Never—not once—had Luis ever said something that nice to her. Looking back, she couldn’t remember him paying her compliments before they got married. After that day, everything seemed to go downhill. There were no compliments and very little communication, and mostly, when they talked at all, it was to argue about him spending more time with his friends than with her. Maybe it was cultural, but after the first year, she’d asked him why he’d wanted to marry her if he couldn’t even stay home with her a night or two a week. He’d told her it was because he didn’t like to cook or clean house. In his opinion that was the only reason a man needed a wife anyway. She had judged all men by Luis after that.
She shook off the memory, took the hand Noah offered, and hoped that she had been dead wrong.
Noah slowed his truck down as he passed the house where the new business would be going in. “Looks like Kayla stopped by here on her way to the grocery store. Want to go in and look at the place, maybe invite her to go with us?”
“Are you having second thoughts about our first date?” she joked.
He drove on past the place. “Not a bit, other than that we should have had our first date right after that first kiss when we were teenagers. Our lives might have been different if we had.”
“We are who we are today because of what we’ve been through,” she said. “If we’d had a first date then, we wouldn’t be who we are. Does that make a bit of sense?”
“More than you’ll ever know,” he replied. “Let’s play pretend. We’re teenagers. We’ve had our first kiss, and even though neither of us can drive, we take a picnic lunch out to the backyard and call it a date. We write notes to each other, call on our cell phones when we are apart, and eventually we wind up married. You go to college with me, and I’m drinking every day like my dad did.”
“I don’t like you passing out on the sofa every night, and you don’t like listening to me nag about it. Neither one of us is happy,” she added.
“Point proven. We weren’t right for each other then, like you said. We needed to go through what we have so we could be who we are and fall in love now, right?” he asked.
“L-love?” she stammered.
“If everything goes right, isn’t that the logical end to this first date?” he asked as he turned south toward Sulphur Springs. “It may not be in two weeks, or even in two months or a year, but that’s where we’d like for this to wind up, right?”
“Are you summarizing, like you do in court?” She smiled.
“I haven’t spent time in court in a couple of years,” he answered. “I’m not sure if I could even present ending arguments, but I’ll give it my best shot.” He cleared his throat, took her hand in his, and held it on the console between them. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, today’s question for you to ask yourselves is whether or not two people begin to date so that they will eventually find something in each other that makes them fall in love. I believe that any other reason is simply tagged booty call or friendship. What you must decide is whether Teresa Mendoza and Noah Jackson should or should not go on a second date. The decision is in your hands.”
Teresa’s laughter bounced around the inside of the truck. “You convinced me, but I’ll have to persuade the rest of the jury. I believe that Will won’t be difficult. I admit I’m a little worried about Kayla. She seems a little smitten with Will right now, but I’m afraid she’s still got a bad taste left over from living with Denver.”
“As the elected spokesperson for the jury, you will have to use your powers to convince any of the diehards.”
“They’ll be tough,” she sighed, but he could tell by her expression that she was enjoying this as much as he was. “They’ll throw up all kinds of obstacles, like us living in the same house. What if this doesn’t work out and then things get weird between us? What if one of us falls head over heels in love with the other one, and that one is kind of ho-hum after a couple or three dates?