Page 70 of If We Never Met

His laugh was deliciously husky. "God, no. I fumbled my way through a lot of dates."

"I can't see that. You're way too good-looking. You had to be a confident teenager."

"I grew up with brothers. I didn't know how to talk to girls for a long time."

She wasn't buying his story. "I have a feeling talking wasn't really a requirement. You were a hot baseball player. Enough said."

"You know you're denigrating teenage girls as being shallow and superficial," he teased.

"Since I was a teenage girl, I'm allowed."

"What about you? Did you date in high school?"

"My first real boyfriend was Anthony Anderson. We were both sixteen. He was a guitar player. He had long hair and a soulful voice, and I let myself believe he was singing every love song to me. He was a cool guy."

"How long did it last?"

"Not quite a year. He left Whisper Lake that summer to go to LA and play in some summer music program, and he never came back."

"Do you know what happened to him?"

"He got into a band. They toured in the US and Europe, but they never made it big. Last I heard, he was running a music store in LA and teaching music."

"Have you ever tried to contact him?"

"No. It was a teenage thing. I look back at most of the guys I liked when I was younger, and I wonder what the hell I was thinking. Anthony was a great musician, but he was also wild, and I was not. I could have never kept up with him, nor would I have wanted to. I was never a party girl. Even when I got to New York, I was the most boring girl in our apartment."

"You were working, pursuing your dream. I was boring, too, when it came to partying. I didn't want to jeopardize my fitness with too much alcohol. Nikki was an aberration."

"So, we're just two boring people."

"Hey, we were not boring tonight."

She smiled, loving how easy it was to talk to him. "That's true. So, tell me something about yourself that no one else knows, not your fans, or your agent or publicist, something personal, and if it's embarrassing, you get an extra point."

"A point, huh? Okay. I love to compete."

She could see the new energy in his eyes. "What have you got?"

He thought for a moment. "There's actually a lot that people don't know about me."

"I'm intrigued."

He laughed. "Don't be. It's hard to be super exciting when you have a singular purpose in life."

"No point for that."

"That wasn't my answer. You want embarrassing?"

"Yeah, something like sitting down at the wrong guy's table and assuming he's your date."

"That was not embarrassing. That was lucky."

"It was both for me," she admitted.

"All right. Here's one. I was twenty-five. One of my friends was getting married, and I was in charge of the bachelor party, which involved hiring a stripper. I was texting with the stripper one night, and at the same time, I was getting texts from a woman I had just started seeing."

"Uh-oh, I think I know where this is going."

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