I wonder if Kirk is ill. He stumbles into Biology with a frantic, sort of nervous look on his face, but I’m afraid to ask. He looks pretty dashing today, in his dark gray wool sweater and jeans. A little unusually dashing, to be honest, in that way high school boys are on school picture day, when they know they should dress a little bit nicer but they aren’t sure exactly quite how.
The lecture today has something to do with water molecules, but neither of us are paying attention…it’s not out of boredom though, and it somehow doesn’t seem appropriate to bring up hangman. His body is unusually still, but I can see in his eyes that his mind is racing underneath.
When the bell rings, I turn to him with concern.
“Hey Kirk, are you okay?”
He stares at me as if in shock. “Yeah, yeah, of course,” he says.
“Good.”
“Hey, Marissa, I, um…”
“Yes?” I stare at him as he freezes, gripping the desk with one hand.
“Do you maybe want to go see a movie this weekend or something?”
My eyes widen a bit as the strangeness of the last hour starts to make sense. Oh my god, he was planning this moment and must have been terrified, poor thing. But wow, Kirk just asked me out. Lovely, funny, handsome Kirk. He wanted me too.
I suddenly remember that Kirk is standing in front of me in mortified terror as he awaits a response. “Yeah,” I smile. “That sounds great.”
We share an excited smile, breathe a sigh of contented relief, and each make our way down separate hallways to our next class.
As I sit in English for the next hour, I twirl my pen in my hands distractedly as the reality of what just occurred sets in. A date with Kirk Atkins. A movie…a relationship?
I wanted it, all of it, that I knew. But the complications…I look over at my friends seated in the row next to me and sigh. They weren’t evil, I mean, they wouldn’t stop me from dating him…but I wasn’t sure they would approve. Kirk and I were from different worlds…
…and worlds colliding had never been much of a peaceful process.
Hm. What to wear?
First dates are tricky. Men will tell you that they barely notice what you wear beyond a certain point, but I’m no fool. The wrong outfit could send the wrong message, and this was a message I needed to get across crystal clear.
I wanted Kirk, and I wanted him to stay.
I only had two pairs of lingerie that I would categorize as being particularly sexy, my red ones from the other night (I was practically swooning at the thought) and a pair of black panties with a matching bra that were much in the same style. They would have to do.
I choose a long-sleeved purple dress, lace with a sharp black collar, and a borderline threatening pair of spiky heels. The dress said romantic picnic, but the heels said fuck me afterwards. Perfect.
I took the elevator down to the lobby of my apartment complex and walked out the door. Kirk would be here in five minutes. I felt good. I felt fancy. I’m not the kind of girl to get her panties in a twist over the fact that she was dating a rich guy, but Kirk was rich. I was about to be picked up in a brand-new Jaguar and taken out to dinner at a restaurant where the bill would probably end up being more than a month of my apartment rent. I wasn’t going to pretend the small town girl in me wasn’t just a little bit smug about it.
Kirk pulls up in his Jaguar, dressed in a blue suit and a different pair of glasses from the red pair he wears at work. I see Mrs. Lee, my neighbor, give me a look as she walks into the door of the apartment building: a look that says, girl, you are lucky and I hope you know it.
“Good Evening,” Kirk says, rolling down the window with an awful attempt at an overly-posh British accent. “Are you possibly available for dinner?
“I might be,” I said, giggling as I opened the passenger door. Classic rock was playing softly through the speakers and the GPS gleamed with the directions to the restaurant. I liked being in this car, feeling at home in it, here, with Kirk. I could get used to this.
Kirk looked almost impossibly handsome and I couldn’t help but stare at him. He looked like the man everyone wanted to be, and that every woman wanted, driving his shiny car down the Seattle streets in his designer suit. I realized why I liked being in his passenger seat so much, and why it elicited such a warm response in me—he was sitting to my left, just like he used to all those years ago.
And he still smiled at me in the same way.
I watched the grungy, neon-accented streets, the old Chinese restaurants, and the mobs of people coming home from work fly past me from out the window. Seattle, to a small-town girl, sometimes felt like a city full of lonely people—a place where everyone you walked past was a stranger. But with Kirk by my side, it really didn’t feel so bad.
Before I knew it, Kirk was turning into a parking garage and helping me out of his car. Standing up, he looked even more handsome than before. His blue suit fitted him perfectly, sculpting the muscles of his body to show them off, but just enough to remain classy. The button-down shirt he wore underneath the blue suit was unbuttoned just enough to tempt me into thinking about unbuttoning it further, to reveal the dark, toned expanse of his chest that I had seen just a few days ago.
Behaving ladylike on this date might prove difficult…
Kirk took my hand and my heart leaped at the contact. We turned down a series of streets in one of Seattle’s nicest districts, passing by five-star restaurants and stores that sold purses the price of tuition for a semester at my college, their mannequins challenging me with their bizarre, giraffe-like elegance. A small, insecure part of me was panicking, terrified that Kirk would bring me to a restaurant where I would have no idea how to pronounce a thing on the menu.
