Friends & Fortune Cookies: A Sudden Falls Romance (7 page)

“So who’s tonight’s lucky contestant?” he asked after getting himself settled back into the seat of his truck.

“His name is Bob Miller. He lives north of downtown—I think near Over the Rhine.
He works with computers. Never married. No kids. No pets.” I chanced a quick glance over at Joe and knew, without his saying a word, what he was thinking. “If you make any comment about my lack of technical savvy, I will kill you in the face.”

He cleared his throat in a probable attempt not to laugh. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Clearly, mean and scary weren’t in my repertoire. Which was unsurprising as the butterflies in my stomach battled with the shaking of my hands as to which would give away my nerves first.

And Joe didn’t have to mock my near inability to do anything more technical than turn on my computer. I was aware of my shortcomings in that area. The IT guys at the paper are all too willing to point it out every time I have a problem.

“What does ol’ Bob Miller like to do for fun?” Joe asked.

I pointed to a parking spot, mostly to keep Joe from noticing I hadn’t answered. To be honest, I hadn’t quite understood half of what Bob was talking about in the short email exchange and one, brief instant message conversation we’d had. He communicated in a shorthand only teenagers and other tech types would understand. Half of the words he’d used were acronyms I didn’t recognize. I’d looked the first ten or so up in the Urban Dictionary, but that got old fast.

I wasn’t certain why I’d accepted his offer to meet for coffee, except for my impending deadline. I felt honor bound not to make up a date, at least not the first one. Bob had mentioned that he only had an hour, so at least the evening wouldn’t get dragged out forever.

Parking on Main Street in the early evening was generally somewhere between tricky and nightmarish, so we were lucky to find an empty spot. Joe whipped into it just in time.

Café Diem was a couple of blocks away, and Joe motioned me ahead. “I’ll let you go first. That way, your date won’t see us coming in together.”

I nodded and walked toward the coffee shop.

“Good luck,” he called after me.

I tugged at my maxi-skirt and shifted my blouse so it sat straight on my shoulders. A quick purse of my lips assured me I hadn’t eaten off my lipstick. I hadn’t had enough time to wear through my makeup yet, so I took a deep breath, mentally pulled up my big-girl panties, and walked the short distance to the café.

Small sofas, upholstered chairs, and lacquered end tables sprang up in odd, colorful, and wildly mismatched groupings. The glass-enclosed, gas fireplace in the center of the room offered a bit of ambiance, as did the well-pierced hipster at the right of the door strumming an acoustic guitar and singing for change thrown into his instrument case.

I identified Bob from his picture almost instantly in the crowded coffee bar. He’d saved me a seat on a small purple velvet couch in front of the fireplace. Sitting there with his knees together, he drank from a paper coffee cup and tapped his foot out of sync with the musician.

Bob stood when he saw me. I really wanted to be charitable but felt pretty certain this was not going to be a love match. He wore a beige-and-olive-plaid shirt, a blue tie, and olive khakis which had a dark-blue ink stain on a pocket. He had unfashionably long sideburns and a crooked grin and looked very uncomfortable in his own skin.

“Hi. Grace, right?” He held out a hand for me to shake.

“Yes, and you must be Bob.”

He nodded. With introductions out of the way, suddenly the conversation dried up. My smile wavered. This right here is one of the reasons I don’t date.

“I like the name of this place. Like Eureka,” he said.

I had no idea what he was talking about. I shook my head.

“The Syfy TV show? Eureka? Café Diem? Vincient? Global Dynamics? Sheriff Carter?” He trailed off as I continued shaking my head.

“I guess I missed that one.”

“Oh. You should catch it on Netflix. It’s about a town of genius super-nerds who nearly blow up the world in every episode and the non-genius sheriff who always manages to save the day.”

“Ahh,” I said for lack of anything better to offer.

After an interminable moment of uncomfortable silence, Bob asked, “Would you like some coffee or tea or something?”

“A mocha cappuccino would be great.”

“Stay and save our seat. I’ll go get it.” He moved toward the counter. Joe caught my eye and grinned. “Geek,” he mouthed from across the room.

