Chapter 10 Adrian
Chapter ten
Adrian
Iarrived fourteen minutes early.
The restaurant was six blocks from my hotel. I could have walked. Instead, I sat in my rental car for eight of those fourteen minutes, watching condensation crawl down the inside of the windshield, while wondering when I’d become the kind of person who showed up early to things.
The Thai place was called Siam Palace, though the “P” had fallen off the sign and nobody had bothered to fix it. The awning sagged, and decades of cooking oil had fogged the windows. A handwritten sign taped to the door read: CASH ONLY. NO EXCEPTIONS. NO ARGUING.
I loved it immediately.
Inside, the decor was what I’d call aggressive authenticity—mismatched chairs, plastic tablecloths printed with faded roses, and a small altar in the corner with incense burning in front of a golden Buddha.
The woman at the register looked up when I walked in, assessed me with a single glance, and pointed to a booth in the back.
“You’re meeting the hockey boy?”
I blinked. “How did you—”
“He called ahead. Said look for tall, serious, probably frowning. Told me to seat you facing the door because you’d want to see the whole room.” She shrugged. “He tips well.”
I sat where she pointed. She was right—I did want to see the whole room.
This is a date, I reminded myself. An actual date. With a person you’ve already slept with. Stop acting like you’ve never done this before.
It was an accurate thought, but I hadn’t done it in years.
Theo and I fell into each other sideways—documentary subject to something more, with no clear line between before and after.
We’d never had a first date. We’d had a first interview, a first kiss during editing, and a first morning where I woke up in his bed.
This was different. It was deliberate. Pickle texted me an address and a time, adding: Wear something that can survive Pad Thai sauce. I’m a messy eater. Fair warning.
The door opened at 7:02.
Pickle slid into the booth across from me, shrugging off his jacket. “I knew you’d be early. You have early energy. Very responsible.”
“I was not early. I was on time.”
“The menu’s already warm from your hands.”
I looked down. He was right. I’d been holding it since I sat down.
“Stalker math,” Pickle said cheerfully. “Menu temperature plus condensation patterns on your water glass. I’d estimate…” He squinted at me. “Six or seven minutes?”
“That’s not real math.”
“It’s absolutely real math. It’s a science. I’m a pioneer. The Galileo of restaurant-based surveillance.”
The woman from the register appeared with two waters and a basket of prawn crackers neither of us ordered. She set them down without comment and disappeared.
“Mrs. Prasert loves me,” Pickle explained, already reaching for a cracker.
“I helped her grandson with a school project last year. He had to interview someone about their job, and none of the other Storm guys would do it, so I showed up in his classroom in full gear. Skates and everything. Nearly broke my ankle on the tile floor, but the kid got an A.”
I tried to imagine it—Pickle in an elementary school classroom, helmet on, stick in hand, probably terrifying half the children and delighting the other half.
“You wore skates. Indoors. To an elementary school.”
“Commitment to the part.” He crunched a cracker. “Also, I didn’t think it through. Classic Pickle move. Act first, consider consequences never.”
I set the menu down between us.
“I should warn you,” Pickle said, “I’m bad at dates.
Like, historically terrible. I talk too much and order the wrong thing.
I once knocked an entire plate of spaghetti into someone’s lap because I was waving my hands about—I don’t even remember what.
Penguins? Something about penguin mating rituals. It was a weird night.”
“Penguin mating rituals?”
“They give each other pebbles. As gifts. Isn’t that romantic?” He shrugged. “The guy didn’t agree. He drives a snowplow.”
“His loss.”
A grin flickered on Pickle’s face. “Anyway. Fair warning. I’ll probably say something weird. Or knock something over. Or—”
“I’m rusty, too,” I said. “I haven’t done this in a while. The last person I dated—it didn’t end well.”
Pickle watched me. The manic energy dimmed, replaced by something quieter. Attentive.
“How long?” he asked.
“Five years.”
An eyebrow rose. “Five years?”
“Give or take.”
Pickle leaned back against the booth and exhaled. “That’s a long time to be alone.”
“I’ve not been alone. I had work. Projects.” I picked up the menu.
“The Pad Thai,” I said. “You recommended it.”
Pickle accepted the deflection. I watched him decide to let it go and file it away for later, giving me room to breathe.
“The Pad Thai is transcendent,” he said. “Life-changing. Religious experience territory. The drunken noodles are also—” He kissed his fingers. “Mrs. Prasert puts crack in them. That’s the only explanation.”
“Crack?”
