Chapter 13 Just the Two of Us
Nathan asks me out on a Tuesday.
It's not dramatic. It's not a grand gesture. It happens in a parking lot outside a coffee shop where we ran into each other by accident.
I'm walking out of Green Street Coffee with my usual order when I hear someone say my name. I turn around and Nathan is standing beside a truck that I recognize as Ronnie's. He's wearing a gray shirt and dark jeans and he's holding a coffee of his own.
"Hey," I say. "Are you following me?"
"I was here first. You're following me."
"Fair point."
We stand in the parking lot for a moment. The morning is warm. The coffee shop behind us is full of the usual weekday crowd and through the window I can see the barista making someone's elaborate drink.
"I was going to call you," Nathan says.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Ronnie gave me your number a while back. I've been thinking about using it."
"How long have you been thinking about it?"
"About three weeks."
"Three weeks is a long time to think about making a phone call."
"I wanted to make sure it was the right call to make."
I look at him. Nathan isn't nervous exactly but he's more deliberate than usual. He's choosing his words with the care of someone who knows that what he's about to say matters.
"I was wondering if you'd want to get dinner sometime," he says. "Just the two of us. Not a group thing. Not a cookout or a game night with five other people. Just dinner."
My heart does something fast that I choose not to examine.
"Like a date," I say.
"Yes. Like a date. I wanted to be clear about that so there's no confusion about what I'm asking. I've seen too many situations where people go to dinner and one person thinks it's a date and the other thinks it's casual and then everyone is confused. So to be clear: I'm asking you on a date."
"I appreciate the clarity."
"Is that a yes?"
"That's a yes."
He nods. There's a brief expression on his face that I would call relief if Nathan were the type to show relief openly.
It tells me he was less certain of my answer than his calm exterior suggested.
Nathan Johnson, who won a trivia game solo and eats corn in organized rows and survived four years in the Army and reads books at cookouts, was genuinely nervous about asking me to dinner.
"Friday?" he says.
"Friday works."
"I'll pick you up at seven. Is that too early? If you work late on Fridays I can push it back."
"Seven is perfect."
"I'll pick you up at seven."
"You know where I live?"
"Ronnie told me. Birch Street."
"Ronnie is very generous with my personal information."
"Ronnie is rooting for this."
I laugh. Nathan smiles. We stand in the parking lot for another ten seconds looking at each other and then he gets in Ronnie's truck and drives away and I get in my car and I sit there for a minute holding my coffee and feeling something I haven't felt in a very long time.
Anticipation. Clean, uncomplicated anticipation for something good.
I tell Raina that afternoon.
"He asked you out?"
"In a parking lot. He said he'd been thinking about calling me for three weeks."
"Three weeks. Nathan Johnson spent three weeks gathering intelligence before making his move. That is the most Nathan thing I've ever heard."
"He was very direct about it being a date. He said he wanted to be clear."
"I already like him more than Blake. I liked him more than Blake before this, but now it's not close."
Friday arrives and I spend an unreasonable amount of time getting ready.
I try on four outfits. I do my hair twice.
I put on makeup and take half of it off because too much makeup on a first date with Nathan feels wrong.
Nathan has seen me at cookouts and game nights and in the salon parking lot.
He asked me out looking like I normally look.
I should show up looking like I normally look, just slightly better.
I settle on jeans and a top that Raina once told me was flattering and my good boots. Simple. Put together. Me.
Nathan arrives at seven in a truck that isn't Ronnie's.
It's his own truck, which I've seen parked at Ronnie's apartment but never seen him drive.
It's a dark blue Ford that's older but clean.
He comes to the door and knocks and I open it and he's standing on Dorothy's porch in a button-down shirt and dark jeans and he's clean-shaven and his hair is neatly combed and he looks good.
Really good. The kind of good that makes me briefly forget how to start a sentence.
"Hi," I say.
"Hi. You look nice."
"Thanks. So do you."
He walks me to his truck and opens the passenger door, which I notice without commenting on because pointing out that a man opened a door for you turns a polite gesture into a performance.
"Where are we going?" I ask.
