Page 37 of Death is My BFF

David angled himself toward me, having listened intently to my rant without any interruption. “Want to know what I think?”

“Sure,” I said with a casual shrug. Although on the inside, I felt like I was having a major identity crisis at a super untimely moment.

“I think you should stop apologizing for being yourself.” The lights of the carousel raced over his black aviators. “You have a remarkable authentic quality about you, Faith. You’re honest.

Honesty might disguise itself as a monster when people don’t want to receive it, but for people like me—we need the truth to remember who we are.”

After watching the carousel unload, David and I headed back to the game booths to play Soda Pop Toss. The vendor plopped down two green plastic buckets with pink plastic rings. Empty soda bottles were lined in neat row after row on a raised platform. At first, David and I were back in our competitive zones and aiming for the gold bottle, but at some point, I gave up, flinging them blindly into the pit of bottles. Then there was a catastrophe. One of my rings ricocheted off the bottle and nailed me right in the boob. David stood behind me and jokingly showed me the “correct” way to toss the rings.

I swear it should have been an Olympic sport to pull all my focus onto his instructions, rather than the press of his strong hand around my waist or his sinful lips a breath away from my ear.

“Tension is thick in the air,” David said, rolling a baseball around in his fingers at the baseball toss. “Two outs, bottom of the ninth, bases loaded and up one run.”

I pinched his shoulders, pretending to massage. “What’s the count?”

“Full count. This is the payoff pitch. If I knock down the tower, you get that stuffed penguin you keep eyeballing.”

“Woop-woop! Get that penguin!”

He smirked for a second and then fixated on the stack of blocks ahead of him. “Watch and learn, grasshopper.”

He adjusted his baseball cap and wound up like a professional pitcher. The muscles in his back tightened at release as the baseball flew through the air in a blur. It knocked off two out of three of the blocks, before slamming into the backboard with a thud. The last block spun a few times, teetering precariously over the edge of the platform, before finally tumbling off with the others, as if scripted for maximum suspense. A buzzer went off.

David pivoted, surprise all over his face. He threw out his arms in triumph. “PENGUIN!”

“PENGUIN!” I echoed.

I jumped into his embrace without a second thought. Our bodies molded together, and his chiseled arms swept me off the ground in a spin. When he set me down, our smiles fell away. His gaze lowered to my lips and the tender heat of attraction blooming within me sparked to a fierce magnetism.Whoa.

“I have a great idea,” David said in a calm, unhurried voice.

“Earlier, you said you wanted to know more about me. Why don’t we discuss me over food and make this date official?”

I hesitated. Of course, I did. This night was bizarre, yet perfect and too good to be true.

“I’d like that,” I whispered, “although I think you’re forgetting something . . . ”

“How bad is it?” David asked for the third time. The terms of my Skee-Ball victory were he had to get a temporary tat of my choosing. “There better not be any pink. I’m not kidding, Faith.”

The tattoo artist handed him a mirror. He got a look-see at the sparkly pink butterfly on his tan cheek and lunged out of the chair to chase me.

Luckily, the line went fast at the food court because I was starving. David took my order of one slice of pepperoni pizza, cheese fries, and an ice-cold root beer and got in line at a concession stand.

Searching for a place for us to eat, I scoped out a red picnic table away from everyone else and sat down with my penguin. Sometime later, David came over with our trays of food and sat down across from me. My mouth fell open at the smorgasbord he’d ordered for himself: four hot dogs, two large cheese fries, onion rings,andfunnel cake.

“Holy crap!” I laughed out. “Do you have ten stomachs?”

“Why yes, yes I do.” He patted his flat stomach, and I imagined the six-pack abs beneath.

His white cotton T-shirt left little to the imagination. For the thousandth time that night, I immersed myself in the sight of his hard biceps, wide shoulders, and the tight ridges of his abdominals.

“I was going to get a double cheeseburger, too, but I didn’t want to gross you out. You’re welcome.”

“You’re such a dork.”

He waggled his eyebrows. “What’d you name your penguin?”

“Maddox,” I said.

---