Blind Date Teddy Bear

Dad looked at me over his coffee. “Reckon we’ll leave in about half an hour.”

“Don’t leave it too late. You get tired on the drive.” I took another sip of my water.

Mom glanced at Dad, then me. “Why so eager to get rid of us? You planning to entertain Trevor in your bedroom? That bed’s only a double.”

I damn near spit out my water. “Mom!”

She shook her head and rolled her eyes. “He’s such a tall man,” she said. “How tall is he?”

The doorbell rang.

I said, “Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

She dropped the tea towel from her hands and ran for the door, getting there well ahead of me.

When I got to the door, she was feeling one of his biceps.

“Mother!”

She ducked her head and ran past me into the house.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Trevor. “My sister and I didn’t date at all in high school, so technically you’re the first guy to come pick up one of her daughters for a date.”

“She seems enthusiastic,” he said, grinning. He must have shaved recently, because his beard was gone. I was surprised by how attractive his bare jaw was, with just the smallest cleft in his chin.

“Your beard is gone,” I said, waiting for him to respond with a comment about my hair. It had been blue and black and long before, and now it was short, and spicy shades of brown.

He rubbed his chin and said, “I wasn’t intending to have a beard before. I just stopped shaving one day, and a beard happened.”

“I guess you got back on the shaving bandwagon.”

He looked past me, over my shoulder. “What does your mother do for a career?”

“She’s an elementary school teacher. With the little ones.”

“Ah,” he said, as though that explained everything, and then, “Hello, sir!”

My father was there, shaking his hand. I introduced them and stood patiently as my father asked him questions he already knew the answers to. My father noticed the truck and the two of them had a ten-minute conversation about gas mileage, which was odd, but not bad.

I stopped my father just short of taking poor Trevor out to our garage, saying, “You guys should get going to the lake, and we have a movie to make.”

They shook hands again, and my mother came out to wave goodbye.

“So embarrassing,” I muttered on the way to the truck.

Trevor opened the door for me, and I climbed in using the running board to step up easily. Something struck me as different, and I figured it out in the space of time it took for Trevor to walk around to his side.

“Did you install that step?” I asked him when he got in. “That step wasn’t there last week, was it?”

“It was on my to-do list and I finally got around to it.”

He seemed cool toward me, and I wanted to ask him about a million questions, from why did he rush me out last Saturday to why didn’t he phone me, but I took another tactic and waited for him to make the first move.

We made small talk about the chilly autumn weather, and then, at the movie theater, we talked about movies and the terrible amount of fat that’s in theater popcorn but how we crave it anyway, and then we had a long discussion about where was the prime spot to sit in a movie theater. I’ve always picked a seat as close to the middle as possible. Trevor said he liked to be near the middle, but along the aisle, so he could stand and get out of the way if someone needed to get past him.

We were seated at this point, with him on the end seat by the aisle, and I had to laugh that his knees were practically touching the seat ahead of him. I stood and pretended to trip over his legs, joking that I’d fall into his lap.

When I sat back down next to him, he leaned over and kissed me on the cheek and then on the mouth. We kissed for a moment, until I got self-conscious about all the people filing in around us and pulled back.

Just like that, he’d ignited my fire.

I wanted to do more than kiss him.

The movie started, and it was way too long. I couldn’t wait to get Trevor out of there. Part of me wanted to stick my hand down his pants in the middle of the dark theater, but the sensible part of me told me to stay calm, play it cool, and don’t be so easy.

When the movie finally ended, and the lights came back up, he turned to me and said, “Naomi. Something’s different. Why’d you change your hair?”

I countered with, “What did you think of the movie?”

The showing hadn’t been very crowded, and the people in our row went out the other way, so he didn’t have to stand to let anyone out.

Sitting there, he repeated, smiling, “Why’d you change your hair?”

I blew air out of my lips. “Because I thought you’d like it better this way.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You’re not mad that I didn’t notice when I came to pick you up? I mean, I saw that you looked really pretty, and you smelled so good, but I couldn’t figure out what was different until that girl in the movie got her hair cut.”

“I thought you were a details-oriented kinda guy.”

“I am. But I guess I’m blind about certain things.”

“Apparently.”

People were still filing out of the theater, while the credits rolled on the screen. I wanted to ask Trevor if he actually liked me or if he’d just taken me out a second time to keep my sister from killing him, but I didn’t want to hear the answer if it were the latter.

He said, “How’d you like the movie?”

“It was good,” I lied, my voice pitching up from the fib.

He laughed. “I know. So bad. But the trailer looked so good.”

“The trailer is not the movie.”

“No, it isn’t. But it gets you excited, about what could be.”

I considered the differences between a trailer and a movie, a date and a relationship. “You have to trust your gut,” I said.

“Don’t you mean your heart?”

At the mention of heart, mine started to beat faster. Maybe it was the intense look Trevor was giving me. “If you trust your heart.”

He broke away from my gaze and wiped some stray popcorn off his lap. “That word, trust. I don’t know.”

“What don’t you know?”

He got up and brushed away the rest of his popcorn, then reached a hand down for mine. “Should we get a drink or something?”

“Sure.”

* * *

Back in his truck again, we drove around looking for somewhere to have a drink. The clubs I’d normally go to with friends were too loud, and the idea of going to a fancy hotel lobby in my casual clothes wasn’t appealing.

“My parents have gone to the lake for the weekend,” I said.