her own personal barbed wire. “I never knew my grandparents. My dad was raised by his father, who died in a car accident before I was born. And my mother is estranged from her mom. My parents have been married for twenty, long years.”
She raised her eyebrows when she said ‘long’ and a familiar twitch seized my heart. I knew the pain of parental disappointment all too well.
“My mom rules the house with an iron fist and my dad stopped fighting a long time ago,” she finished with a bitter chuckle.
“I see your unhappily married parents and raise you an unhappily married set of my own. They made everyone around them miserable and did me a ‘favor’-” I made disgusted air quotes with my fingers. “By waiting until I graduated from high school until they got divorced.” It had been a long time since that awkward announcement, but the sting of it still took my breath away. “My dad? His latest girlfriend just celebrated her 21st birthday. And my mother sends me periodic emails from the beach, nestled beside her new real estate tycoon hubby and their ankle biter mutts.”
Natalee refilled my glass, then hers. “Here’s to love!” she said sarcastically, raising her glass.
“How about we drink to us?” I countered tentatively.
She lowered her glass an inch. “To us?”
“Mmhm. To a jerk who doesn’t deserve the woman sitting across from him. And a man who wants to spend the gift that he’s been given showing her that he’s more than that. That she makes him want to be more.”
Natalee pondered it, wetting her lips so many times that my cock ached, wanting those lips wrapped around me.
Don’t judge—I may be more than a jerk, but I’m only human.
Finally, she raised her glass, touching hers to mine. “To new beginnings.”
