Page 21 of The Boardroom: Kirk
Chapter 13-Marissa
I wonder if Kirk is ill. He stumbles into Biology with a frantic, sort of nervous look on his face, but I’m afraid to ask. He looks pretty dashing today, in his dark gray wool sweater and jeans. A little unusually dashing, to be honest, in that way high school boys are on school picture day, when they know they should dress a little bit nicer but they aren’t sure exactly quite how.
The lecture today has something to do with water molecules, but neither of us are paying attention…it’s not out of boredom though, and it somehow doesn’t seem appropriate to bring up hangman. His body is unusually still, but I can see in his eyes that his mind is racing underneath.
When the bell rings, I turn to him with concern.
“Hey Kirk, are you okay?”
He stares at me as if in shock. “Yeah, yeah, of course,” he says.
“Good.”
“Hey, Marissa, I, um…”
“Yes?” I stare at him as he freezes, gripping the desk with one hand.
“Do you maybe want to go see a movie this weekend or something?”
My eyes widen a bit as the strangeness of the last hour starts to make sense. Oh my god, he was planning this moment and must have been terrified, poor thing. But wow, Kirk just asked me out. Lovely, funny, handsome Kirk. He wanted me too.
I suddenly remember that Kirk is standing in front of me in mortified terror as he awaits a response. “Yeah,” I smile. “That sounds great.”
We share an excited smile, breathe a sigh of contented relief, and each make our way down separate hallways to our next class.
As I sit in English for the next hour, I twirl my pen in my hands distractedly as the reality of what just occurred sets in. A date with Kirk Atkins. A movie…a relationship?
I wanted it, all of it, that I knew. But the complications…I look over at my friends seated in the row next to me and sigh. They weren’t evil, I mean, they wouldn’t stop me from dating him…but I wasn’t sure they would approve. Kirk and I were from different worlds…
…and worlds colliding had never been much of a peaceful process.
Hm. What to wear?
First dates are tricky. Men will tell you that they barely notice what you wear beyond a certain point, but I’m no fool. The wrong outfit could send the wrong message, and this was a message I needed to get across crystal clear.
I wanted Kirk, and I wanted him to stay.
I only had two pairs of lingerie that I would categorize as being particularly sexy, my red ones from the other night (I was practically swooning at the thought) and a pair of black panties with a matching bra that were much in the same style. They would have to do.
I choose a long-sleeved purple dress, lace with a sharp black collar, and a borderline threatening pair of spiky heels. The dress said romantic picnic, but the heels said fuck me afterwards. Perfect.
I took the elevator down to the lobby of my apartment complex and walked out the door. Kirk would be here in five minutes. I felt good. I feltfancy.I’m not the kind of girl to get her panties in a twist over the fact that she was dating a rich guy, but Kirk wasrich.I was about to be picked up in a brand-new Jaguar and taken out to dinner at a restaurant where the bill would probably end up being more than a month of my apartment rent. I wasn’t going to pretend the small town girl in me wasn’t just a little bit smug about it.
Kirk pulls up in his Jaguar, dressed in a blue suit and a different pair of glasses from the red pair he wears at work. I see Mrs. Lee, my neighbor, give me a look as she walks into the door of the apartment building: a look that says,girl, you are lucky and I hope you know it.
“Good Evening,” Kirk says, rolling down the window with an awful attempt at an overly-posh British accent. “Are you possibly available for dinner?
“I might be,” I said, giggling as I opened the passenger door. Classic rock was playing softly through the speakers and the GPS gleamed with the directions to the restaurant. I liked being in this car, feeling at home in it, here, with Kirk. I could get used to this.
Kirk looked almost impossibly handsome and I couldn’t help but stare at him. He looked like the man everyone wanted to be, and that every woman wanted, driving his shiny car down the Seattle streets in his designer suit. I realized why I liked being in his passenger seat so much, and why it elicited such a warm response in me—he was sitting to my left, just like he used to all those years ago.
And he still smiled at me in the same way.
I watched the grungy, neon-accented streets, the old Chinese restaurants, and the mobs of people coming home from work fly past me from out the window. Seattle, to a small-town girl, sometimes felt like a city full of lonely people—a place where everyone you walked past was a stranger. But with Kirk by my side, it really didn’t feel so bad.
Before I knew it, Kirk was turning into a parking garage and helping me out of his car. Standing up, he looked even more handsome than before. His blue suit fitted him perfectly, sculpting the muscles of his body to show them off, but just enough to remain classy. The button-down shirt he wore underneath the blue suit was unbuttoned just enough to tempt me into thinking about unbuttoning it further, to reveal the dark, toned expanse of his chest that I had seen just a few days ago.
Behaving ladylike on this date might prove difficult…