"There's a place called Clarkson's about twenty minutes south. A friend from work recommended it. It's quieter than anything in Pinehurst."
"You chose a restaurant outside of town."
"I thought you might appreciate not running into everyone we know."
"You thought right."
The drive takes twenty minutes. We talk the whole way.
Nathan tells me about his week at work. He does administrative coordination for a logistics company that services military contracts.
It's not exciting work, he says, but it's stable and it uses skills he developed in the Army and he doesn't hate it, which he considers a positive review.
I tell him about the salon. About Cheryl and Mrs. Gallagher and the regulars and the satisfaction of doing something well with my hands every day. He listens carefully, which I'm getting used to but which still surprises me every time.
Clarkson's is a small restaurant in a town I've never visited.
It's the kind of place with cloth napkins and candles on the tables and a menu that's short enough to suggest everything is made fresh.
We get a booth in the back. Nathan sits across from me and opens his menu and studies it with the same focus he brings to everything.
"Do you know what you want?" he asks after about two minutes.
"I'm torn between the chicken and the fish."
"Get the fish. If it's on a short menu it's because they do it well."
"Is that a rule?"
"It's a theory. I've been testing it for about three years. It holds up roughly eighty percent of the time."
"What about the other twenty percent?"
"The other twenty percent is why I always have a backup order ready."
I order the fish. He orders a steak. We talk over bread and water and then over wine and salads and then over our main courses and the conversation doesn't stop or slow down once.
Not because we're trying to fill silence.
Because there's no silence to fill. The topics move naturally, one flowing into the next without anyone steering.
His time in the Army, which he talks about more openly than I expected.
He was stationed at Fort Bragg for most of his service.
He deployed twice. He doesn't talk about the deployments in detail but he mentions the people he served with and the friendships he made and the way the structure of military life gave him a framework that he still uses.
He wakes up early. He keeps his space clean.
He reads voraciously because books were the most portable entertainment available during long stretches of boredom.
Where he grew up: a town called Mercer, about two towns over from Pinehurst. Smaller than Pinehurst, which is saying something.
He and Ronnie met in middle school. They've been friends since they were twelve, which makes their roommate situation less odd and more natural than it looks from the outside.
His family: a mother named Carol who still lives in Mercer and works at the library there.
A brother named Marcus who moved to Colorado three years ago for a job in construction management.
Nathan talks to his mother twice a week and his brother once a month.
His father died when Nathan was fifteen, which he mentions briefly without elaboration. I don't push on it.
I tell him about mine. Raina and how close we are and how she carried me through the worst months of my life without ever making me feel like a burden.
My mother Mariah, who lives in Pinehurst and who knows about Blake and who has been calling me weekly to check in with increasing subtlety.
My father, who lives in another state and who I talk to once a month in conversations that are pleasant and surface-level and have been that way for years.
We talk about books again and this time we go deeper. He recommends a novel he finished recently that he thinks I'd like. I recommend one back. He pulls out his phone and adds mine to a list, which I find endearing in a way that's almost embarrassing.
We talk about the future. Not ours together because it's a first date and that would be insane. The future in general. Where we want to be in five years. What we want our lives to look like. Nathan says he wants stability. A home. Something permanent.
"I've moved around a lot," he says. "The Army does that. You go where they send you and you live where they put you and nothing feels permanent. I'm ready for permanent."
"I was supposed to have permanent," I say. "Blake and I were saving for a house."
Nathan doesn't flinch at Blake's name. He doesn't look uncomfortable. He meets my eyes and nods.
"I know. Ronnie told me some of it. I'm sorry that happened to you."
"I'm past it. Mostly."
"Mostly is honest. I'd be suspicious of anyone who said they were completely past it after a few months."
After dinner he drives me home. The twenty minutes back to Pinehurst go by quickly. He parks in front of Dorothy's house and turns off the engine and we sit in the truck for a moment.
"I had a really good time," I say.
"So did I."
"Would you want to do this again?"
He looks at me. "I've been wanting to do this since the night I asked you if you were okay at The Pint."
"That was months ago."
"I know."
"Nathan, why did you wait so long?"