Page 3 of The First Kind of Love
Is this real life? Did she just…give me acompliment? My brain is short-circuiting, and there’s no saying if my whole body will experience a total-program shutdown as well.
I pantomime my best mask of confidence, hoping that she can’t hear the loud bellowing of my heart. “Oh. Um, thank you very much. Honestly, I’m glad the stress of the season is over, but I know my team’s disappointed with the outcome.”
Shiloh just nods, as if it’s the most relatable thing in the world.
Dude, compliment her back! She doesn’t want to hear you talking about yourself.
“I really like your…eyes?”
Good job, Fulton. That almost sounded normal.
She bristles a bit, clearly caught off guard. “Oh?—”
“Yeah, they’re not too dark. They’re the perfect shade of brown, you know? Some people’s eyes are the color of chocolate. Some people’s eyes are almost black. Some people’s eyes are poop brown, and that’s…uh…unfortunate. For them. But you don’t have poop eyes! You have pretty brown eyes that are way too light to be poop colored.”
Kill. Me. Now.
Why, Fulton, would you say the dreaded P-word to the girl that you’ve had a crush on for four years? Are you trying to ruin your chance with her? (Not that you really had one in the first place.)
I want the floor to open up underneath me and swallow mewhole. I donotwant to be alive to revisit this interaction when I’m lying in bed tonight. Insomnia’s already bad enough—I don’t need my mind replaying “Fulton’s Greatest Hits.”
I’m expecting Shiloh to cringe in disgust or pity or whatever the hell is going on in her head right now, but instead, she breaks into a flurry of giggles, her small shoulders shaking with each harmonious chuckle. “Thank you. I guess I wouldn’t want to have poop-colored eyes.”
That laugh…God, I’m so fucked.
I’m not sure what changes, but for a fleeting moment, confidence rallies inside me, and some deep, dark, depraved—and deprived—part of me needs to hear the sound of her laugh for as long as I can, because just remembering it won’t do it justice.
With nothing to lose—except my dignity—I place one of my hands on the counter, start to feel it slide from an accumulation of sweat, and then quickly catch myself before tripping over my feet. “Shiloh, will you…” I start rockily.
Her eyes go cartoonishly wide, and maybe it’s because I’m barely riding a whisper, but she eagerly leans in to listen to me.
There’s a din of noise all around me, like how a forest of trees screams after being enveloped by the licking flames of a raging wildfire. This borrowed confidence isn’t going to last long, and neither will the state of my pathetic, loose-limbed body.
A lot of things can happen when I drop the big question—I shower her workspace in chunks of undigested food, I hightail it out of the door and accidentally knock over some elderly lady in doing so, or I decide last-minute not to invite her and slug back to Gage with my tail between my legs—so I take it as a win when a string of unintelligible gibberish comes out of my mouth instead.
“Willyoubemyplus-onetomyfriend’swedding?”
I think Shiloh takes a moment to decode whatever it is I just said, and when she finally does, another smile is waiting for me—one that I haven’t seen before, and one that I hope she’ll grace me with during our three-week-long adventure.
“It’s, uh, a destination wedding. We would be traveling for it,” I clarify.
“Let me see if the shop can run without me for a bit.”
2
DISASTER STRIKES
SHILOH
No matter how much I clean my workstation, the prospect of being someone’s plus-one to a wedding looms over my head like a rather intimidating venture. Fulton Cazzarelli isn’t your average caffeine addict. He isn’t some freakishly attractive stranger you only ever see once in a blue moon. He’s Riverside’s local celebrity, and the man I’ve secretly been crushing on ever since he fumbled over his coffee order and asked for a dairy-free macchiato instead of a dairy-free cappuccino.
I’m not a big personality. I don’t command the attention of every room I walk into. I prefer to stay in the shadows where I can people watch from a safe distance and avoid socially straining situations. I’m just shy, I guess. Quiet. And I don’t mind being invisible. But never in a million years would I haveeverimagined that a world-renowned NHL player would askmeon a date. Or is it a date? I don’t even know. Maybe it’s a friendly furlough? Some kind of last-minute my-initial-date-abandoned-me-and-you’re-the-backup? I mean, that alternative seems more believable than him reciprocating my unspoken feelings.
When he was standing in front of me, asking me to be his plus-one and looking like a heavenly angel, I wasn’t even really considering the logistics of this whole agreement. I was too distracted by the way strands of his hair fell effortlessly into his espresso-colored eyes, how his bone structure was hewn to utter perfection by God’s very own chisel (yet he still has some baby fat on his cheeks), how his ears turned the slightest bit pink when he tripped over his words. Hell, I was all sweaty and nervous and my heart was skittering like some startled barn cat against the shelter of my ribs.
Why didn’t you just say yes, Shiloh? This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for you!TheFulton Cazzarelli asked you to be his plus-one. You should’ve hung up your apron right then and there. Who knows if Mr. Right will come along again.
Well, there’s always the possibility that Fulton’s a serial killer moonlighting as a hockey player, and you would’ve been found limbless and stuffed in a suitcase somewhere off the coast of the Bahamas if you said yes.
