Page 184 of The Bet
“And they’ve accepted me,” she said, smiling for the first time in a long, long time. Her smile reached inside him, filling him with her obvious joy.
“You must have dazzled them with your brains.”
“I dazzled them with something, but something tells me this was your doing.”
He looked at her, not giving anything away but feeling good that he had done something that would help her.
“Thanks,” she said, unable to stop smiling. She looked happy, and because she was happy, it made him happy.
They stood looking at one another, but smiling, for a change. It had been the longest time since they had exchanged a smile, and a look like that.
It didn’t seem as if they were strangers, and it didn’t seem as if they had fallen out, because their recent communication had given them a new springboard to launch from. Things felt not-so-odd, this time. She’d grown her hair longer, and it suited her, her bangs framing her face like that.
“Had any good veggie food lately?” she asked.
“Not lately. But… “ He cleared his throat. “I heard about a new place opening on a few blocks from here.”
“Oh, what place?”
“I can’t remember what it’s called,” he confessed.
“Hmm.”
“If you ever want to try it, you should go.”
“But you don’t remember what it’s called,” she pointed out.
“It’s uh—Benito, or Venito or something like that.” He scratched the side of his face, trying to remember, but the name wouldn’t come to mind.
“I’m kind of hungry now.”
Her admission caught him by surprise. “You are?” It seemed the obvious question, and yet he had to think twice before he asked it. “We could try it out now, if you want.” He held his breath.
“Now?”
“You said you were hungry.”
And that was how it had started. A lunch, and conversation, and getting to know one another all over again.
Nothing like the old days, but good.
Good enough.
A week later, another lunch date, followed by dinner a few days after that. Nothing like the old days, though. The conversation was always light, always.
One weekend, they took Jacob to the park. As Jacob raced around on his scooter, Xavier thanked her, for letting him come with them.
“I thought about what you said,” she told him, “And I want to believe you. This is me believing you, so don’t ever deceive me again.”
“Never,” he’d told her.
A few days later they somehow ended up holding hands while he walked her back to her apartment, and Cara looked at him as if he’d won a trophy.
And then a week later, a kiss. Not the sizzling making out sessions of before, but slower, cautious, measured moves, but Izzy Laronde had a way of giving him a hard on that most girls gave him being fully naked. She could do that with something as simple as a kiss.
“I wanted to believe you, and now I do,” she’d said. “I remember how you wouldn’t let me touch you, and I found it odd.”
“It’s true,” he told her. “All of it. I didn’t want to go too far with you not knowing. I wanted us to start with a clean slate. But everything we did, came from here.” He’d held her entwined hand to his heart.
And after that, the kissing progressed rapidly and reached scorched earth levels at warp speed.
So when, one night, as they sat in the car and kissed, and she asked him what had happened to the weekend in The Hamptons, he had to ask her a couple of times if she was sure she still wanted to go.
Because he wasn’t sure what she was asking, and he didn’t want to risk taking anything for granted.
“I’m willing for us to have a second chance,” she’d said.
