CHAPTER ELEVEN
Dessert and Ice Cream
Our dinner was cold by the time we got back to the kitchen. I was wearing his T-shirt and my underwear. He was bare-chested, his low-slung jeans revealing the deep V of his well-toned obliques. It was really hard to think about food, but when he leaned over to kiss me we both heard my stomach announce its displeasure with my neglect. We decided not to take time heating anything up and took it out to the back patio. It was a lovely spring night. The lights of the busy city twinkled below us. We floated above it all.
Out on the patio, we ate in candlelit silence, until my nervousness resurfaced and drove me to speak. “So . . .” I began.
“So,” he repeated, teasing me with his eyes. He took a bite of chicken.
“That happened.” I was thankful for the candlelight so he couldn’t see my cheeks turn red.
“I know. I was there.” I was ready for it to happen again. Soon. We’d reached a new level in our relationship now that sex was officially on the table. It was like unwrapping a shiny new toy on Christmas. Weren’t you supposed to play with it?
“You’re not going to make me sign an NDA are you?”
He laughed that deep-throated laugh I adored. “The time for that would have been before we slept together.”
“Ah. Well, it’s your problem, then. You missed the window.” I skimmed the rim of my wine glass with a languid finger, marveling at the way the candle flame made it sparkle.
He dropped his fork and reached across the small table to take my other hand. His expression transformed from playful to pensive. “Kate, I should have told you this before but . . .” He stopped, took a breath, shook his head. “I’m in love with you.”
The response came out before I could think about it. “I love you too.”
He squeezed my hand and let go. “You should also know this isn’t a regular thing for me.”
“Which part?” I asked.
He sat back in his chair. “Any of it.”
I’d tried to question him weeks ago about his dating history during one of our late-night make-out sessions on my couch. I wanted to know as much as the rest of the world, except I had a legitimate reason for asking. He said he didn’t like to talk about it and I never brought up the subject again. He had me at a disadvantage, since he knew all about Adam, but I didn’t want to push it. A good journalist knows when to apply pressure on a subject and when to back off. The strategy had worked, it seemed. Now I was being rewarded with unprompted revelations.
“I mean, I’m not celibate,” he continued. “I sleep with women. But I don’t bring them home. And it usually doesn’t go past a few dates. Then you came along. So unexpected. I never thought I’d feel this way about anyone, Kate.”
The sound of my name on his lips was such a turn on. I wanted to hear him cry it out as we ravaged each other again. Through the fog of lust I registered he was still talking and fought to regain my concentration.
“Most people, girls especially, they only see the guy up on the screen. They’re drawn to fame or money or some manufactured persona that isn’t real. You saw me. Even before we met. I’m used to criticism, but for some reason, what you wrote about me really hit home. It was the word ‘trapped,’ I think. You nailed how I felt.”
I silently scolded myself for objectifying him while he was opening his heart, but I couldn’t help it. His emotional honesty was kind of hot. “Do you still feel that way?” I asked. “Trapped?”
“Not so much anymore,” he said, his lips pursed, the beginning of a smile.
Later, as we were cleaning up the dishes in the kitchen, he faced me again with the same candid expression. “There’s something else I have to confess,” he said. There was a long pause as I awaited for some major revelation. Then he changed course, like a storm bearing down on a city only to swerve away at the last minute. “I completely dropped the ball on dessert. I was so focused on dinner — and let’s face it, what I hoped would happen after dinner — I forgot all about it.”
“That’s okay,” I said, slipping two fingers into the loose waistband of his jeans. “I’m sure we can come up with something.”
“Ice cream!” he exclaimed. It was the first time I’d ever gotten that reaction to putting my hand down someone’s pants. “I think I have some ice cream.”
I kissed his neck as he struggled to focus on dessert. He squirmed away. “Kate, it’s very important to me this dinner go well. I’ve already made you eat cold chicken. The least I can do is provide a decent dessert.”
“I have to confess something too.” I put my hands on his chest and leaned up on my tiptoes, my voice a breath in his ear. “I’m not here for the food.”
