Page 41 of Such Sharp Teeth

A flight of stairs leads up to a loft space.

I spin around to give the place another look-over. He’s got plants. They’re alive. Thriving, even.

It’s nice. Too nice.

I wasn’t expecting it to be this nice.

I don’t know what I was expecting.

He’s not concerned with me and what I’m doing. He’s cooking something. He’s got a pot of water on the stove. I come over and sit at the kitchen table. He takes out a glass, fills it with ice, then sets it down in front of me, along with a can of root beer. We both love root beer. It’s our soda of choice.

“Thank you,” I say.

And that’s it, nothing else, nothing cute or clever, because my brain seems to have been swapped with a blobfish.

He nods and goes back to cooking.

Music plays, but I don’t know when it started or how. In my nervous fidgeting, I push my hair behind my ears and accidentally graze my neck. The mark is still there. It feels hard now, like it scabbed over. I hope it’s not noticeable. If it is, I hope he doesn’t ask me about it.

“I sort of figured if you ever agreed to go out with me, it’d be like this,” he says, sprinkling some salt into the pot.

“Like what?” I ask, my voice weak and squeaky.

He raises his eyebrows.

“I don’t know. I don’t go on dates,” I say. I’m being tragically uncool. It’s kind of amazing how uncool I’m being, considering I’m actually pretty fucking cool. “I don’t do this. Dates. Not then. Not now. Not ever, really.”

He looks at me. There’s no judgment. I don’t think. He might be curious. Or maybe concerned?

“It’s not weird,” I say.

“I didn’t say it was. I don’t think it is.”

“It’s not something I’m interested in,” I say. “Sitting across from a stranger and having to make small talk. ‘What do you do?’ ‘Oh, what do you do?’ Mortifying. Not how I want to spend my time.”

“What do you do again?”

I roll my eyes.

“I’m not a stranger,” he says.

“I know. I know you’re not.”

“I don’t have any expectations,” he says, taking a Tupperware container full of meatballs out of the fridge. “It’s cool that you’re in town and we get to hang out again.”

He scoops some meatballs into another pot, then adds a fistful of spaghetti to the boiling water.

“Bullshit you don’t have expectations,” I say. “You’re trying to Lady and the Tramp some spaghetti with me.”

He shakes his head. “Would never.”

He’s true to his word. We eat on opposite sides of the table, off different plates. I choke down some spaghetti even though all I really want are the meatballs.

He tells me about his house, about how it was built in 1898, that it used to be a bank, but eventually the bank closed, and it sat vacant for years. They were going to knock it down, so he bought it, and then he and his dad fixed it up. He tells me there’re a vault and some old lockboxes in the basement. He offers to show me later.

“I’m actually more interested in what’s upstairs,” I say, my true self cutting through my nerves for the first time all evening.

He doesn’t blink. He’s unflappable. “Okay.”