“Don’t let that fool you. Looks can be deceiving. Salt looks a hell of a lot like sugar, sweetheart.”
I wasn’t even sure why I was attempting to date now. Ever since things ended with Davis eight months ago, I’d been on a self-imposed dating hiatus. I didn’t have the time or energy to put into a relationship. Not to mention I didn’t have a great track record with men, in general. I’d mostly done it to cheer up Ava. Last winter, she and her boyfriend of seven years broke up on her twenty-fifth birthday. They’d been together since their senior year in high school. After months of watching her pout, I finally talked her into signing up for one of those dating websites. I’d signed up in solidarity, too, although I never really had intentions of going out with anyone. Great job I’d done—the dating website was where she met married Owen. With friends like me to cheer her up, she’d be on Prozac in no time.
I delivered the drinks to my table and took an order from table eight, even though my shift was over. Basically, I was stalling to avoid going to change and get ready for my date. Table service at O’Leary’s ended any time we felt like it after eight, and Charlie’s motto was ‘There’s a burger joint down the street. Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out’, for anyone who didn’t like it.
After I changed out of my uniform, I washed up in the bathroom, swiped some mascara on my lashes, glossed my full lips, and looked in the mirror. I was lucky I had my mother’s naturally clear porcelain skin, so I never had to wear much makeup. I considered highlighting my green eyes with some black liner, but then changed my mind. Good enough, I thought. Which was probably not the effort I should have been putting into a first date.
After our initial email exchange, Mason had seemed nice enough that I continued to chat with him over the last few weeks. He checked all the boxes of the right guy for me to go out with: Gainfully employed—check. Polite—check. Over thirty, but not knocking on forty’s door—check. Didn’t use phrases like fo-shizzle and my bad in our message exchanges—check. Nice looking. Well groomed. Check, check. I should have been more excited. It had been a long time since Davis—time to move on.
I noticed him before he noticed me. I’d gone to the stock room to grab a few bottles of tequila for Charlie and saw Mason looking around. He looked like his pictures, so that was a plus. Maybe a little thinner than I’d expected, but nothing drastic enough to surprise me. He was medium height, medium build, and handsome, but not quite the type of looks you felt in your belly. Mason was also wearing a blue shirt. Which reminded me of Professor West last night. Oddly, that made me feel a little fire in my belly.
“I make no promises about not biting feisty TAs.”
I shook my head to physically shake some sense into my brain and took a deep breath before heading to meet Mason.
You know that feeling you get when you think you’re going to taste one thing and it turns out to be another? Maybe water and soda? It’s not that you don’t like either of them, but you were prepared for something tasteless and non-carbonated and instead you get unexpected fizz—a lot of fizz.
Mason was fizz when I expected tap water. Perhaps it was accountant that had led me to preconceived notions that he would be a certain way in person. But he was way more confident and forward than I expected.
“You’re really gorgeous. Not that I thought otherwise from your profile picture, but you only had a head shot. I guess I didn’t expect Megan Fox to continue from the neck down.”
“Thank you…I think.” While it was a compliment, I didn’t like the way he eyed me. We had gone to dinner a few doors down and then come back to O’Leary’s for a drink. His eyes roamed my body as he sipped his fourth Jack and Coke—which was another red flag—three hard liquor drinks during dinner on a first date? Each one made him bolder in a way I liked less and less.
“You said you were a hundred-percent Italian, right?”
“No. I have a little German in me, too.”
He leaned in, putting one hand on my knee. “How’d you like a little more German in you tonight?”
Ugh. I was just about to tell the idiot he’d be playing with himself tonight, when Charlie interrupted. With the bat. He tossed it on the bar right between us, causing Mason to jump back.
“Everything okay over here?” My girl doesn’t look too happy.”
I didn’t want to cause a scene. Just wanted my bad date to be over.
“That’s your father?” Mason asked.
I ignored him and spoke to Charlie. “Everything’s fine here. We were going to call it a night anyway.”
Mason misunderstood. After he gulped back the remnants of his drink, he stood. “My place or yours?”
“You’re going to yours. I’m going to mine.”
He reached for me, and I stepped back. “Go home, Mason. Before you go home with Charlie’s bat up your ass.”
Realizing he wasn’t getting laid, Mason paid the tab and took off. I smiled at Charlie after he was gone. “Did you double the price of Jack and Coke?”
“Asshole surcharge.”
I laughed. Not wanting to walk out right after Mason, I sat at the bar with Charlie for a while.
“Dating sucks,” I huffed. “No wonder I don’t do it that often.”
“I’m glad dating wasn’t what it is today back in my day. I’d never have met my Audrey.”
Charlie’s wife had been gone at least ten years—heart attack in her early fifties.
“How did you two meet anyway?”
“The old-fashioned way, in the grocery store.”
“That’s sweet. Did your carts crash into each other like in the movies?”
“Something like that. Audrey was in the fruit and vegetable aisle picking out some eggplant, and she put her things in the wrong cart. She was halfway down the aisle before she realized. When she went back to find her cart, she noticed the cart she’d taken had a handwritten grocery list in it.
“She’d taken your cart?”
“Yep. She handed the list back and said, ‘I took the wrong cart. Wouldn’t want you to forget some of the important items on your list’.”
“What was on your list?”
Charlie shrugged. “It said ‘cheese and other shit’.”
I furrowed my brow. “Literally? It said cheese and other shit? Not a list of the other shit?”
“I only cared about remembering the cheese. I like a slice of cheddar at night before I go to bed. The other shit covered the rest and wasn’t as important.” Charlie stared into space. “Anyway, Audrey smiled at me, and my heart did this weird double pump that it had never done before. Thought I was having a heart attack. Had to sit down right there next to the eggplants to catch my breath. Turned out it wasn’t just cheese and shit I picked up in the supermarket that day.”