“Sounds good,” I say. More than good, even. It sounds perfect.
It was a great idea in theory, not talking about angel stuff, but what it really means is that an hour later, sitting in the dimly lit auditorium before the movie begins at this amazing little indie film theater in Capitola, we’re running out of things to talk about. We’ve already been through how the first week of winter classes went, and the gossip going around Stanford, and our favorite movies. Christian’s is Zombieland, which surprises me—I would have pegged him as a profound type, like The Shawshank Redemption.
“Shawshank’s good,” he says. “But you can’t beat the way Woody Harrelson kills zombies. He takes such joy in it.”
“Uh-huh,” I say, making a face. “I’ve always found zombies to be the least threatening of the scary monsters. I mean, come on. They’re slow. They’re brain-dead. They don’t plot evil or try to take over the world. They just—” I put my arms out in front of me and give him my best zombie groan. I shake my head. “So not scary.”
“But they just. Keep. Coming,” Christian says. “You can run, you can kill them, but more of them always pop up, and they never stop.” He shudders. “And they try to eat you, and if you get bitten, that’s it—you’re infected. You’re doomed to become a zombie yourself. End of story.”
“Okay,” I concede, “they’re kind of scary,” and now I’m vaguely disappointed that we’re not here to watch a zombie movie.
“Next time,” Christian says.
“Hey, I have a new rule for our date,” I suggest with a cheerful grin. “No mind reading.”
“Sorry,” he says quickly. “I won’t do it again.” He sounds so serious all of a sudden, embarrassed like I’ve caught him looking down the front of my shirt, that I have no choice but to throw a piece of popcorn at him.
“You’d better not,” I say.
He smiles.
I smile.
And then we sit in silence, munching popcorn, until the lights dim and the screen flickers to life.
Afterward he drives me to the beach. We have dinner at Paradise Beach Grille, this little upscale place on the shore, and after dinner we take our shoes off and walk along the sand. The sun set hours ago, and the light of the moon is playing off the water. The ocean gently shushes us, lapping at our feet, and we’re laughing, because I have admitted that my favorite movie is Ever After, this old and completely cheesy retelling of the Cinderella story where Drew Barrymore tries and fails to master an English accent. Which is embarrassing, but there it is.
“So, how am I doing?” he asks after a while.
“Best date ever,” I answer. “Good movie, good food, good company.”
He takes my hand. His power and mine converge, the familiar heat sparking between us. A cool breeze picks up and blows my hair, and I toss it back over my shoulder. He glances at me out of the corner of his eye, then looks away, out at the water, which gives me a chance to look at him.
It’s awkward to call a guy beautiful, but he is. His body is lean but strong, and he moves with such grace—like a dancer, I think, although I would never tell him that. Sometimes I forget how beautiful he is. His gorgeous gold-flecked eyes. Those thick dark eyelashes any girl would kill to have, his serious eyebrows, the finely chiseled angles of his cheekbones, the full, expressive lips.
I shiver.
“Are you cold?” he asks, and before I can answer, he takes off his jacket, the black fleece jacket, and pulls it around me. I am immediately enveloped by his smell: soap and cologne, a whiff of cloud, like he’s been flying. I flash back to the first time I wore his jacket, the night of the fire, when he put it around my shoulders. It’s been over a year since that night, but the vision still lingers bright in my mind: the burning hillside, the way Christian said, It’s you, the way it felt when he took my hand. It never actually happened that way, but it feels like a memory.
It’s you, he said.