Chris felt pleased with himself the morning after his date with Martina as he went through his routine: shower, coffee, getting dressed, and planning his day.
True, the date had not ended in sex, but he’d been pretty sure it wouldn’t, so that was fine. He could wait. The kisses had been exceptional, so he was betting the sex—if it happened—would be worth waiting for.
And it wasn’t just the promise of exceptional sex that interested him. He enjoyed talking to her, even if they were talking about something trivial, something that, were he talking to anyone else, would be boring or tedious. Just listening to her voice was enough.
He found himself wanting to tell her things he didn’t want to tell anyone else.
Case in point, the lost virginity story.
He could see, in retrospect, it probably hadn’t been a good idea to share that particular anecdote with her. When they finally had sex—if they had sex—she’d be wondering whether he was running through a sequence of coding in his brain. (Which, in fairness, he might actually do if he was worried he wouldn’t last long enough.)
He wasn’t as smooth with women as some guys were, but he knew a woman didn’t want to have to compete with a complex algorithm while she was in the throes of passion.
Still, it hadn’t seemed to put her off. The way she’d kissed him just before she’d left made him optimistic and, frankly, happy. He hadn’t felt simply happy in a long time.
He wanted to call her, and he didn’t want to wait—he wanted to hear her voice now. But even with his problematic social skills, he knew better than to do that. He would have to wait at least long enough to convince her he had a modicum of self-control.
He needed to call someone, though, so he called Will.
It was still early, but Will had a young daughter who tended to wake him at the crack of dawn. And this was well past dawn. Surely, Will would be up.
“Chris. How’d it go?” The sound of some cartoon on TV—Chris thought he heard SpongeBob—offered a background to Will’s greeting.
“Really well. I wanted to thank you for getting Jackson to send me the recipes. Martina liked the food. The mushroom caps especially.”
“No problem. But I can’t believe you actually cooked.” Will chuckled. “It’s like Thurston Howell the Third making his own coconut cream pie—it just doesn’t happen.”
“Well, it happened this time.” Chris was unperturbed by Will’s Thurston Howell comparison. “And it was very good … um … pie. Metaphorically.”
Will hesitated. “If somebody ate somebody else’s pie, I don’t know if I—”
“We kissed. That’s all. Then she thanked me for dinner and went home. It was nice. It was better than nice.” Chris found himself grinning like an idiot, and he thought it was probably better Will wasn’t here to witness it. Though Will could probably hear the grin over the phone.
“Nice is good,” Will said. “Better than nice is very good.”
“Yes.” After a moment, Chris added, “Though, I’m wondering if maybe I shouldn’t have told her about how I got the idea for PlayDate.” Will had heard the story before, and surely he would understand the full implication of what Chris was saying.
“You told her that story?”
“I did.”
“But you didn’t tell her the entire circumstance, the whole when and where and—”
“Actually, I did.” Will’s reaction—that surely Chris hadn’t been fool enough to do such a thing—made him wonder if it really hadn’t been such a good idea.
“Oh. Wow.”
Will was too kind to say the word asshole, but it was clear he was thinking it.
“This could get to be an issue if Martina and I take things to the next level,” Chris admitted.
“You think?”
Well, there was only one thing to do. Chris would have to make sure when the time came, Martina was entirely too busy, and too immersed in pleasure, to have any thoughts at all.
He looked forward to meeting the challenge.
“Fun fact,” Martina said at breakfast the morning after her date. “Did you know Chris came up with the idea for PlayDate during sex?”
She, Sofia, and Benny were at the kitchen table with their various breakfast items: Pop-Tarts for Benny, cold cereal for Sofia, and homemade granola with Greek yogurt for Martina.
Benny had been raising a Pop-Tart to her mouth, and the toaster pastry froze in midair. “Wait. What?”
“Not only that,” Martina continued, trying to sound casual. “It was while he was losing his virginity.”
Sofia let out a rude laugh. “Oh, my God. That’s …”
“I know,” Martina said.
She was probably violating Chris’s privacy by saying anything to anyone else about it, but she told her sisters everything. Besides, it wasn’t as though either of them would ever tell Chris they knew.
“I can’t imagine why he told you that,” Sofia said. “Usually a guy is so worried about whether you’ll think he’s a good lover that he edits those kinds of stories. My God, I would.”
“But it’s kind of cute, right? That he told me, I mean.” Martina considered it. “It’s cute he wasn’t worried about how he’d look or what I’d think, he just told me a true thing. He made himself vulnerable.”
Benny rolled her eyes. “There’s that word.”
“What word?” Martina said.
“Vulnerable. Usually you only hear it from therapists and self-help books. And women talking about their crap relationships.”
Martina had to conceded the point, except she wasn’t talking about a crap relationship—she was talking about a potentially promising one.
“Well, anyway,” she went on, “it’s sweet, right? Kind of?”
“Yeah,” Sofia said, “unless he’s thinking about his taxes while he’s in bed with you.”
“On the other hand,” Benny said thoughtfully, “if he’s thinking about his taxes, it might give him a little extra endurance, if you know what I mean.”
“Unless he’s turned on sexually by his taxes,” Sofia added. “Which, with a guy like him, is not entirely out of the question.”
“So, when are you going to see him again?” Benny asked.
“I don’t know. We didn’t say.”
She was going to have to see him again for his kitchen remodel, obviously. But she wanted to see him sooner than that, and more often. That worried her a little. She liked her independence, and in her experience, when you started to feel like you wanted to see someone soon and often, independence was the first thing to go.