His body responded immediately to my words. I had his full attention. “No?” he said.
“I have something else in mind.” I placed kisses on his neck, his chin, his cheeks, his nose.
“Do you now?” The look he gave me could have sold a million magazines.
“Mmm-hmm.”
“I think I’m going to let you bring dessert from now on.”
After we’d had our fill of “dessert” we lounged on Nick’s living room rug with bowls of ice cream. It was drugstore brand French vanilla, nothing fancy, but it might have been the best ice cream I’d ever tasted. The sight of Nick licking the spoon made me eager for round three.
“Look at us,” I said. “Eating ice cream in the afterglow. Like one of those cheesy couples in a romantic movie. Wait. I think you did do this in a movie once.”
“You remember that? Wow.” The light was faint, but I thought I saw his cheeks redden.
“Of course. The Midnight Heart, right?” It was a small independent film that came out right after The Carriage House. He played an emotionally stunted heart surgeon who falls in love with a doomed manic pixie dream girl. It was a sweet, quirky romance, if a little hackneyed. I missed it in the theater, a lot of people did, but I found it on Netflix one night when I was bored. This was right after I’d broken up with Adam and it was a nice distraction.
“We had to eat so much ice cream for that scene,” Nick recalled. “It kept melting, so they gave us a new bowl every take.”
“Don’t they make it out of lard or mashed potatoes or something?”
“Only if you’re not going to eat it. Otherwise they give you the real stuff. Or as real as it gets when your co-star doesn’t eat dairy or gluten. I thought I’d never eat ice cream again.”
“And yet here you are, living the cliché.”
“So what if it’s cliché?” he said. His voice was content and sleepy. I didn’t think we were heading for round three anytime soon. “I mean, I like the other stuff too, don’t get me wrong, but this is . . . nice.”
I frowned. “Nice?” After tonight my world would never be the same, but to him it was just “nice.”
“Don’t knock it. Nice is good. Nice is great. I could use a lot more nice in my life.” He spooned the last of his ice cream into his mouth. I wanted to taste the sweet coldness on his tongue.
I felt like changing the subject, so I asked, “Do you enjoy what you do?”
He put his empty bowl on the floor. “Are you still interviewing me?” He said it lightly, with a hint of amusement, though I sensed an underlying tension.
“Sorry, occupational hazard. I can’t turn off my curiosity.”
He twisted in my lap to face the ceiling, as if the words he was looking for might have been written up there. I chased the last melty droplets of vanilla around my bowl, then deposited it on the floor next to his. After a while, he said, “Do you remember on our first date, when I said you love movies but hate Hollywood?”
“Of course. You had me figured out pretty early on.”
“Well, that’s how I feel too.” His hands were folded on his chest but he couldn’t help gesturing with them when he talked. “I love acting. I like that I get to be someone else for a while. Being on a set, being with the crew and a good director, having co-stars who are there for you, there’s nothing else like it. And then, if everything goes right, people go to the theater and see the work you’ve done and they’re transported somewhere else. I know it sounds corny, but it’s a little bit magic.”
“I like corny,” I said. And even that was corny, but I didn’t care.
His smile was gentle, less dazzling than I knew it could be, but warmer. “Plus, I have no other marketable skills. So I don’t think I could do anything else.”
“I don’t know. I think you’d make a pretty good salesman. With your looks you could sell snow to an Eskimo.”
“That’s basically my job already. Probably the part I hate most. You know, other than the lack of privacy, the backstabbing, the pressure, the long hours. Let’s say top five.” He tilted his head back to look at me.
“It’s actually kind of funny. If it weren’t for us both having to do something we hate we might never have met.”
“I dunno,” he said, mulling it over. “I like to think we’d have found each other anyway.”
I placed a kiss on his forehead. “Is it worth it? To get to do the work you love?”
He was quiet for a while. I could feel him slipping down into the dark place he went to sometimes. This was the most intimate he’d ever been with me, so I didn’t want to interrupt or seem impatient. I let him be in the moment.
After a long pause he said, “Not always.” I waited for him to say more, but nothing else came.