I raised an eyebrow, scooping a spoonful of ceviche into my mouth. Delicious. I hummed around the spoon, closing my eyes as the fresh ocean flavor hit my palate. Maybe this restaurant was actually worth the hype.
“What kind of show?” I asked coquettishly. I pulled the spoon slowly out of my mouth, lavishing it with a languorous lap of my tongue as I did. Ricky swallowed, and I grinned, amazed at how quickly we had managed to shift the mood.
“That’s . . . pretty good,” he said, not lifting his eyes from my mouth. When I reached for more, he grasped my wrist and guided the bite of ceviche to his lips, closing them over the spoon. Suddenly, the room narrowed to just the two of us, to Ricky’s hand closed around my wrist, his eyes holding mine in a challenge. His grip was strong, like it had been when he’d wrestled my hand away under the cover of our blanket fort. Unbidden, I imagined that hand elsewhere, clasped just so around the base of my neck, not quite squeezing, but firm—
“Your drink, ma’am,” our waiter said, placing my cocktail gingerly on the table under my still-outstretched arm. “Are you ready to order?”
I jerked backward, leaving the ceviche spoon hanging in Ricky’s mouth. Jesus Christ, I thought. Maybe we should get this meal to go. Still, I put in my order, biting back a triumphant grin when Ricky ordered a different entrée.
Thankfully, the rest of dinner went as prescribed. We swapped bites off each other’s plates, and I pouted when I discovered that Ricky had made the better choice. Our first round of drinks became two, which eventually became two and a half when we decided to split a final cocktail. And as the night progressed, I thought of date nights that stretched far into the future, of Ricky’s eyes crinkling with crow’s-feet as he smiled, of my wrinkled hands offering him forkfuls from my plate. I imagined growing old and arguing about if we really needed more tomatoes in grocery store parking lots, Ricky patting me on the bum as I walked in front of him the way my dad sometimes did to my mom. And as the images flickered through my mind, I felt an awful sinking sensation, as hopeless as a cannonball in an ocean. I’d thought there would be an end to the depth of my feelings for Ricky, but somehow every time I saw him, I fell exponentially harder. Tabatha had been wrong. I didn’t need to sleep with Ricky to get too far gone; I was already there.
“We overdid it,” I declared as he walked and I hobbled out of La Ventana two hours later. The alcohol settled like a thick blanket over my shoulders but turned somersaults in my stomach, and I felt simultaneously pleasantly buzzed and a touch queasy. Chuckling, Ricky reached for my hand and brought it to his lips.
“I think we did just enough,” he said. He grinned dopily, his right dimple popping into view. I resisted the urge to poke it. “You wear this dress just to torture me?”
I laughed, feeling light as a feather, feeling like I could own the world.
“Perhaps,” I said coyly. “Is it working?”
Ricky’s grin grew wicked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I can walk behind you and find out.”
Giggling, I obliged, twirling my hand out of his and falling into my best strut. I could feel Ricky’s eyes course over my figure salaciously, and I pondered how a look like that from any other man in the world would have made me run away. From Ricky, though? He could spend the next hour undressing me with his eyes, and I would relish every second. I looked over my shoulder to watch him watch me, waiting for his eyes to tick up from wherever they were now most occupied to meet mine.
A mischievous look crossed Ricky’s face, and then he was stepping around me to cut me off, crowding me backward until my back scratched against brick.
“Okay, yeah,” he said, pressing into me until my body was crushed between his and the wall. “I would say it’s pretty effective.” He chuckled, leaning into me. “God. I don’t ever act right with you, do I?”
“Ha,” I said, watching our chests heave in unison. Our eyes met in a challenge, and in the next second his mouth was slanted over mine, kissing me with an immediacy that left me sagging against him. All at once, my mind went blank except for a euphoric happiness and a sudden, pressing urge to take him home to finish this. God, he was hot. I wanted him to touch me everywhere, wanted the hands that were clutching my hips to delve higher and lower and everywhere in between. And afterward, I wanted to sit at my dining room table with him and eat the pancakes that we’d made together and talk about his most recent annoying client and trade funny patient stories and—