He looks a little sad when he talks about giving up the kittens.
“I couldn’t do it,” I say. “I would get attached and keep them.”
He shrugs. “It sucks, but someone has to do it. Besides, I get a new foster animal once the kittens are gone.”
The waitress appears at the table with our food, knocking over the stack of creamer and jelly as she sets the plates down. She touches his shoulder again and encourages him to let her know if he needsanything.I can’t help but notice that she doesn’t seem to have the same concern for my needs. He responds with a frown and, “Sure,” and then we both dig in.
“Did you always know you wanted to be a meteorologist?” he asks after clearing most of his plate.
I take a bite of toast while I think about my answer. “I’ve always been fascinated by the weather. And I loved watching the weatherman on TV when I was a kid. I probably talked about the weather more than most kids my age at school.”
That was something that Luca often made fun of me for in his letters. I had never considered that it was something I could turn into a career until Luca mockingly suggested that’s what I was going to study when I got to college. I find it ironic that he was trying to make fun of me, and instead ended up helping me make one of the best decisions of my life.
“I think that’s awesome that you always knew what you wanted to do,” he says. “I didn’t figure it out until I was twenty-two.”
“Really? What did you do until then?”
He rips a packet of sugar open and stirs it into his coffee. His blue eyes meet mine for a moment before he returns his attention to his coffee. “I guess you could say I was sort of a police officer.”
“Sort of? What does that mean? Were you a security guard?”
He smiles, telling me all I need to know.
“Oh my God. You were a mall cop, weren’t you?” I laugh, because I can’t imagine him with a job like that. “Did you ride around on a Segway yelling at kids in the food court?”
“That about sums it up,” he says. “It wasn’t exactly my dream career.”
“Why did you choose marine biology?”
“Other than basically closing my eyes and blindly picking from a list of majors? I’ve always loved animals. And I loved going to SeaWorld as a kid. I guess it never occurred to me that I could actually work with dolphins every day.”
I watch him for a moment, wondering what the catch is. This man can’t possibly be this perfect. Fosters kittens, heals sick dolphins, and has a body built like a Greek god? He has to be married, or maybe he has a crazy ex-wife. Or maybe he lost his penis in a terrible accident as a child. Maybe a whale at SeaWorld jumped out of the water and bit it off. But that wouldn’t make sense with his current career choice. Unless he chose this path as a twisted long-term plan to get revenge on the whales.
“I guess we both chose our childhood passions,” I say. “Why did you come to Miami? It couldn’t have been for the beaches.”
He smirks. “My family was out here. I wanted to be closer to them.”
Ugh. And he’s close with his family, too? I want to tell him to stop being so perfect. He’s making me look bad, especially since moving to Miami took me far away from my parents and cousins.
“What are your flaws?” I ask before I can stop myself. “Nobody’s that perfect. You’re either making amends for something, or you’re just trying to impress me.”
His smile falters. “You want to know what my flaws are?”
I raise an eyebrow.
“Okay.” He lowers his voice. “I’ll tell you.”
I lean a little closer to hear him better. I notice the stubble on his face, and my eyes are drawn to his lips again. I wonder what it would be like to kiss him, how that stubble would feel against my face. When I look at him again, I notice that his eyes are on my mouth too. He meets my eyes, and I feel a rush of warmth come over me. His lips part, and somehow the rest of the world gets a little quieter, and all I can hear is my own heartbeat as I wait to hear what he’s going to say. I wonder if he can hear it too.
He continues in a whisper: “I’m told that I’m a very noisy neighbor.”
I can’t help but laugh, releasing a breath I didn’t know I was holding. “You are. And I still want to know how you manage to make so much noise up there.”
“I really don’t know what you’re talking about. Maybe it’s the kittens. They like to run around the apartment.”
“Two little kittens can’t possibly make that much noise.”
“You’d be surprised,” he says.
