“I like your sweater,” he said. “That color looks great on you.”
It was, of course, from Poppy’s closet—one of at least fifty sweaters with “delicate, hand wash only” on their dainty labels. It was bold and beautiful.
“I like wearing green here,” Rose said. “It makes me feel like part of the landscape.”
Landon laughed. “Well, you don’t look it. You stand out, Rose.”
She picked up a menu to hide what his words had done to her. There was something about sitting across a table from him that stripped her bare in a way that even stripping her clothes off hadn’t. “No one has ever accused me of that.”
“Get used to it,” Landon said with a sweet, lopsided smile. “See anything on there you like?”
Rose skimmed the plastic-wrapped menu she’d been cradling. “Curry, probably. Green, medium heat.”
“Green again.” He smiled. “I hear the dishes here are surprisingly spicy.”
“I like spicy.”
Their waiter sidled up to the table and poured ice water into the empty glasses in front of them. “Ready to order?”
“Another minute, please,” Landon said, still studying the menu. “I just want to make sure I’m not missing anything.” The waiter nodded and left them.
“This menu is as long as a phone book,” Rose said. “Are you really going to read the whole thing?”
“There.” Landon’s pointer finger landed on a target. “Suea ring hai. I’ve never had it before.”
Rose laughed. “I’ve never had almost everything on this menu.”
“Exactly,” Landon said, the lopsided smile evening out as it grew. “I try to order something I’ve never eaten before.”
“Huh,” Rose said, cocking her head. “That’s kind of cool.”
“It’s all I’ve ever wanted, to be ‘kind of cool.’”
“What made you decide to do that?”
Landon put his menu down and smoothed out a few bubblesin the plastic. “My parents took us out to dinner a lot. Mom absolutely loathes cooking unless it’s a holiday. But when you do something that’s supposed to be special over and over, it starts to feel normal. Boring, even. So I did what I could to make it fun. Jess wanted no part in it, though she did find her own thing. She must have read over two hundred books while we were camped out in restaurant booths.”
Rose couldn’t know that this quirk she initially found so sweet would someday come to annoy her so much they’d have to leave her favorite Cambodian restaurant before their meals arrived, smoke practically billowing out of Rose’s nostrils as she begged him to just order something he knew he would like—something that wouldn’t cause a stomachache that would take days to recover from.
“Are you telling me that this”—she waved her hand at the two of them and gestured to the place settings—“is not special? This is just Saturday night for you?” She was mostly kidding, but there was a kernel of truth to the question. If she’d read the room wrong, she wanted to know sooner than later, her tolerance for unclear expectations at an all-time low.
“No,” Landon said, suddenly serious. Then he lifted his arm up to reveal an enormous sweat stain leaking through his blue button-up. “Saturday night dinner doesn’t usually make me so nervous I ruin my clothes.”
“I make you nervous?”
“Oh yeah,” he said, all smiles once again. “Terrified.”
“Another first.”
“It’s your eyes,” he said, staring into them. “They remind me of a shark.” Rose laughed. “No, I’m serious!” Landon pulled out his phone and held up the first image from a Google search forGreat White. “Look, they’re just like yours. Such a dark blue they’re almost gray.”
Rose looked closer. She hadn’t realized that sharks had blue eyes, though in all fairness, she hadn’t spent a great deal of time wondering about the eye color of the ocean’s fiercest predator. “You’re kind of weird,” she said.
“You aren’t the first to say it, and you won’t be the last.”
Her gray-blue shark eyes flashed. “Not in a bad way.”
“Oh,” Landon said, his own cheeks reddening now. “Well, good.”