I looked across the table at him, meeting his eyes and trying not to register shock in mine, but I could tell by his expression, he saw it anyway.

“Wow,” I finally said softly.  I waited for him to ask me how old I was, but he didn’t, so I decided to offer it up anyway.  “I’m twenty-six.”

“I figured,” he said simply.

“How’s that?”

“Four years in undergrad, plus two for your master’s.  Assuming you started college right after high school and didn’t fall behind at all, you would have to be at least twenty-four.”

I couldn’t fault his logic.

“I was nineteen when I graduated high school,” I said.  “Summer baby.  I also took a year off between my undergraduate degree and master’s program.”

“Is that going to bother you?” he asked, his intense eyes boring into mine again.  “The age difference, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly.  “If we were in a relationship, maybe…”

“What did you like studying in college the most?”

His abrupt change of topic was extremely welcome, but there was still distance in his eyes that wasn’t there before.

“I liked a lot of things,” I said.  “Obviously I had a lot of accounting and finance classes as well as economics…”

“Are those the classes you liked the most?”

“I needed them for my major.”

“What did you take that you liked?”

“Well, the past two years I have mostly focused on the classes I needed for my master’s,” I told him.  “There wasn’t a lot of time for anything extra.  I took a couple of lit classes.”

“Literature?”  Ethan’s eyes brightened again.  “What kind?”

“English and American, also one of German women writers.  Those were all during my undergrad, though.”

“Who is your favorite author?”

“I have a lot of them,” I admitted.  “It’s hard to choose just one.  I love Austen, Bronte, Shelley, Poe, Tolkien, Anne Rice, and Stephen King—lots of different ones.”

“Sweet,” he said, and his smile glowed with the light of the fireplace and the light from his eyes.  “I loved the Lord of the Rings movies.”

“They were all right,” I replied with a shrug.  “I usually hate it when they take a great book and ruin it with a movie though.”

“Ruin it?” Ethan’s eyes widened.  “Those were some of the best movies ever.  I mean, the cave troll alone would have made a great flick!  And you can’t tell me that Orlando Bloom wasn’t the most awesome Legolas there could ever be.”

“And that’s just the sort of thing I’m talking about.  It was a journey about loyalty and friendship, and the movie had to make it a constant bloodbath just to keep teenage boys entertained.”

“That’s an extremely narrow-minded view of film,” Ethan argued.  “Actually, if you look at…”

We had a fantastic dinner and spent the next two hours talking about every book we had ever read.  Though I had a little trouble keeping the seven-year age gap from bothering me, both the food and the conversation had been wonderful.  For someone who had dropped out of college, Ethan had obviously been remarkably well read before he was hurt.  We had similar tastes in authors and had argued half the night about whether or not books should ever be turned into movies.  He made great points in his arguments but not enough to change my mind.  He might have had difficulty reading now, but whatever was wrong with him obviously didn’t affect his intelligence in the slightest.  We laughed, and I was having such a great time, the next thing I knew we were headed back to his BMX bike, and I was agreeing to go back to his apartment with him.

“Yo, dude,” Ethan said into the phone.  “I’m coming home tonight.  Just wanted to warn ya that I’m bringing someone with me.  So, I dunno…take the night off or something?  We’ll be there in about ten…yeah, that’s cool.  See ya in a bit.”

He ended the call and shoved his phone into his jeans pocket.  I tried to figure out just what in the heck I thought I was doing.

 “Your roommate?” I asked, trying not to show the nervousness I was beginning to feel.  My eyes focused on the rings decorating his face and the ink decorating his arm.  I had figured out the tattoo around his arm was a tail of some sort, but I hadn’t mustered up the courage to ask him about it yet.  Ethan seemed great, but I didn’t really know him.  He wasn’t exactly the type Daddy was going to welcome, and that by itself should have been enough for me to call it a night.

“Nah, just the help,” he said, laughing.  “Frazier stays at my place ‘cause I’m not there too much.  I usually stay with Gwen and CeeCee.  I like it better there.  I just didn’t want to scare him or anything.”

“Where do your friends live?”

“Lower West Side,” Ethan said.  He maneuvered the bike away from the wall and held it steady with one hand so I could get on.  Then we were off, and the cool, night breeze tossed my hair around my shoulders.

The area he mentioned was definitely not a nice neighborhood.  My anxiety began to grow, and I wondered where Ethan could live that would make him prefer spending his time in the slums.  I wanted to ask, but I had already agreed to go back to his apartment and didn’t want to hurt his feelings.  At the same time, I knew this was an asinine thing to do.  I hadn’t even told anyone I was going out tonight or whom I was with, and now I was going to this guy’s apartment.

If we were in a car, I’d be considering jumping out about now.

I recalled a narrow escape my friend Zoey had with a guy she met on an online dating app.  She went to his apartment where he became a complete jerk to her after they hooked up.  They were supposed to go out for dinner, but he said he was tired, offered her a yogurt, and then fell asleep.  When she woke him up to say she was leaving, he yelled at her and called her all kinds of filthy names. There was a moment when she thought he wasn’t even going to let her leave.

“Ethan,” I said, and he leaned his head closer to mine as he continued to pedal down the sidewalk.  I saw the entrance to the subway about two blocks away and figured this really was for the best.  “Could you stop a minute, please?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said, and pulled off to the sidewalk’s edge, dismounted and put one hand on my shoulder.  He leaned over and looked at me.  “You okay?  You aren’t motion sick or anything, are you?”

