by Linda Seed
When he realized how they were positioned—his hands on the wall on either side of Sofia, so close to her that he could smell her hair—he gradually stopped laughing. Then, so did she.
Everything fell away: the bickering couple, the restaurant, the tension they’d both felt at the beginning of the date. Now, there was just this exquisite nearness, this yearning.
He leaned forward and kissed her, and he didn’t feel nervous or awkward anymore. He felt that he was exactly where, and who, he was supposed to be.
Sofia was lost in the kiss when, through the fog of her desire, she heard the waitress talking to them.
“You two want to get a room? Because we need this hallway.”
So many things about Patrick were endearing, and one of them was that he had a tendency to blush—which he was doing now.
“Ah … sorry,” he told the waitress.
Sofia wasn’t sorry, though. She wasn’t sorry at all.
Albert and Janice were gone when Patrick and Sofia got back to their table. Whether they’d been asked to leave or had cut the night short on their own was unclear.
Either way, Patrick and Sofia were able to continue their date without the distraction of a fight at the next table—and without the awkward tension that had marked the beginning of their evening together.
They talked easily and comfortably through the rest of their meal—though Patrick was careful not to approach the topics of her sisters or her parents. That didn’t matter, because they had so much more to say.
Patrick told her about Ramon and Lucy and their toddler son, Joe.
Sofia told him about the things she loved to do: hiking, camping, running.
By the time the check came, Patrick should have felt completely at ease with her. And he would have, if not for the suffocating sexual tension he was feeling.
He wasn’t the kind of man who would try to get into a woman’s bed on the second date. Even if he thought he could accomplish such a feat, he wouldn’t have wanted to, because he’d always found sex so much more satisfying when he truly knew someone.
And yet, there was the kiss and the way it had made him feel.
He drove her home reminding himself that he absolutely, certainly, without a doubt was going to walk her to her door without trying anything. What kind of man would he be otherwise?
As it happened, when they got to her house, she was the one who tried something.
Not that he minded.
He needed glasses when driving after dark, and he was wearing them when she grabbed him by the shirt and hauled him to her as they stood outside the front door of the log cabin, the porch light shining down on them in the warm evening air.
She reached out, took the glasses off of him, and set them down on a small table that sat between two Adirondack chairs. Then she kissed him long and hard, still with a fistful of his shirt in her hand.
The blood was rushing to his nether regions; maybe that was why he felt so lightheaded. The taste of her mouth was more intoxicating than the wine he’d had at dinner.
He leaned into the kiss, into her, his lips exploring hers, his tongue tasting hers. Just when he was about to abandon his ideals about sex and getting to know someone and what, exactly, constituted respectful behavior, she let go of the shirt and stepped back, a languid smile on her face.
“Call me,” she said. Just that. And then she disappeared into the house and closed the door.
He waited a moment for his rational mind to start working again, then went down the steps and toward his car.
Patrick was all the way to the car before he realized that his glasses were still on the porch. He went back up, grabbed them, then started to leave again.
He meant to go to his car and go home, he really did. But the window next to the front door was open, and he could hear Sofia and her sisters talking. Still, he wouldn’t have listened. Except for the fact that they were talking about him.
At first he just heard his own name along with some unintelligible words. Then, someone—probably Bianca, if he remembered her voice correctly—came closer to the window, and he could hear her clearly.
“ … nothing like the others,” she said. “He’s got a brain, for one thing.”
“And he’s cute,” another voice said. Martina? “But he’s not … you know … drop-dead gorgeous.”
Patrick wasn’t offended by that; after all, it matched his own assessment of his relative attractiveness.
Sofia made some noises about how they all should mind their own business, but the others kept on.
“Oh, come on, Sofia, don’t deny that you always date super hot men,” said a third voice that had to be Benny. “They’ve all been either weightlifters, or models, or … or there was that guy who acted in a soap opera. What was his name?”
“Blake!” Martina said triumphantly. “Oh, I remember him. He used to wax his eyebrows.”
They all laughed at the memory of the eyebrow-waxing, then he could hear Sofia again.
“There is nothing wrong with Patrick just because he’s not as … well … as conventionally attractive as the other guys.”
“Believe me, I know,” Benny said. “I think you might finally have a good one. Give this one a chance before you crush him into dust, would you?”
“Please,” Martina agreed.
10
In the days following the date at Neptune, Patrick couldn’t stop thinking about the things he’d overheard.
If he’d been more secure about his place in Sofia’s affections, he might have focused on the fact that her sisters had praised his intelligence and had even suggested that he was superior to the men she’d dated before.
But he wasn’t entirely secure, so he focused instead on the fact that they’d said he was less attractive than the others.
Weightlifters? Models? A soap opera actor?
How in the world was he supposed to compete?
“Be honest. Am I hot?” he asked Ramon at school the following Monday. The two of them had met at a coffee kiosk on campus before Ramon’s first class.
“Dude. I like you a lot, but not that way,” Ramon said.
“Very funny.” Patrick accepted his latte from the barista, opened the lid, and added sugar from a packet. “I’m serious. If you were a woman, would you find me attractive?”
