He turns around. “Good night, Annie.” And then he walks away.
I close the door and lean back against it. The sound of rolling dice comes from the dining room, then Dungeon Master Rick saying something about the party entering a tavern.
I sigh and cover my face with my hands, even though no one is around to see me blush. You know how in every romantic comedy, there’s a scene where the love interests almost kiss? They’re so close, their faces mere inches apart, their bodies practically radiating heat, when some precocious child or rude elderly woman interrupts them and they spring apart?
Well, sub in Uncle Don for a child or old woman and you’ve pretty much got what happened in my room.
I thought Drew Danforth was nothing more than an irritating jerk, but maybe I was misreading the signs. Maybe this entire time, we’ve been bantering and I didn’t even notice. Maybe this is an enemies-to-lovers situation, and we’ve been gradually building sexual tension that will have no choice but to explode in a scene so explicit that it would change the movie of my life from a PG to a hard R rating.
Chloe might be right. I might actually, finally, be in my romantic comedy.
Chapter Thirteen
I stay up late into the night working on my screenplay. Writing is often like plugging in one word after another, willing them to make some sort of sense, but this is different. My fingers attack the keyboard, and words appear on the screen before I even notice I wrote them.
I drift off to a dreamless sleep, then wake up before my alarm goes off (which is very, very early). Drew was in here, I think to myself as I get ready. He saw my room.
Despite Chloe’s reassurances, and despite the fact that Drew and I didn’t even kiss—I mean, I’m pretty sure no one would qualify “getting coffee with one man and then having a sexually charged conversation with another man before falling over” as morally dubious behavior—it’s still weird for me. Carter and I aren’t dating, per se, so much as we are People Who Have Been on One Date in Which Barry Was Present. What do we owe each other at this point? I haven’t dated enough to know, and romantic comedies didn’t prepare me for this. In movies, usually one guy is comically terrible—he’s cheating on the heroine at his bachelor party or using her connections to get a job. It’s easy for us to yell at the screen, “JUST DUMP HIS SORRY, TWO-TIMING ASS!”
But it turns out real life isn’t like that. Yes, I have strong and confusing feelings for Drew, but a) he’s leaving town soon and b) doesn’t everyone? And perhaps Carter’s presence doesn’t cause my breath to quicken or my brain to scramble, but I don’t know him that well yet. Maybe what we need is another date.
Maybe what we need is a kiss.
Luckily for me, Carter and I have a date scheduled for the night after my weird bedroom conversation with Drew. Carter seems like an old-fashioned guy, but I’m pretty sure even he would agree that a second date is a perfectly acceptable moment for a first kiss. And maybe, probably, when we do kiss, it will be so good, so intense, that I’ll know instantly that he’s the one for me.
That’s how it often works in the movies, right? In The Wedding Singer, Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler don’t understand their true feelings for each other until they have to pretend-kiss in front of her best friend under the guise of Drew practicing for her upcoming wedding. But when that kiss is over, they just stare at each other, entranced. It turns out their true love was there all along, like some sort of virus that’s only transmitted via saliva.
I intend to find out the secrets contained in Carter’s saliva tonight.
He suggests an Italian restaurant in German Village. I don’t know if he’s actually a fan of Italian food or if he’s trying to avoid the sort of situation that happened last time when we were at Nick’s, but whatever it is, I’m happy to be going out with him. Not just because of my aforementioned kiss plan, but also because it’s nice to have a distraction from the weird Drew situation yesterday, which makes me feel altogether unsettled whenever I think of it.