“That’ll be fine, thanks,” he said mildly, his color gradually returning to normal.
The waitress put a little extra wiggle in her walk as she led us to our table. She was old enough to be Owen’s mother, but he still seemed to have the same effect on her as he had on me. She plunked napkin-wrapped rolls of silverware and laminated menus in front of us with a warm “Here you go,” then got a pad out of her apron pocket and asked, “Now, what can I get you to drink?”
We both asked for water, and I was surprised that she was as friendly to me as she was to Owen. Maybe she was merely enjoying having a good-looking man around without getting possessive about him. I liked her better already.
“You really must eat here all the time,” I teased Owen as soon as she was out of earshot. “You’ve definitely made an impression.” I was rewarded with a slight pinkening of his ears as he kept his eyes focused on his menu. Someday I’d have to catalog his various kinds of blushes and see if there was a correlation to the kind of embarrassment. “Any recommendations?” I asked.
“As I said, everything I’ve tried has been good. I like their burgers. The Greek food’s good. The turkey and stuffing remind me of Thanksgiving at home.”
There was yet another tantalizing mention of home. I was dying to ask more, but I’d have to know more about him to be able to ask him more about himself. From what little I knew of Owen, I had a feeling he’d tell me what he wanted to tell me, regardless of what questions I asked.
I chose to start at a broader level. We could get more personal later in the meal. “There’s a café a lot like this in my hometown, except it’s only open for breakfast and lunch, and the waitresses call you ‘hon’ and ‘shug.’”
“There seems to be a place like this in just about every small town in America,” he replied, his eyes still on his menu.
“Are you from a small town, too?” Now we were getting somewhere.
“I’m not sure where I was born, and I have the vaguest memories of living in a city when I was very young, but I grew up in a tiny old village up the Hudson.”
The part of me that harbored the killer crush gloated at my more rational side as one of the possible barriers between us melted away. I’d thought of us as so radically different that we’d never be able to find common ground, but if he was a small-town boy, then on some level we might have a similar background.
“I imagine your definition of ‘old’ in this part of the world is different from mine,” I said.
“Pre–Revolutionary War,” he said with a nod.
“Yeah, very different. My hometown dates from not much more than a hundred years ago.”
“These days, it’s a suburb of New York, about an hour away by train, but it used to be a farming community. They still have a colonial farm nearby for the tourists.”
“With the land prices around here, you probably can’t afford to farm.” Even as I kept up the small talk, I wanted to bang my head against the table. Did he even know what he was doing when he neatly deflected anything that might become personal, or was it an old habit? Or was he hiding something?
The waitress returned with two glasses of water. She set them down on the table in front of us, then got out her pad and pen once more. “Ready to order?”
Owen nodded toward me. “I’ll have the bacon cheeseburger,” I said.
“You want the full plate with fries and slaw?”
“Yes, please.”
She turned to Owen, who said, “I’ll have the same.”
She noted this in her pad and said, “It’ll be right out.”
I felt like our earlier conversation had lost its momentum, if it ever had any to begin with. While I was still trying to think of another topic, he surprised me by starting one of his own. “You never did tell me how your date with Ethan went, other than that it was nice and that something odd happened. Where did he take you? He said he had something different planned.”
My heart and my head went to war over what this question meant. Was this relationship recon, his attempt to see where my current relationship (if you could call it that) stood so he’d know when or if to make his move? Or was it casual interest because two of his friends were going out together and he was curious how it went?
While the battle raged within me, I decided to just answer instead of analyzing it to death. “He took me to a wine dinner, one of those things where they create courses to go with certain wines from a particular vineyard. It was interesting. The food was good, but I don’t know enough about wine to say much about that.”