“I’m not a woman,” Ramon pointed out.
“But if you were. Use your imagination.”
“My imagination isn’t vivid enough for that,” Ramon said. “You want to ask Lucy?”
The idea of asking Ramon’s wife if he, Patrick, was hot made him flush with humiliation. On the other hand, a woman’s perspective might prove enlightening. And yet, there was the humiliation again.
“No,” he said. “Absolutely not. But … maybe.”
So Ramon called Lucy and put her on the phone with Patrick.
“Hot isn’t the right word,” she said after considering the question. “Hot implies a certain kind of generic good looks with the body and the attitude and all of that. You’re something different. You’re … compelling.”
“Compelling,” he repeated, trying the description on in his head.
After he hung up and returned Ramon’s cell phone, Ramon gave him a side-eyed look. “Why is my wife calling you compelling?”
“Well … you’d have more to worry about if she’d called me hot, wouldn’t you?”
Ramon shoved the phone into his pocket. “No, I wouldn’t, and you know it.”
Compelling was nice, but it didn’t put him in a league with Sofia’s previous boyfriends. Patrick thought about what he could do to improve his odds. He couldn’t change his genetic makeup, and he couldn’t change his basic personality.
There was one thing he could change, though, so he went to a gym near the college after his classes finished the next day and asked about a membership.
“You ever worked out before?” Chad, a guy in a bright red Fantastic Fitness T-shirt, sat across from Patrick at a fake wood-grain desk i
n a glass-walled area next to the free weights. Chad was so bulked up it seemed likely that the sleeves of his shirt might split should he unexpectedly flex. The room smelled like sweat and synthetic carpet.
“Ah … no.”
Chad made a note on a clipboard. “You do any cardio?”
“Well, I take long walks sometimes between classes, so …”
“That’s a no.” Chad made another note. “Let’s just get your weight and measurements.”
There was a scale, a measuring tape, and a pair of calipers, and Chad made notes and grunted to himself as he contemplated the data he was writing down.
“It’s not looking good for the home team,” Chad said, his eyebrows raised, as he looked at his clipboard.
Patrick let himself be talked into the personal training package, which on the one hand seemed like an extortionate scam, but on the other hand might prevent him from seriously injuring himself.
He got started the next day, at an obscenely early hour when he normally would have been sipping his first cup of coffee or reading the news online.
“Let’s warm you up with ten minutes on the treadmill, then we’ll run you through a nice beginner routine,” a guy who wasn’t Chad, but who was pretty much interchangeable with Chad, told him as the machines whirred and clanged around him. A bank of TVs mounted on the walls showed a variety of morning programming, ranging from CNN to a cooking show.
The warmup went well enough—no matter how out of shape he might be, he could manage ten minutes at a brisk walk on the treadmill—and he had settled into a false sense of security by the time not-Chad came to get him.
He’d expected to be taken to the machines with their neat stacks of weights on cables and their padded seats and handles that made everything seem so doable and straightforward. Instead, not-Chad steered him to the free weights.
“Aren’t we going over there?” Patrick asked, gesturing plaintively to the machines.
“Nah.” Not-Chad waved off the idea. “Those are for the members who pass on the personal training—we send them over there so they won’t hurt themselves.”
“But won’t I hurt myself?” Patrick wondered.
“Not with me showing you what to do. Let’s start with the bench press.”
Half an hour later, Patrick left the gym freshly showered, dressed in the clothes he’d worn to work, and feeling weak as a kitten recovering from a bad bout of the flu. His limbs were rubbery and shaky, and he had the odd sensation that they might give up at any moment, refusing to hold him upright and leaving him to collapse onto the surface of the parking lot.
It was possible he’d overdone it.
Not-Chad had reminded him not to strain himself, saying he should take it easy for the first week or so until his body began to adapt. But there were two problems with that: one, he didn’t want not-Chad to think he couldn’t handle a basic beginner’s workout, and two, he didn’t have a lot of time. If he took months to get into shape, Sofia would either have seen him naked by then—proving that he wasn’t up to her usual standards—or she’d have decided she didn’t want to see him naked because he wasn’t up to her usual standards.
No, he had to speed up the usual timeline for this kind of thing. So he’d lifted a little more than not-Chad had suggested and he’d done it a few more times than what he’d been told to do.
And this wasn’t so bad, really. Yes, he was tired. But he also had the satisfaction of knowing he’d embarked on the manly occupation of sculpting his body into something superior to what it was today.
He and Sofia had a date for the following night, and Patrick would see her with a little more confidence.
That was the plan, anyway.
Of course, Sofia Googled Patrick. In this day and age, only an idiot would fail to Google the person they were getting involved with.
And Sofia was not an idiot.
Mostly, she wanted to make sure he wasn’t some sort of lunatic who seemed perfectly normal at first but who eventually ended up sending you a live wolverine in the mail.
What she found was pretty much what she’d hoped for: all of the normal things, with no references to wolverines, crackpot conspiracy theories, or restraining orders.
