We’ve kissed before.
Gentle kisses, rough and urgent kisses, kisses that are intense, kisses that are playful, kisses that seem to last a minute but really steal parts of an hour. We’ve had them all. But this kiss is something more. The first brush of his lips feels like a question. The tip of my tongue against his is the answer. And as the intensity increases along with the emotion behind it, I feel the comfort of this kiss until my chest aches with new awareness of what this man is becoming to me. I slide my hands up around his neck and push up on tiptoes to get closer.
Which is the exact moment my stomach growls loud enough to startle us both.
Kill. Me.
Brody is already chuckling when he pulls back to look at me. I’m eight kinds of mortified, but the joy lighting up his eyes is enough to make my embarrassment worth it.
“Dinner time?” he asks with a grin.
“Absolutely.” I smile back. “What kind of food sounds good?”
His hand slides down my arm until he reaches my fingers. “I know a great pancake place.”
I laugh at the suggestion as he pulls me towards his car.
“Pancakes?” I tease. “Is that gonna be our thing?”
“Well”—he smiles and opens the car door for me—“I know how you love a theme.”
I’m still laughing when he closes it behind me.
Part II: Brody
Landon is still giggling when I close the door on her side and walk around the car to get in. I’m fairly certain I’m grinning like a child, but I passed the point of caring a while ago. It’s not my normal MO—none of this is. In fact, if you told me six months ago that I’d be on a date in an undershirt because I’d burned a three-hundred-dollar button-down doing a flaming shot of cheap flavored liqueur, I would have happily laughed in your face. But then, six months ago, I’d never seen Landon before.
I climb in, put the car into drive, and head towards Swingers. It’s a bit of an institution in LA, and the food is actually great, even if I’ve only ever eaten it when I was drunk in college or soaking up a hangover the next day. A middle of the night trip to a diner isn’t what I had in mind for our date, though. I’ll have to try again to take her somewhere special. There’s an incredible restaurant down in Cabo, and she said she’s never been out the country—though it’s definitely too soon for weekend getaways. Not for other women I’ve dated, but I am constantly reminding myself to move slowly with her. Moving slowly isn’t my MO either. This whole process is an exquisite kind of torture.
Landon is drumming her fingers idly on the armrest between us. Each one is tipped by the same bright-pink polish she had on the very first time I saw her. She’d be shocked if she knew I notice that pink polish—hell, I’m shocked that I notice it. But that’s how it’s been since the very first time I saw her. She was there, I saw her, and then I couldn’t not see her. The very first time—that very first day—she was just a girl in an elevator. But there’s something about Landon: her energy, her enthusiasm for life, her innocence. Even her optimism, which should repel me, somehow manages to pull me in tighter. As jaded and cynical as I am, as much as I told myself I’d never let myself feel this way about someone again, I can’t help it. I’ve been enthralled from the beginning.
She was a disaster that day. Way too overdressed for the office, slowly choking to death on a muffin, too prideful to ask for help. I chuckle at the memory and reach for her dancing fingers. My sweatshirt is entirely too big for her, and she has to shake her hand loose of the material before she can entwine her fingers with mine. I’m not going to lie—I fucking love that she’s wearing something of mine. If I thought she was adorable before—with her gigantic hair and the fact that she’s still reapplying lip gloss even though she’s got a black eye—the sight of her in my sweatshirt just proves I don’t know anything.
I didn’t know that I’d become so aware of her so quickly. I didn’t know that her bright-eyed innocence wouldn’t annoy me at all—that it would actually become a balm to scars I thought I’d buried long ago. I had no idea how refreshing it would be to date someone so opposite me in so many ways. How fun it would be to choose the unexpected, to find joy in something as simple as a well-lit street in the middle of the night. That’s the thing about Landon: she sees things in a different way, and when I’m with her, I see them that way too.
I help her out of the car when we get to the restaurant. As soon as her feet touch the ground, she slides her arm through mine and leans into me. I have to stop myself, like always, from throwing her over my shoulder and driving us right back to my house. Move slowly—that’s my new MO. She grins up at me, and even in the streetlight I can make out the freckles that cover her nose.
Oh yeah, moving slowly is exquisite torture. But I know deep in my gut, in a place I thought someone else had destroyed, that she’s the one I want. So I’ll do anything, including torture myself, to move at her pace and to make sure she understands that.
Because this girl—she’s it for me. She is the answer to a question I didn’t know I had. And so I’ll go as slowly as she needs me to. I’ll eat breakfast in the middle of the night and hang out in dive bars and, apparently, do stupid crap like light myself on fire, if it means I can be the answer for her too.
A waitress hands us menus as we sit down and takes our drink order before hurrying away. Landon reads through it, as happily as if she were at the nicest restaurant in town. Have I ever met someone this joyful? No. I absolutely have not. I feel a deep need to make sure she never loses that.
“What are you going to have?” I ask, reaching out to play with her pink fingers again. I should have better restraint, but it’s been a long night and I’m giving in to the urge to touch her constantly.
“Um . . .” Her big blue eyes smile at me over the top of the menu. “I think I’m going to go with the waffles.”
“Rebel,” I say with a wink.
She puts the menu down on the table.
“Oh, you have no idea.” She winks back. “I’m an unknown variable.”
She smiles at me and takes her cup of coffee from the waitress who’s just appeared at our table. I watch as she adds way too much sugar. I watch as she stirs the coffee once around and then counterclockwise three more times before taking a long sip.
She grins up at me. “Waffles, St. Nick’s, my super-sweet dance moves—I make all sorts of rebellious decisions, Brody Ashton. I’ll change up everything.”
I can’t stop staring at her, with her black eye and golden hair and that irrepressible grin.
All I can think is, God, I hope so.
About the Author
Rachel Hollis founded the LA-based event-planning firm Chic Events at only twenty-one. Six years later Inc. magazine named her one of the Top 30 Entrepreneurs under 30. She went on to turn Chic into the extremely popular lifestyle website TheChicSite.com, where readers log in daily for the tips and tricks she’s acquired after years of planning fancy parties for celebrities. She has designed and produced fabulous events for many of Hollywood’s elite, including Bradley Cooper, Al Gore, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Ivanka Trump, Rashida Jones, Jamie King, Sara Rue, and Cuba Gooding Jr., just to name a few.
Rachel moved to Los Angeles to go to college and promptly met a boy named David, who was as handsome as he was funny. First she made that boy her best friend, and then she made him her husband. Eleven years later they have three equally handsome and hilarious little boys named Jackson, Sawyer, and Ford. They live in LA, where they spend their time doing super cool and sexy things such as going to soccer practice and hitting up any restaurant where kids eat free with the purchase of an adult entrée.
Take this friendship to the next level by hitting up Rachel on any of the websites below. She’s so excited to be an author that she’d probably pee her pants if you actually brought it up on social media!
Twitter: @msrachelhollis
Facebook: /msrachelhollis
Instagram: @msrachelhollis
Pinterest: @msrachelhollis
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