Page 2 of The Boardroom: Kirk
Chapter 2-Kirk
She’s really smart. I am ashamed at how much this surprises me—but that’s the stereotype for pretty, popular girls like her—they always make the grade, but not from intelligence or work—just their natural ability to float through life without a care.
I am amazed at her focus, and at her respect for me. I smile as she punches buttons into the graphing calculator as if it were second-nature to her. We’ve been lab partners in Biology for only a week, and I’m already getting the dangerous notion that we could become friends.
I have an affection for the Breakfast Club-esqe kind of thrill I get talking to her every day during fifth period…unwrapping who she is. I revel in the tiny details. The cute way she squints into the microscope, the places where she’s doodled on her converse, the discovery that she’s had a crush on Han Solo since she was kid. She’s a little bit extraordinary, and it’s my favorite secret.
That’s all it is.
I should really stop taking advice from Cassidy.
Cassidy, my suave, devil-may-care coworker, a man with a deep voice and British accent that makes girls watch him from across rooms, is clearly not the kind of guy to understand my current dating situation, or lack-thereof.
I’m sitting at a sushi bar near the Space Needle with a girl I met on a dating app Cassidy had raved about. She was just as cute as she was in her photos—a petite blonde in a little black dress, and she was kind and polite. She had said nothing in the past half hour to remotely offend me.
Butgod,was this woman dull.
My date tonight, another lawyer named Amanda, has done two things during the course of our date—stare absentmindedly into space like she’d rather be anywhere but here, and talk about a problem she had last week with her washing machine.
I try to change the subject to anything else—does she travel? What movies does she like? What bands? Does she have a pet? Siblings? —to no avail. Amanda possessed the extraordinary power of taking anything even remotely interesting and somehow morphing it into a dialogue about the most mundane details of her life.
I didn’t know how I could spend another hour with this woman, much less the rest of my life. I had pulled another hopeless romantic Kirk mind-twist with this date, and within seconds of arranging it I had already imagined a life with Amanda, one filled with dogs and board game nights and really great sex. And, as usual, that dream had a shorter shelf-life than these tuna rolls.
“Should we ask for the check?” Amanda asked, and I nodded. As bad as bad dates were, the awkwardness ofendinga bad date could be even worse.
Amanda and I sat there, exchanging tiny, forced, smiles from time to time, and I already couldn’t wait to be at home in bed. I shouldn’t be complaining…Amanda was far from my worst date. There was the girl on the weird avocado diet, the girl who kept bringing up the fact that I was black, the skinny girl who yelled at waiters…Amanda was fine. She was pleasant, and she was pretty. But,damn,was I bored out of my mind. I didn’t know how much longer I could go on like this…going on blind internet dates that were at best extremely dull. I wanted to meet a woman who I clicked with, whose every move fascinated me, one who made me feel like I was walking on air. Like the way…
Never mind.