But the more she read, the more uneasy she felt—for a different reason.
It turned out, Patrick wasn’t just some English teacher toiling away at a thankless job teaching eighteen-year-olds to diagram sentences. If anyone even did that anymore.
He was actually kind of a big deal.
He’d graduated with honors from Princeton, he’d been a Rhodes Scholar—she’d had to look that up to even know what it was—and he was, according to Wikipedia, the world’s foremost authority on some Scottish poet she’d never heard of. He’d published a book about the poet, which had been reviewed in The New Yorker.
Sofia didn’t usually feel insecure when it came to men. That was one area in which she tended to hold the upper hand. In every relationship, there was one person who was more desirable—more of a catch, at least on paper—than the other one. The less worthy of the two was generally the pursuer, while the more worthy one was generally the pursued.
Sofia was always, always the pursued.
Now, she was beginning to wonder if she might be losing her spot at the top of the dating food chain. Yes, she looked the way she looked, and that was always an advantage. But Patrick wasn’t just smart. He was brilliant. How could she compete with that? How could she possibly hold his interest in a conversation about … oh, let’s say … iambic pentameter?
Sofia wasn’t even sure what iambic pentameter meant, though she did know it had to do with poetry.
How could she hope to be attractive to Patrick when she couldn’t even define iambic pentameter?
She liked to read, but she read thrillers, for God’s sake. Romance novels. Game of Thrones. She didn’t read poetry! She didn’t read literature! She’d gotten through high school English mostly with the aid of CliffsNotes.
She was starting to become slightly hysterical by the time Bianca came home from work to find her at the kitchen table with her laptop, her hands fisted in her hair.
“You look like you just read that a giant asteroid is going to wipe out the Earth,” Bianca remarked as she put her purse on the table and grabbed a water bottle out of the refrigerator. “It’s not, is it?”
Sofia stared at the screen, where the New Yorker review of Patrick’s book was displayed.
“Hello?” Bianca waved a hand between Sofia’s face and the screen.
“I’m doomed,” Sofia said. “Doomed.”
“Oh, God, is there an asteroid?”
“What? No.” Sofia snapped the laptop closed and laid her head on it. “But, now that you mention it? That would solve my problems.”
Bianca pulled out a chair and sat next to Sofia. “All right, spill it. What’s going on?”
Sofia just moaned.
Bianca slid the laptop out from under Sofia’s head, opened it, and looked at the article displayed on the screen.
“Why are you upset about this guy Calum Mc something or other?” Bianca asked.
“I’m not.”
“Then what …” Bianca scanned the article, and her eyes widened. “Patrick wrote this book. Your Patrick.”
“Apparently. And he’s not my Patrick. He’s never going to be my Patrick. He’s a freaking genius, it turns out. And I’m just … me!”
Sofia hadn’t realized how interested in Patrick she was until this. Until she’d learned that she wasn’t good enough for him. And she certainly hadn’t planned on talking about it with any of her sisters. But who else was she supposed to talk to? Where else was she supposed to turn?
“You’re joking, right?” Bianca said. “Of the four of us, you’re the one most likely to cause a traffic accident bending over to pick up a dollar from the sidewalk. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”
“That’s fine, until he wants to talk about … about iambic pentameter!” Sofia threw her hands
into the air for emphasis.
“Sof, you’re hysterical.”
“He should be dating you, not me,” Sofia said. “You’re a doctor! You know things. You’ve read books that aren’t sold in the checkout line at Walmart.”
“That’s true,” Bianca allowed. “But he doesn’t want me. He wants you.”
“He won’t, once he knows I’m not smart enough for him.”
Benny had come in the front door in the middle of the conversation, and she swung her messenger bag—full of books, papers, and God knew what—on the kitchen island. She was wearing a Superman T-shirt, a pair of ripped jeans rolled up to midcalf, and a pair of Converse sneakers.
“What are we talking about?” she asked.
“About how Sofia isn’t smart enough for the new guy she’s seeing.”
Benny’s eyebrows drew closer to one another, causing her forehead to wrinkle. “You’re smart.”
“I’m smart in the sense that I can balance my checkbook and manage my life and … and have conversations at parties. But Patrick …”
“Patrick what?”
“Patrick was a Rhodes Scholar and he wrote a book that was reviewed in The New Yorker,” Bianca said, filling her in. She pointed toward Sofia with one thumb. “She’s freaking out.”
Benny still looked puzzled. “Since when do you freak out about men? Men freak out about you, not the other way around.”
“This one’s different,” Bianca said pointedly.
“It’s just … he makes me feel things,” Sofia wailed.
“Oh, boy,” Benny said.
“I’ll bet he’s only dated really smart women in the past,” Sofia said. “Other professors, or writers, or … or poets.” She said the word poets as though she were saying lepers or crack addicts.
“Oh, I doubt that’s true,” Bianca said, her hand on Sofia’s shoulder.
“You want me to find out?” Benny sat down at the kitchen table, a bottle of Coke in her hand. She twisted off the top and took a long swig.