“Yeah,” Jack chuckles. “I know.” He grabs my hand again to thread his fingers through mine, and I sort of forget all about my dislike of surprises. “But this one will be worth it, maybe.”
Strangely enough, I believe him.
Stranger still…I might even be thrilled to go with him.
Not sure what to make of that.
“The aquarium?” I question aswe stand in line. “Really?”
“Hell yeah,” he says. “I love this place.”
“Definitely not what I thought you meant when you said it was a surprise.”
Jack buys two tickets at the counter, ignoring my protests that I can buy my own.
“Didn’t want to have to drag you here kicking and screaming,” he says.
I roll my eyes. “I wouldn’t have been that bad.”
“Are you kidding? This placescreamsdate. I’m surprised you aren’t trying to sneak away.”
I don’t tell him that lately the idea of going on a date with himdoesn’t make me as terrified as it did the first time he suggested it, mainly because that fact alone is terrifying in itself. There’s no good reason for Jack and me to go on anactualdate, because that’s not what this is between us, but still, I can’t pretend that every time he makes a joke about it lately, my heart doesn’t flutter in my chest.
Jack never lets go of my hand as he leads me inside the massive building, the entryway spilling out into a room with floor-to-ceiling tanks filled with hundreds of colorful fish swirling about. The lighting is lower in here, the water casting reflections on our skin in a way that is almost romantic. Jack was definitely right; this placedoesscream “date.”
“So why the aquarium?”
Jack tugs me over to a massive tank in the wall where the lights are shut off to highlight the bioluminescent jellyfish. “My dad took me here when I was a kid,” he tells me. “Just a few weeks before he died.”
I feel my heart drop into my stomach. “Oh, Jack.”
“Don’t,” he says with a shake of his head, not unkindly. “It’s okay. We sawFinding Nemoin theaters a few weeks before that, and I wasobsessedwith that movie. Begged my parents to take me here so I could see Dory and Nemo and Marlin.”
I try to picture a little twelve-year-old Jack here, almost able to see the way he would be bouncing from exhibit to exhibit. I imagine he was just as rambunctious as a child as he is as an adult, and the thought brings a small smile to my face.
He tugs me along, and sure enough, in the next tank there are a few clown fish floating around.
“I was struggling in my hockey league back then,” Jack tells me quietly, watching the fish. “I hadn’t grown into my arms andlegs yet, and it was like I was all hands and feet. Couldn’t sink a shot to save my life some days. It used to frustrate the hell out of me.”
“Wow, I can’t really imagine that,” I say.
“I wasn’talwaysthe picture of perfection you see today,” he says with a flourish of his hand down his body.
I elbow him in the side. “Right.”
“Anyway, so I see this movie about this little fish who had this messed-up fin, and still he was determined to do anything he set his mind to. That really resonated with me as a kid, you know?”
“I could see it.”
“So dad brought us all here a few weeks later, and I remember being really bummed that I didn’t see an actual clown fish here like Nemo. Which is fucked-up I guess, that I was hoping to see a disfigured fish.”
“You were just a kid,” I remind him.
He nods. “Yeah, I know. But I remember being actually kind of upset about it. I was being a real Debbie Downer all afternoon.”
“I’m sure your dad understood,” I say.
“He did,” Jack tells me. “He actually said something to me that day that I never really forgot.”