“No, I’m not,” I said.  I slid off the seat and bent down to start untying the shoes.

“What are you doing?” Ethan asked.  He knelt down next to me and placed one hand over the laces to stop my movements.

“This really isn’t a good idea,” I said.  What was I thinking?  Going to some guy’s apartment when I just met him, and no one even knew where I was?  Granted, I felt like I knew him a little now, and I really didn’t think he would hurt me, but he was practically a kid, a college dropout and…and…whatever else he was.  A punk?  A goth?  I had no idea what he was supposed to be called.  It didn’t matter.  I couldn’t be with him.  “I should go home, and I should give you the shoes back…”

“The shoes are yours,” Ethan said.  His eyes darkened and narrowed at me.  “I don’t want them back.  Why do you want to go home?”

“I just…should.”

“I fucked something up, didn’t I?”  He reached behind me and pushed the bike backwards, allowing it to crash-land against the side of the building.  I hoped the package of leftover Alfredo wasn’t spilled.  With a slight thump, he dropped to the sidewalk on his backside and his hands went up into his hair.  “I’m sorry—whatever it was I did.  I didn’t mean to piss you off.”

“You didn’t piss me off,” I tried to assure him.  “This is just…a little weird for me.  I can’t do this.”

“What’s weird?” Ethan asked, his eyes still narrowed.  He released one of his hands from his hair and used it to pull a cigarette out of his shirt pocket.  Lighting it quickly, he took a long drag off of it and then looked back up at me.  He looked so…confused.  “I thought you were having a good time.”

“I did have a good time, Ethan,” I told him.  “I mean, I am having a good time.  It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just…not a good idea.”

“What isn’t?”

“Going back to your apartment with you.”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” Ethan said.  His eyebrows scrunched together as he furrowed his brow.  “I wanted to spend more time with you.  If the restaurant hadn’t been closing, we could have stayed there.  I can ask Alfero.  He might let us stay there for a while longer, but we’ll have to hurry, or he’ll be gone already.”

“No, don’t do that,” I said.  I wanted to sit down, but I couldn’t figure out what to do with myself.  Ethan was sitting on the ground; the bike was in a small pile behind me, and I was in a skirt that was way too tight for sitting next to him.  “I’m a little nervous.”

He looked up at me and tilted his head a little to one side.

“I would never hurt you, Ashlyn.”  Ethan’s eyes were dark and intense.  “Or take advantage of you.  Never.”

“I know you wouldn’t, Ethan,” I said.  I knew in my heart it was true.  “I don’t know if this is the right thing to do.”

“Do you want to spend more time with me?” Ethan stared straight into my eyes.

“Yes,” I said, “but…”

“If you want to, what’s stopping you?”

Images of my father’s face bounced around in my head—every expression from his deep disappointment to his extreme ire made an appearance.  The predictable opinions of some of my friends—Zoey, Presley, even Isaac—echoed through my head.  I was an up-and-coming debutante expected to be the future of the financial business in this city.  It wasn’t just a matter of whether or not I should be in this guy’s apartment.  I shouldn’t even be seen with him.

“It doesn’t really look right…”

“You are worried about how this looks?”  Ethan’s dark eyes glared at me, his head tilted off to one side a bit, and then he looked to the left and the right, down the nearly deserted streets.  “Who’s going to see you?”

He had a point there.  If his friends lived on the Lower West Side, wherever he was taking me was not likely to be a spot frequented by my father’s golf buddies.  Then again, that also meant no one would know where I was or whom I was with.

 “Well, that’s sort of the point.”  I looked away, afraid of insulting him if I expressed my fears.

“You think I might hurt you.”

His words were a statement, not a question.  Though what he said was true, I was also concerned about what people who knew me might think if they saw me with someone like him.  How quickly would that information get back to Presley, or worse yet, my father?

“It’s not exactly that…”

“Yes, it is.”

“I just…don’t really know you.”

“Do you have a friend you can text my name and address to?”

I looked at him and then glanced down to the ground.  I could send Presley his information, but if I did send it, and she thought I was going home with some guy in the most run-down section of town there was, she’d freak and might even send the cops there.

Ethan was still waiting for me to say something, but I had no idea what to say.  Eventually, he got tired of waiting.

“You don’t have any friends you can text?”

“It’s not that,” I said, “I just…well, I wouldn’t know what to say to them.  They’ll tell me I’m an idiot and probably send someone looking for me.”

“Hey, Ashlyn”—Ethan reached out and placed his left hand on my arm—“I don’t want you to be scared.  I don’t know what to say other than what I already said—I’d never hurt you or anyone else, for that matter.  I just want to spend more time with you.”

“I’d like to spend more time with you, too.”  My heart was pounding.  His words were pretty enough, but what else did I expect—a serial killer who says he plans to kill me and chop me up for dinner?

But Ethan hadn’t done anything but be perfectly polite and nice to me.  He’d given no indications that he was dangerous.  In fact, everyone we came across seemed to really like him.  Maybe I was just being paranoid and silly.

“We both agree on that, at least.”  Ethan grinned.  “Why don’t you wait to decide when we get to my place?  I can even tell Frazier to wait if you want.”

 “All right,” I said.  I took a deep breath.  “You are right, and I’m being ridiculous.  Let’s go.”