I pick a restaurant with a good salad selection for Anjalee, and I get one too, albeit with a big hunk of salmon on it. It’s surprisingly quiet as we eat, and I realize she doesn’t feel a need to fill every moment with talk.
I like this more than I can say.
Eaten, paid up, and outside the restaurant, I face her. “Figured out what you want to do, or where you want to go?”
It’s early evening, yet. Plenty of day left to enjoy.
She nibbles her lower lip. “I thought of one thing.”
“Hit me with it, beautiful.”
Shit, I shouldn’t call her that—her eyes light up when I do, and a soft, pleased smile crosses her face. That smile is a drug—I’d do anything for my next hit of it.
“A movie. In a real theater, with people.”
I stare at her a moment. “Meaning, you’ve never been to one?”
“Pappa, if there is a movie he wants to watch, or one he knows Mamma and I would like, he has someone come with a special…thing. I do not know. We have a theater in our home. We watch all the latest movies there, at the same time as they are in the theater. So no, I have never been to a theater.”
“That’s your big ask?” I can’t help a smirk. “I tell you we can go anywhere, do just about anything, and you wanna see a movie?”
“Yes.” Shy, embarrassed. She starts walking it back. “I know it is not exciting, but—”
I cup her beautiful face in my hands, and she shuts up, looking up at me with those big dark eyes wide as the whole world and deeper than the ocean, looking at me like there ain’t a single other human in existence. “You wanna see a movie, honey, that’s what we’ll do.”
She wants the normal shit.
I don’t need to buy her diamonds from Tiffany’s or take her to Rodeo and drop a mint. I brought her to the beach, got her a twenty-dollar salad, now a movie…and she’s looking at me like I hung the goddamn moon.
I donotfucking deserve this shit.
Burns at my gut like acid, how much I don’t deserve it. Yet I’m a sick, greedy fuck, so I take it.
I find a nearby theater, and we catch a showing of some sweet, sappy rom-com. I get her popcorn and a soda and candy. She wants to sit close, so her neck is craned up. She takes my hand and won’t let go. She eats her popcorn one-handed, her candy. Sips her soda. Doesn’t let go. Fingers in mine, holding on as tight as she does when I’ve got her on the back of my bike.
I don’t watch the movie, I watch her.
She eats up every single fucking second, eyes wide and glittering in the dark, the silver light bathing her skin. When something sweet and funny happens, she looks at me, grinning fit to burst, like she just wants to make sure I’m sharing the goodness.
I swear, just watching her, some of the black on my soul fades.
Just a little.
What am I doing? What thefuckam I doing? Taking her sweetness and her light, like I have any claim to it. I’m a sick, twisted fuck.
When the movie is over, we walk hand in hand like a normal couple, and she’s chattering away about it. “…When he caught up to her at the end and he kissed her? Oh, Kane! It wassoromantic, do you not agree?”
I grin, I can’t help it—her spark is contagious. “Yeah, babe. Romantic.”
She snorts. “You were not watching.”
“Nope.” Her hair, still in the fancy ‘do from whatever she ran away from, then beach wet and dried, is escaping and tangled around her eyes; I brush a lock away, tuck it behind her ear. “Watchin’ you, darlin’. Enjoyin’ you enjoyin’ the movie.”
She melts. Fuck me, she melts into me. Leans against me, cheek to chest, like I just asked her to marry me or some shit. “Kane, you are too much, do you know?”
“Heard that one before,” I say, snorting, making a derogatory joke out of it, when I know damn well she meant it another way.
“That is not what I meant, and you know it.” Her tone is sharp.
