“I never should have said anything about the French fry,” I said, rubbing her shoulder now with my palm.
She snorted, and it was a self-deprecating sound. Lifting her fingers from her face and raising her head, she composed herself. “You know what? It’s fine. It’s just a French fry. I can handle it. I’m not going to be a big baby about a French fry,” she said and reached across the table to my plate to grab a fry. She bit into it as if to prove she could do it. Then she finished it, and held her arms out wide.
“There. Did it,” she said, clearly mocking the momentousness of eating something that had once been far too tempting.
“And it didn’t even bite back,” I said, and she laughed, then looked at me.
“Thank you,” she said softly. “For not mocking me.”
“For being human? Never,” I said, then turned serious again. “How long were you bulimic?”
“Through most of high school. I never told anyone, but Anaka figured it out, and was pretty supportive. She even took me to a support group, and that helped me to really deal with it. It was never about food. It was always about control, and I felt so out of control starting in high school when my dad’s company went under and my college fund went kaput. So, controlling food felt like the only thing I could manage. But then I stopped, and I was pretty good until I relapsed my second year of college.”
“What happened that made you relapse?”
She squeezed her eyes shut momentarily and her face flushed for the first time. I’d never seen her ashamed before, and it made me want to hold her close.
“I was going out with this guy, and the whole relationship was so distracting that my grades suffered. When I saw my progress report, I wanted to die. We broke up pretty quickly, but it just felt like everything was unraveling and I fell off the wagon for a week or so. Anaka, once again, was the one who helped me. I wouldn’t have been able to change without her,” she said softly. She stared at the jukebox, and her jaw twitched, then seemed to harden as she turned her focus back to me. “But then I got it all sorted out, and I’ve been fine ever since.”
The last words came out too quickly, too crisply. I knew there was something more to it. Something she was afraid of sharing, but Jess wasn’t prone to oversharing, and I sensed she’d somehow reached her limit for the afternoon. I took her cue and shifted gears too.
“You know, Jess, I’m a pretty good cook. I can make salads, and pasta with vegetables, and eggs without the yolk,” I said, since I was starting to figure out she wanted someone to understand and respect her food choices, not push pizza and ice cream on her if she didn’t want it.
She arched an eyebrow. “Now you’re just talking dirty to me when you use words like eggs, hold the yolk.”
There we were, back to the jokes, our familiar territory. “I knew the way to your heart was through healthy food. You’re so California.”
She held up a hand and shook her head. “Did I say it was the way to my heart? I believe I said talking dirty, which means it’s the way to my–” she dropped her voice lower “–pants.”
A small groan escaped my lips. I bent my head to her neck, pressing a light kiss near her earlobe, then whispered, “Lettuce. Grapefruit. Whole wheat bread.”
She inhaled and moaned quietly, as if I were turning her on with my food talk. Naturally, I had to continue. Even if she was playing pretend, she was so damn sexy when her eyes floated closed and her lips parted.
“Broccoli. Carrot sticks,” I said in a low, growly tone. She ran a hand across her thigh as if I were driving her wild. “Yogurt.”
She turned to me, grabbed a fistful of my T-shirt and tugged me close. “Now, you’re just turning me on way too much.”
She might have been teasing, but I wasn’t. Not one bit and I had the hard-on to prove it. This was getting to be the usual state around her. “Jess, believe me when I say there’s nothing I’d rather do than turn you on,” I said.
This time, when her breath caught, it seemed for real. No more pretending. “You do,” she said quietly, but she quickly returned to safer ground. “Will you tail Keats and Wordsworth as well as you tailed me?”
“No. I’ll do a much better job.”
“You didn’t do a good job tailing me?” she asked as she speared a pineapple chunk.
“I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to get to know you. I noticed you the second you walked into J.P.’s office that first day.”
She held her fork in the air. She didn’t bring it to her mouth. She didn’t put it down. It just hovered in her hand. “From the first day?”
“Of course. You were coming through the same door.”
“That’s the only reason I noticed you, too. It had nothing to do with your fantastic ass,” she said, then wiggled the fork with the pineapple chunk in my direction. “You know you want this pineapple, don’t you?”
“Oh, I’m dying for it. Bring it here,” I said, and held my mouth open. She fed me the pineapple, and I smacked my lips, declaring it delicious. I was no shrink, but I had a hunch she needed to return to her way of controlling her world, and if that was by giving me a piece of fruit, I’d let her do that. “Now, tell me more about how much you wanted me the second you laid eyes on me.”
She threw her head back and laughed and it felt good to both comfort her and to make her laugh. Hell, it felt good to spend time with her. So good, in fact, that it occurred to me how much I’d miss her if the State Department sent me packing in less than two months. In a few short days, she’d somehow become one more thing I found immensely appealing about America. The thought should have scared me that I liked her this much already. But it didn’t. Instead, it made me even more certain that I needed to find a way to stay.