As much as I want to spend every waking second of every day with her, I don’t want to push her away. I don’t want to lose her. I’ve done that before. I’ve loved someone so intensely it scared them, it pushed them away.
I refuse to do that to her.
So we’ll take things slow, one deliciously enjoyable day at a time, and see what happens.
30
Aidy
Twenty-two.
The number of times I’ve had sex with Ace since our first official date.
Eighteen.
The number of times I’ve stayed the night at his house since our first official date, so basically every other night.
Seven.
The number of real dates we’ve been now. Real, get-all-dolled-up, dinner and a night on the town type of dates. Hand holding. Door holding. The works.
Three.
The number of times I’ve caught myself daydreaming about a future with this man, which is completely ridiculous because I’ve never been one to fantasize about the ring and the dress and the house and being tied to one man for the rest of my life.
One hundred.
The likelihood that I’m one hundred percent obsessed with Alessio ‘Ace’ Amato.
I ring his doorbell on a Friday night, takeout in hand. We have five more episodes of season three of our old West ghost show to watch, and we’ve had this Friday night in planned for a couple of weeks now.
Ace answers with a towel wrapped around his waist and a smile in his eyes. God forbid he smiles with his mouth once in a while.
“Hey,” he says, opening the door and leaning in to steal a kiss.
I think he’s my boyfriend now.
But I don’t know for sure.
We’ve been on several dates now. We screw like rabbits. And he doesn’t seem to get annoyed when I respond to all of his text messages within seconds because I’m too impatient to play games with him.
He knows I like him.
I tell him all the time, dropping hints every chance I get and doing sweet little things that I know he appreciates, like not complaining when he wants to watch some stupid action movie and trying really, really hard to learn more about baseball because despite the fact that he pretends like he’s over it, I know the love of the game is still there.
Plus I told him all about Wren’s surprise pregnancy and how the wedding got moved up, and he didn’t even flinch when I asked if he’d be my date to Wren and Chauncey’s friends-and-family reception at Luciana’s on Fifth.
Anyway, Ace does plenty of sweet things for me. He’s sent me flowers a few times, always a different arrangement, never predictable. And he bought me a toothbrush to keep at his place. I even have my own drawer in his dresser, and I keep some extra clothes and pajamas in there despite the fact that whenever I sleep over, pajamas are pretty much out of the equation. Just last week, Ace bought my favorite organic cinnamon toothpaste because his mint paste makes me gag.
And he tells me he likes me too.
But it’s always just that.
“I like you, Aidy,” he usually says. “You’re different.”
I try not to think about his love for the girl from the notebook compared to his lust for me. For all intents and purposes, maybe he didn’t write those things after all. It is possible that I’m wrong. And it is possible that I’m reading too much into things. A few nights ago, we were lying in bed, and I almost brought up the journal again. It was on the tip of my tongue. And then I breathed in his mossy scent and kissed his full lips as he buried his fingers in my hair, and I remembered how happy I was and how magical this whole thing is, and I didn’t want to throw it away all over something he’d probably deny anyway.
The day Ace tells me he loves me, if he tells me he loves me, I’ll die and go straight to Heaven, like one of those cartoon characters lying on the ground with a bouquet of flowers in their hands as their ghostly spirit rises high above them.
“What’d you bring?” he asks, his hand on the small of my back as we head upstairs.
“Your favorite,” I say. “Corned beef and cabbage pizza from Chauncey’s.”
“God, I love you,” he says, his hands sinking into my hips as he leans in and kisses the spot just beside my left ear.