Noting Bob was busy ordering my coffee, I made a face at Joe and turned back toward the fireplace. My date returned a few minutes later, beverage in hand.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

The silence once again drew long.

“So, Bob, you said you work with computers?” I figured I’d jump into the deep end. Certainly couldn’t be worse than the Eureka conversation.

“Yes.” He leaned forward enthusiastically. “I’m the network engineer for a consulting company. I design networks for companies that hire us.” He continued on for a few moments, enumerating what he did on a daily basis in great detail. It was all Greek to me, but I tried to stay focused on what he was saying.

“Do you enjoy it?” I asked when he’d evidently run out of things to say and quiet returned.

“Unless I’m dealing with idiot users who couldn’t distinguish a universal serial bus port from a hole in the ground.”

Undoubtedly, I was one of the idiots in question since I had no idea what a universal bus thingy might be but guessed it had nothing to do with mass interstellar transit. The silence became oppressive again.

“So how old are you?” I tried to remember what he’d written in his introductory email.

“I’m twenty in hex.”

Huh?

He explained. “Hex or Hexidecimal is a counting system used by your computer that is based on sixteen instead of ten.”

I tried to keep my expression blank. I really did, but I was pretty sure my eyes had glazed over.

He proceeded to clarify. “When you count normally, you use the numbers one through ten, eleven through twenty, and so on, right?” He didn’t wait for any sort of response from me but continued on. “In Hex, you count zero-zero, zero-one, zero-two, to zero-seven, then zero-A, zero-B, zero-C, to zero-F...” Bob trailed off. “How old are you?” he asked me suddenly.

“Twenty-five.”

“That would make you nineteen.”

Oh. My. God.

“
Really...
” My brain went so numb that someone could crack me over the head with a baseball bat and I wouldn’t even feel it.

Surreptitiously, I glanced at my watch. Only thirty-five minutes had passed since I’d arrived so I couldn’t leave yet. But I really,
really
wanted to.

The conversation dragged on. Bob didn’t ask any questions of me, and I got tired of having to keep coming up with the subject matter. Inevitably, whatever subject I
did
introduce was met with a long discourse on a tangent I had little interest in. Finally, I noticed the hour hand on my watch had at long last crawled to the twelfth position.

He had also been checking his watch with great regularity.

“I have to go.” He stood somewhat abruptly and to my great relief.

“It was really nice to meet you,” I said.

“You, too,” he answered from halfway across the coffee shop.

Joe came over and sat down in the seat Bob had vacated.

“Not a love match?”

I giggled in relief that it was over. “That was so awful, I can’t even tell you.”

“Why was it awful?”

“What do you know about counting in hex?”

Chapter 12 — Joe

As we pulled away from the curb, relief flowed over me.

If all of Gracie’s dates were as bad as this one, then...
Then what?
There might be hope for us? I sighed.

“I felt so bad for him.” Gracie exhaled. “He was so...
awkward.
Now I feel bad for kind of calling it in and clock-watching for the last fifteen minutes. That was probably mean.”

Gracie truly was one of the nicest people anyone would ever want to meet. Sometimes that kind-heartedness got the better of her, though. “I’m sure he barely noticed.”

She raised an eyebrow. I wasn’t fooling her.

It took no time to get to her apartment despite the fact I drove at ten miles below the speed limit. My Spartan studio flat, chosen for its low price and not for comfort or appeal, didn’t exactly call my name.

Gracie didn’t immediately jump out. She flipped her wrist over to check the time. “It’s early. You want to come in?”

She didn’t have to ask twice. I pulled the key from the ignition and met her at the front of the truck, feeling a lightness that hadn’t been in my step since she told me about her dating assignment.

“My place is a mess.” She turned the key in the deadbolt and pushed open the door.

“I’m sure I can handle it.” Gracie tended to be a neatnik, so I was certain her mess was contained.

I was right. She’d completely tidied her apartment, except for her dining-room table, which was littered with photographs, albums, and enough craft supplies to keep a first-grade class occupied for an entire year. Along the edge of the table, she’d lined up a stack of albums, each with a consecutive year stenciled on the spine. Apparently, she’d started this collection in middle school. Oddly, I’d never seen any of it.

