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He put the car into Park. The disappointment that he had previously felt at a lack of blood rushing to his head and stars in front of his eyes was nowhere to be found. He was happy. They could sit in this car and do nothing but stare at the trees and he would still be happy.
Spark. He’d been too much of an idiot to realize sparks could be minor or major and he’d been looking for major sparks, which would have stopped his heart.
Marsie was a minor spark, and she started his heart.
“So what is this place?” she asked, as she got out of the car, rubbing her eyes. For the last part of their drive, he’d wondered if she’d fallen asleep. It appeared that she had.
“Pettigrew State Park. It’s small, just this path around the lake. Apparently the fishing is really good. But the trail will take us through cypress swamps, and we can walk out over the lake on a long boardwalk. It sounded really cool on TV.”
“Yeah,” she said, slipping her hand into his. “It must have.”
Together, they stepped forward to the trail.
They walked the entire three miles of the trail out and three miles back hand in hand. He probably shouldn’t have been surprised that Marsie was able to recognize a number of the birds by their calls and knew the different kinds of trees.
“I like learning things,” she said when he asked, as if it was no big deal, to know what a pawpaw tree was. “I particularly like learning things about math and statistics, but I’ll read anything someone puts in front of me. Airline magazines have a lot of random articles, and one from several years ago had an article on trees.”
“Yeah, but they didn’t include all the trees of eastern North Carolina in that article.” He wasn’t going to let her get away with being modest about this.
“No.” She looked shyly at him, and he leaned over to peck a kiss on her lips. Encouragement for her. Enjoyment for him.
She smiled, then looked back over the railing of the boardwalk keeping them out of the swamps. “The article was interesting, so I checked a bunch of books on trees out of the library. And read them all. Then I made flash cards and quizzed myself until I could recognize the trees by different things. Bark and leaves and such.”
“For fun?” he asked, unable to keep the surprise out of his voice.
“For fun.” He felt both her nod and the slight bit of self-consciousness in her voice.
“That’s really cool. And I’ll make you a deal.”
“Is this another deal where I buy you dinner?”
“Well, if you want to, sure. But that wasn’t the point of the deal. My deal was this—I’ll find us random, out-of-the-way places to go. And you make flash-card quizzes for yourself so that you can blow me away with how much you know about a place you didn’t even know we would visit.”
“Would that be fun for you?”
“To be impressed by you at every turn? Of course.”
“I’m reading a book about coral right now. Want to learn to scuba dive?”
“With you, yes.”
After that, Marsie no longer bothered to pretend to hide the vast depths of her knowledge. And Jason just walked beside her and enjoyed it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
MARSIE TRIED TO be silent on the car ride home from dinner. Tried, and failed. Because Jason listened to her.
Not that he sat in the driver’s seat, drove and didn’t interrupt her. He listened. He interrupted. He asked questions. He pointed out places where he thought she was wrong, and he asked where she had learned that information.
Active listening.
God, it was so awesome that they made the entire two-hour drive home after dinner before she stopped to take a breath. And when she took a breath as they pulled into her driveway, she didn’t take a breath and apologize for talking too much or knowing too much or reading too many books.
She just took a breath.
And Jason smiled.
“It’s late,” he said as he turned off the car.
“Yeah.” None of the dating books she’d read covered what to do now. Was she supposed to wait until their third date before she invited him in for sex? They’d already had sex, so clearly that rule didn’t apply. If it was still even a rule.
And was this even their first date? They’d had coffee together at least once a week for months. And lunch. And been out to dinner to talk about their online dating. And played poker. And…
