A Novella MisTaken(11)
“When I run, I listen to hip-hop, to answer your question. What’s tonkatsu broth?” Was that his foot touching hers beneath the table? Or was it the table? Should she kick it to find out?
“Pork bones. It’s my favorite. I listen to punk when I run, but I’ve been doing audiobooks lately for just bumming around the house.” She kicked it. It reacted. Not the table, then.
“Ow!” Noah yelped. She smiled apologetically. She really was sorry. Sometimes she couldn’t control her impulses. But she did want to play footsie. Damn. This was why she had so few second dates, wasn’t it? Self-sabotage.
“Audiobooks. I haven’t really gotten into those. I’m old-fashioned about paper, I guess.”
She slunk her foot back over to his beneath the table. He didn’t recoil. Maybe she could salvage this after all. The charge she felt every time they touched said she sure had to try.
“It isn’t about paper or no. It’s about maximizing my lit time. I could happily read all day, but then I couldn’t walk down to grab groceries, or clean the bathroom, or grade tests. So I do audiobooks then.”
His foot slid up to her calf, and then back down. Jay tried to suppress her shiver.
Suddenly, he kicked her back. “We’re even now. That makes sense about the audiobooks. I’ll think on that. But I really enjoy music, so I probably won’t change.”
She was still blinking from the surprise. It took her a second to recover her wits, but luckily the server was there to take their orders.
“So what are you reading right now?” She mentally patted herself on the back. That was good. They’d bonded over books the first time they hung out.
“Just something for work. What are you reading?”
She grinned as his foot resumed twining around hers. The sensation of elation at this cute scruffy guy staring at her as if he couldn’t wait to hear her answer made her drop the impulse to press him on the work thing. What if he was unemployed? It would be embarrassing for both of them. And embarrassment was a real mood killer.
“Right now I’m reading a new literary fiction novel for my book club, a critique of modern feminism for fun, and I’m listening to this series of books following women of the Tudor era. Oh, and I have a graphic novel I read at night before bed.” She grinned again at the look on his face. She didn’t normally smile this often. Teaching teenagers tended to wear one’s sense of humor down. Her face was going to hurt tomorrow. She made a mental note to smile less.
“I thought you were going to say just a romance novel or something. Jeez.” He reached across the table to grab her hand again. Luckily, it was dry and ready again. As the heat spread from their clasped fingers up her arm, she decided she didn’t care anyway.
“I like a variety!” she said. “If I keep them in separate genres, I can keep multiple readings going on. But you won’t catch me dead with a romance novel.” She shivered again, but this time in mock-horror.
“What’s wrong with romance novels?” He looked genuinely puzzled.
What the hell? It wasn’t obvious?
“They’re completely ridiculous. Hot alpha male with broken past and massive bank account is healed by the golden vagina of a naive girl he meets under completely contrived circumstances. No thank you. That’s just a smutty fairy tale for the Basic Bitch. It’s demeaning, and unrealistic. Besides, the sex in those books is always weirdly dominant and controlling.”
He was staring hard at her now, those gorgeous brown eyes blazing into hers. Shit, was she going too alpha femme herself? Oh well. If he didn’t like it, she didn’t like him. Hmph.
Though that was a total lie—she liked him and liked him bad. But despite her attraction, she wasn’t willing to sacrifice her ideals for a pretty face. This time.
Noah’s pretty face blinked its eyes. Twice. “Um. Wow. So what’s a Basic Bitch, for starters?”
“You know the type. Girls who are aggressively average. The kind who make duck-faces on their Instagram pics at an eighties dance party while ignoring everyone who is actually at said party. They aren’t very smart, they aren’t good at socializing, and they require a lot of attention.”
“That sounds pretty judgey for someone who describes herself as a feminist.”
That one sentence rocked Jaylene like a 9.5 Richter earthquake, knocking down her entire self-image. It was so devastatingly accurate.
If the waiter hadn’t arrived with steaming bowls of ramen just then, she might have just crawled under the table.
* * *
Well, maybe that was a bit too much honesty for their first formal date. But if she wasn’t ready to hear it, he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear what she wanted to say. Smutty fairy tales! Okay, she might have been right. It wasn’t like Noah had actually read the last few erotic chart-toppers, but from what he had gathered, her description was pretty dead on.