I couldn’t help myself and reached for the album with our high-school graduation year.

“Hey!”

I paused, fingertips poised to pull the album from the stack. “I’m sorry. May I?”
What was the big secret?
Her defensiveness only made me want to see them that much more.

“I guess.” She sighed. “If you mock me, I’ll hurt you.”

“You’re very violent for a kind-hearted pacifist.”

Okay, I’ll admit it. In high school, I probably would have given her a hard time about this. But I liked to believe that I’d grown up some since then.

Three steps took us to her living room, and I dropped to the couch to peruse the album. Gracie fidgeted before finally settling in next to me, a couple of feet away. I opened the book to the middle and managed to land right in hot water.

“I can’t believe you still have pictures from prom.” I cleared my throat.

A much younger me, in an ill-fitting black tux with black tie and cummerbund, stood next to a much,
much
younger Gracie, in a bright pink number with nearly non-existent spaghetti straps and an improbable number of rhinestones in varied sizes down the front.

“Mom and Dad have most of them. I think Mom probably took a hundred pictures that night.” She scooted closer to me then flipped to the next page and ran her finger down the cellophane-protected photos. “Were we ever this young?”

God, she’d been beautiful. From the moment Gracie had eased into my arms on the dance floor, I’d found heaven, as completely sappy as that sounds. I don’t remember letting her go or sitting down the entire night. Her firm, soft breasts had brushed my chest with every sway of our bodies, and her knees had bumped mine from time to time though I had avoided letting our hips meet very often, not wanting to shock her. At one point, she’d tilted her head back to laugh at something I’d said and I couldn’t help myself from leaning down and kissing her.

And she’d kissed me back and had continued kissing me back until one of the chaperones tapped me on the shoulder and cleared her throat.

After the dance, we went back to my mom’s house to change for after-prom events. I’d changed first but forgotten to grab my shoes from the foot of the bed. I knocked on the bedroom door so she could hand them out.

“Hey, Gracie. Are you decent? I left my shoes in—”

I broke off as the door drifted open slowly. The latch hadn’t always caught, and this was evidently one of those times. Gracie stood next to the bed in a half-slip, bare from the waist up. I’d half expected her to scream at me to leave, but she hadn’t. She’d simply crossed her wrists in front of her chest, blocking my view.

Neither one of us said anything. We stared at one another.

I found myself drifting toward her as if by magnetic force. “Gracie,” I said, my voice jumping about three octaves and crackling.

She didn’t speak, and I could see her pulse beating at the base of her throat, just above her thumbs.

“I’m going to kiss you now,” I told her.

She said nothing but lifted her chin fractionally. Taking it as more consent than fear, I leaned toward her. Without touching her with my hands, my lips met hers. They were as soft as silk, free of lipstick or gloss, and tasted of heaven.

My arms found their way around her shoulders, and one buried into the fragrant mass of black curly hair hanging down her back. I wasn’t sure which was softer, the satin of her hair or the silk of her skin.

“Gracie? Do you have any idea what you’re doing to me?” I asked against the smooth skin where her neck met her shoulder. God, every inch of her was soft and smelled fantastic.

“No. What?”

I placed a hand at the small of her back and eased her forward, gently pressing her hips to mine, letting her feel what I’d done my best to hide most of the night.

“Oh,” she said then realization dawned.
“Oh!”

“Tell me if you want me to stop.”

She tilted her head back, and I could see so many things in the warmth of her gray eyes. Fortunately, “stop” wasn’t one of them.

Afterward, we lay on my bed, our bodies cooling as I stroked her back from shoulder to hip, reveling in the afterglow. Life was almost perfect. I had a beautiful and very naked woman in my arms. I’d finally lost my virginity and in time for basic training. Graduation was weeks away, and I was about to get away from my parents and their never-ending, self-created problems. I’d been looking forward to going into the army for
years.
And now, I’d have Gracie waiting for me.

“I really wish you weren’t leaving next month.”

A feeling of dread spread through me.

“It’s too late to stop me, Gracie,” I’d said a little more harshly than intended as I sat up and swung my legs over the edge of the bed.