Page 49 of We Met Like This
“Ugh, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m usually so much better on dates. Funny and witty. Not that this is a date, but I feel bad that after all this time, this is the person you get to hang out with.”
“Please stop apologizing, Margot. I already know you’re funnyandwitty. Also… is thisnota date?” he asked.
My eyes shot to his in surprise.
“Oh… it’s not,” he said. “Youdiduse the wordscelebration partner. I should’ve realized you were just wanting to…” He tilted his head as if piecing together my thoughts and how I had jumped him in the car.
Ihadjumped him in the car, and my body wanted to again as I sat here under his intense gaze. But my thoughts were all over the place. “No, that’s not… It’s just our last date was…”
“Terrible?” he said. “Despite my epic souvenir.”
“Yes,” I said. “Exactly.”
“With your talk of resets, I thought you were giving me a do-over.”
“Youwanta do-over?” I asked. He had seemed like he hadn’t when I’d brought it up.
“Yes,” he said. “Very much.”
My heart raced to life and flutters twirled around my stomach. My body and brain seemed to be in two different hemispheres.
“But you just wanted…?” He looked out the window toward the car.
“No, I mean, I just wanted to hang out and maybe…”
“I think we have too much chemistry to not give ourselves a second chance at something more. I was out of practice last time.”
“You didn’t seem out of practice,” I said with a smirk.
Before he could respond, the waitress returned with our waters. “You ready to order?”
I nodded. “I’ll just have a summer salad with grilled chicken.”
“I’ll take the California burger, lots of avocado, and fries, please,” Oliver said.
When she left I picked up my water and took a drink. The cool liquid slid down my throat. Oliver wanted a second chance. DidI? This date, if we were calling it that, was already going a million times better than the last one we’d had. And considering what had happened today, I was surprised by how good it felt to be here with him. “So you still have my panties, then?”
Oliver, who had been taking a sip of water as well, must’ve sucked some down his lungs with the question, because hestarted coughing. When he regained control of his breathing, he shook his head with a smile.
I shrugged. “Is that a yes?”
“No comment.”
I laughed and his expression softened, like he’d been waiting for me to laugh since he’d stepped into my car. My chest expanded, but then I remembered that aside from the red flags of our first date, which I could easily chalk up to him being out of practice or nervous, or whatever, another reason I didn’t think this would work was because we were so different. I didn’t have a filter and he seemed to have all of them. “Can you handle a girl who asks you about panties in the middle of a restaurant?”
“How am I doing so far?” he asked, his handsome face only slightly pink.
“You almost choked to death.”
“But Ididn’t.”
I laughed again. He was right, we had a lot of chemistry. But did we have anything else? “Tell me about yourself. What was younger Oliver like?”
He smiled. He really did have a great smile. “First-date questions. I didn’t ask you any of those last time. I didn’t ask you much of anything.”
“Because of your recent breakup?”
“Yes. I had pushed myself to get on the apps. A friend told me it would be a good way to get over everything.”
