I nod. “I do.” I open the door and motion for her to precede me into the restaurant. The wind catches her shirt as we go through the door and blows it up, and I get a peek at her flat belly. And…my dick gets hard. Oh, shit. This is really, really bad.
We follow the waitress to our table, and Lark slides into one side of the booth and I take the other. I am sincerely grateful for the table between us. The waitress leaves two menus and walks away.
A group of teenagers at a nearby table all take their phones out and start snapping pictures.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “By the end of the night, you’ll be known as the hot guy I’m fucking on the down low in all the tabloids.”
I shake my head like a dog shaking water from its fur. “I’m sorry, but all I got from what you just said was that you think I’m hot and we’ll be fucking later.”
Her face turns bright pink and she looks away bashfully.
“That’s not what I meant,” she says.
“So you don’t think I’m hot?” I tease.
She finally smiles. “No, I do,” she rushes to say, her fingers working quickly.
I grin. “Good. I think you’re pretty hot too. S-M-O-K-I-N-G,” I spell out with my fingers, and then I blow the tips of them like they’re on fire.
Her smile grows and the flush on her cheeks moves all the way down her chest. “Thank you,” she says tentatively.
I lean toward her a little like I’m imparting a secret. “Now about the fucking…” I toss my hands up in question, leaving it open for her.
“Well, we don’t have to worry about that since you don’t fuck hearing girls.” She stares hard at me, and this time it’s me who blushes.
“I didn’t say I don’t like hearing girls. I just couldn’t take one home to meet my parents.” I must be the biggest dick on the face of the planet after that comment. But she’s not angry. She leans back against the seat cushion and just stares at me.
“You’ve had sex with hearing girls?” she asks. Her eyes search my face, like she’s looking for the smallest hint of a lie.
“Never had an opportunity,” I admit. “My circle has been pretty small.”
She takes a sip of her water. “Tell me about your circle. Where did you go to school?”
I name a school for the deaf upstate.
“You lived there all the time?”
I nod. “Except for holidays and weeks off.”
“Did you ever get lonely?” she asks.
I shake my head. “Never. Too many people around.”
“Then you went to NYU?”
I nod. “How did you know that?”
She smiles. “I might have asked Logan.”
“I met Logan at NYU. It was refreshing to meet someone who was deaf at such a big school.”
“I bet it was. Why didn’t you go to a deaf college?”
“I got a scholarship at NYU to study art.”
“You said your circle was small,” she reminds me. “If you were at NYU, your circle was huge.”
“No, the school was huge, and so was the student population. But the deaf population was tiny.”
The waitress comes back and I assume she asks what we want, because Lark orders and then the waitress looks at me. I point to what I want on the menu, and she writes it down. She asks Lark something and Lark looks at me. “You want some wine?” she asks me.
I shake my head.
Lark tells her no and she walks away.
“You don’t drink?” Lark asks me.
“Not when I’m on a first date.”
She smiles at me and my heart skips double time. “Is this a date?”
I stare into her eyes. “This is a date.”
She lays a hand on her chest and pretends to be startled. “But I’m a hearing girl!”
“I know, right? Crazy, isn’t it? Just don’t tell my mother.”
A man in a suit approaches the table and speaks to Lark. She looks around, and realizes that the number of people interested in her being here has grown.
“Who was that?” I ask.
She reaches for her purse. “My security guard.”
“I didn’t know you had anyone with you.”
She shrugs. “It’s kind of his job to stay in the shadows. We need to leave, though,” she says.
“Why?”
“Too many people know I’m here.”