her voice. “Sorry,” she said. “Did I startle you?”
“Yeah, a little.” He looked at her, and while his stomach stayed tight, he no longer wanted to go home alone. He still had way too much to do to take on a girlfriend, but perhaps the two of them wouldn’t want to see each other after this anyway.
When his eyes met hers, Hunter knew he’d want to see her again. We can go slow, he thought. He probably should go slow with Molly anyway, because he couldn’t make lifelong decisions based on what he’d known about this person over a decade ago.
“What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?” she asked.
“Butter pecan.” His throat caught on the last syllable, and he cleared the stickiness away. “Yours?”
“I’m a traditionalist,” she said with a pretty smile. “Chocolate.”
He nodded and indicated her steps. “Should we go?” He started down the steps, and she came with him. He went to her side of the truck and opened the passenger door for her. She climbed up and in, and Hunter couldn’t help noticing the skin-tight jeans she wore, along with that lovely blouse that brought out the red in her hair.
“You look really nice,” he said, leaning into the doorway and smiling at her.
“Thank you, Hunter.” She tucked her hair, and Hunter wondered if he needed to sleep for the next few weeks. Once he got things figured out at work, he’d have more time for Molly, and if he could give up sleeping, he could start a relationship now and do everything else.
He nodded, tapped the door, and stepped back to close it. Once behind the wheel, he aimed the truck toward the grocery store. His mind ran with things to say or ask, but he couldn’t seem to grasp onto one for long enough to speak.
“Did you like MIT?” she asked.
He glanced over at her. How did he sum up six years of school? “Yes,” he said. He supposed that would do. “What did you end up doing?”
“I stayed here,” she said, looking out her window at the neighborhood. “Got my teaching degree. What did you major in?”
“Bioinformatics,” he said.
“What?”
No one had ever heard of bioinformatics before, and Hunter gave her a small smile. “It’s a branch of computer science that extends into some biology subjects, as well as some business systems.”
“I have no idea what that means.” She laughed, and the mood in the truck lightened.
“It means I use computer science and information to understand biology.”
“That doesn’t help.”
Hunter smiled, but he didn’t want to explain what he’d learned over the past six years. It was hard to distill down into one sentence. “We aim to answer questions about biology—about genetics, DNA, proteins, that kind of stuff—with patterns and sequences we can see in the data.”
“Sounds complicated.”
“It is,” he said. “I have a master’s degree, and it was six years of highly technical mathematics, biology, genetics, and computer science classes.”
“So no analyzing novels.”
Hunter chuckled and shook his head. “No, ma’am.”
“I teach seven-year-olds about weather and how to add and subtract.”
Hunter glanced at her. “Maybe one of your students will make a break-through in science one day.”
Molly just looked at him, and Hunter’s awkwardness grew. They reached the grocery store, and as they walked in, he asked, “Do you just have the one cat?”
“I have a dog too,” she said. “He’s really sweet. You’d like him.” She stepped closer to him as someone started to back out of their parking space. He reached over and grabbed onto her arm to tug her further out of the way.
“Whoa,” he called, and the car slammed on the brakes.
His heart skipped with her skin touching his, and Hunter quickly dropped her arm once she was out of danger. His fingers tingled, and he wasn’t sure what that meant.
“How big is this dog?” he asked. “I have rules about that.”
“Rules?”
They reached the entrance, and the doors slid open. Hunter wanted to take her hand in his again, and he started stewing about how to do that without being too grabby and too obvious. He felt like he hadn’t had to work this hard to impress a woman in a long time, but he also wasn’t worried about what a woman might know about him from before.
With other women, there was no before. There was just right now, and the date, and he didn’t have to reveal anything he didn’t want to.
Molly knew more about him than anyone besides his family members, and Hunter wondered if this was a good idea.