“Metaphorical crack. Flavor crack. The good kind.”
We ordered. Pad Thai for me, drunken noodles for him, spring rolls to share because Pickle insisted they were a moral imperative.
The food came fast, and for a while, we just ate. Pickle was right about the food. It was obscenely good.
“You have sauce on your chin,” Pickle said.
“So do you.”
“Yeah, but I warned you. I’m a disaster. You’re supposed to be the composed one.”
I wiped my chin with a napkin. He smiled at me again—a specific grin that seemed to generate its own light source. Under the table, his knee bumped mine.
Pickle set his fork down. “Can I ask you something?”
“That depends on what it is.”
“The guy. The one from five years ago.” He picked the fork up and twirled noodles on it, not quite looking at me. “What happened?”
I thought about Theo’s kitchen. The overhead light. The smell of cigarette smoke and cedar.
“I held on too tight,” I said. “And not tight enough. At the same time.”
Pickle paused in his twirling.
“He said I loved him like I was already losing him. Like I was bracing for the end before we’d really started.
” It was a full-bore confession. Maybe because Pickle wasn’t pushing.
Maybe because his knee was still warm against mine.
“He was right. I did that. I kept waiting for him to leave, and eventually—”
“He left.”
“Yeah.”
The restaurant hummed around us—Mrs. Prasert’s quiet Lao speech drifted from the kitchen.
“I do that too,” Pickle said quietly. “The bracing thing. I convince myself people are going to figure out I’m too much, so I try to be… less. Or more. I don’t know. It gets confusing.”
“Are you bracing now?”
“No.” He met my eyes. “I’m not.”
“I like this,” I said. “You. Like this.”
Pickle’s cheeks flushed. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Under the table, he reached out for my knee. Not grabbing—just resting there. A point of contact.
“I like you like this, too,” he said. “For the record. In case it wasn’t obvious.”
We finished eating. Split the check despite Pickle’s protests. Walked out into the cold together, shoulders brushing as we navigated the narrow doorway.
The street was quiet. A few cars swept past, their headlights cutting through the dark. Somewhere down the block, a dog barked once and fell silent.
“I should go home,” Pickle said. “Practice tomorrow. Coach will know if I stayed out late—he has this creepy sixth sense about sleep schedules.”
“I’ll walk you.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I know.”
We walked. Six blocks stretched into ten because Pickle kept finding reasons to detour—pointing out the bakery where Evan got his cookie supplies, and the corner where Jake had once serenaded Evan with an acoustic guitar at 2 a.m. He pointed out a bench where Hog sometimes sat and knitted.
By the time we reached Pickle’s building, my hands were numb, and I didn’t care.
“This is me,” he said, stopping at the green awning.
Pickle turned to face me. The streetlight shone against his cheekbones.
“Thanks for dinner,” he said. “Even though I chose the place, and I know you judged the hygiene standards.”
“I didn’t—”
“You looked at the kitchen door three times.”
Pickle laughed, and then he kissed me.
Not quick this time. Not casual. He touched the back of my neck with his cold fingers and pulled me in. I reached out for his hips beneath his open jacket.
He tasted like chili and lime. His teeth caught my lower lip, and I whimpered slightly. He smiled against my mouth.
“I’ve been thinking about that all night,” he said, not quite pulling back. His breath was warm on my lips. “You sitting across from me with sauce on your chin, looking at me like—” He stopped. Swallowed.
“Like what?”
“Like I was the most interesting thing to look at.”
I kissed him again. Harder this time. My fingers dug into his hips, and I pressed him back against the brick wall of his building. He grunted, and then his soft moan sent heat flooding through my chest.
“You are,” I said against his jaw. “You’re—”
He grabbed the front of my jacket and kissed me before I could finish. Messy and passionate. His hips pressed forward against mine.
“Come upstairs,” he breathed.
I wanted to. God, I wanted to. But—
“You have practice.”
“I don’t care about practice.”
“You do.” I pulled back just far enough to see his face. His lips were swollen. His eyes were dark. He looked wrecked and beautiful. “And Coach has that creepy sixth sense, remember?”
Pickle groaned. “I hate that you’re responsible.”
“One of us has to be.”
“That’s—” He kissed me again, quick and fierce. “That’s annoyingly mature of you.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Promise?”
It was an important question.
“Promise.”
He extracted himself from my grip reluctantly, walking backward toward his door, unwilling to look away. His hand fumbled for the handle behind him.
“Goodnight, Adrian.”
“Goodnight, Pickle.”