Surprisingly though, we turned a corner to find a small, hidden street, one that looked out of place among the skyscrapers looming nearby. Small shops were hidden among trees struggling to survive on the city sidewalks, and pigeons crowded in corners, pecking for crumbs. I turned to Kirk, and he smiled.
“I’m taking you to my favorite place in the whole city,” he said, squeezing my hand, and he led me towards the end of the street, to a small place hidden in a corner covered by a weathered green awning spelling out TIM’S in white letters that were peeling off. It looked like an old-fashioned Italian restaurant, but I wasn’t quite sure.
“Huh,” I said, studying the place. “This is…”
“I know it doesn’t look like much,” Kirk said, holding the door for me and taking my coat as we went inside. “But it belongs to an old friend of my dad’s, and I promise you it’s like nowhere else you’ve ever been.”
“Your dad’s friend…Tim?”
Kirk laughed. “Not the best restaurant name, I know, but just trust me on this.”
I shrugged and followed Kirk inside to find a place that looked like a strange combination of a very nerdy teenager’s bedroom, a movie theatre, and a restaurant. The walls were covered in movie posters, action figures, and memorabilia, but most of them were behind glass in display cases, not hung around haphazardly to cover the walls like in some restaurants. A large movie screen with an old-fashioned projector sat in the corner, playing an old Hedy Lamarr film, and a dozen or so small tables filled the interior, which was about as big as your average Seattle frozen yogurt joint. It was charming, bizarre, and exactly the kind of unpredictable and unforgettable place where Kirk Atkins would take a girl.
“Is this okay?” Kirk asked, taking in my wide eyes.
I laughed. “I kind of love it.”
“I thought you would.”
“Kirk!” comes a voice from the kitchen in the back, and a tall Asian man wearing a t-shirt and a tie with Super Mario Brothers style mushrooms and stars runs up to Kirk, and they hug and laugh like old friends.
“Tim,” Kirk says, “This is my girlfriend, Marissa Hayes.”
“Lovely to meet you,” Tim says, shaking my hand enthusiastically. He radiates energy, almost like a kid, and I wonder if he’s found the secret to happiness—surrounding himself with fun at work every day in a place like this. “Sit down, please.”
We get a table near the back, where we can still see the movie screen but the sound is low enough that we can hear each other comfortably. Tim comes up to us with menus, and he’s beaming at the two of us with pride.
“Kirk’s the best guy I know,” Tim said. “You hold onto him, okay? I’ve known him since before he could walk, and he’s good inside and out.”
“I know,” I say, smiling at Kirk. “He really is.”
“You must be a special girl if Kirk likes you,” Tim said. “He’s notoriously picky.”
Kirk laughed. “Not so much picky as unlucky in love,” he said, and looked down at the floor.
“Well not anymore!” Tim said, laughing, and left us to look at the menus.
“He seems like a cool guy,” I said.
“Yeah,” Kirk said. “My dad was sick for a while when I was growing up, and my Mom had to work all the time, so he would step in to take me to basketball practice and stuff. He’s kind of like an uncle to me.”
“That’s awesome,” I said, touched that Kirk would take me to a place that was obviously very special to him. “And was he the one who got you into…I motioned at a large hanging Death Star positioned in front of an old Batman poster — “all this?”
Kirk laughed. “Yes. That would be my origin story.”
I looked down at the menu and found I couldn’t pin down the food as any particular type…it seemed to just serve whatever Tim felt like serving that week, and all of the food items were embellished with pop-culture themed names. There was everything from breakfast food to sushi to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I was instantly charmed.
“On the house,” Tim said, and placed a bottle of red wine on the table. We thanked him and placed our order—the Wonder Woman Waffle Platter for Kirk and the Ghostbusters Gnocchi for me. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so happy, or so at home. Here I was with a gorgeous guy, on a first date, and I was genuinely having an amazingly fun and surprisingly relaxed time. I took out my phone and took a picture of us settled at the table, surrounded by the old movie posters and knickknacks.
Our food came and was insanely delicious, and we settled in to watch the movie as we ate. I was falling in love with this restaurant already. Watching the black and white flicker of a 1940’s film in the background somehow made the whole date feel even more romantic. My skirt felt fuller as I moved, my lipstick felt darker…I felt like I could dance across the room and then swoon into Kirk’s arms.
The movie faded off the screen and Kirk and I have finished our food, but we stay, Tim occasionally giving us a smile from the kitchen in the back. We make our way through the bottle of wine as the rest of the patrons make their way home, and we talk like we haven’t since we young. We catch up on the stories we’d missed, reminiscing about the past…only the good parts.
“Remember our first date?” I ask Kirk. “Our other first date?”
We laugh together, remembering our adolescent awkwardness. “I wasn’t nearly as smooth back then,” he says, and I smile, remembering how sweet Kirk was in those days…and how sweet he still was now.
We’re both surprised when Tim hands Kirk the keys and instructs him to lock up when we’re done…it’s already midnight, and we didn’t even notice.
“You kids have fun,” Tim says, wishing us goodnight as he tries to close a jammed drawer. He hits it again with his knee and it slams shut. “Second time’s the charm, I guess,” he says, and makes his way out.
“I guess it is,” Kirk says, and we smile.