“Don’t worry, Mrs. Parker. I will bring Brooke home on time,” Darren smiled at my mom while I slipped into my three inch heels. It looked good on my light pink dress which had a thin golden belt around my waist. It ended a little above my knees. I had left my hair in its usual wavy locks and had applied minimal makeup.
“Good. Have fun you two!” My mom squealed, more excited about me going on my first date, than I was myself.
I gave her a tight lipped smile.
Darren got here an hour ago. My mom left no stone unturned to interrogate the hell out of Darren. She was quite shocked when she heard that I was going on a date. After the interrogation, she clicked a few dozen pictures of us, despite me whining about us getting late.
And now we were finally free.
Darren opened his car door for me and I threw him a smile before getting in. He jogged around the car and opened the driver’s door before getting in.
“Where are we going?” I asked as I saw him grin at me.
“The Grand Paradise,” He said, before starting up the car.
“A dinner date. Cool.”
The Grand Paradise was a fine dine restaurant, just a fifteen minutes drive away from my house.
“So Brooke, tell me about yourself,” Darren said, glancing at me from the corner of his eyes.
“What’s there to know? about me?” I asked, looking out the window.
“What’s there to not know about you?” He countered. “Let’s start with the simple things. Like your favourites,” He suggested.
“Okay. My favourite song is by Attention by Charlie Puth. My favourite band is One Direction. Five Seconds of Summer are cool too but I’m more of a Directioner. I don’t like Harry Potter, Twilight is my favourite. I like vanilla flavour. My brother and mom always fight with me about which is the best flavour. For me, it’s vanilla, my mom likes chocolate, Ryan likes strawberry. I love Nutella, who doesn’t? I-”
“I don’t,” Darren said, cutting me off.
“What?”
“I don’t like Nutella.”
“Are you serious?” I asked, eyeing him incredulously.
“No, I’m Darren. And I don’t like Sirius Black, the dude’s creepy.”
I just gave him a blank stare. “Who is Sirius Black?” I asked, scrunching my brows up in confusion. “Who would have that sort of a name?”
“He’s in Harry Potter,” He said, shaking his head at me. “You wouldn’t know.”
“Oh,” I said. I only watched the first movie of the series and I didn’t like it. So I didn’t watch it’s subsequent parts.
“Now continue.”
“Right. My favourite book is The Fault in our Stars by John Green. My favourite movie series is The Lord Of The Rings.”
“It’s also my little sister’s favourite. I find it a bit lame though.”
I gasped, covering my mouth with my hands, “It’s not lame!”
“Hey, that was just my personal opinion. Don’t kill me.”
“Okay, so what about you? Tell me about yourself now.”
~
“This place is pretty good,” I commented, eyeing the interior of the restaurant. It was a bit crowded for my liking, though it was quite spacious. The restaurant’s interior was done up in a combination of gold, white and cream colours which gave it a sophisticated feel.
“Yeah, it is,” He said. “I have reserved a table outside, near the garden.”
“Oh,” Well, at least we wouldn’t be sitting inside the crowded restaurant with all that talking and smell of food being cooked, not that I didn’t like it, but it was just too much.
Darren called a waiter and told him about the reservation while I looked around the place. I had only being here for a few times to celebrate my mom’s birthday, to celebrate Ryan making it into the football team and other such occasions.
The waiter led us out to our table.
“Why did you choose it out here?” I wondered out loud. There weren’t many tables here. Just another table at the corner of the garden and another laid exactly behind ours, a bit away from our table.
“I like a bit of privacy on my dates. It doesn’t distract me from my date. And it would be a shame to get distracted from someone as beautiful as you,” He said, leaning towards me as he placed a soft kiss on my cheek. My eyes widened at the contact and my cheeks began to redden.
“You look cute when you blush,” He said, chucking to himself but it didn’t make me blush deeper. Instead, I remembered Brian. He had said the same thing to me and I had blushed deeper. But it was not the same in this case.
I sighed.
You’re not supposed to think about? Brian? on your date with Darren!
I scolded myself internally.
“Something wrong?” Darren asked, eyeing me curiously.
“No,” I said, putting on a smile.
Darren pulled out a seat for me and I thanked him. He was such a gentleman.
He sat opposite me and called out for a waiter. A waiter in a black and white uniform with a red tie came up to us with the menu.
“What do you want to eat?” Darren asked as I skimmed through the menu. “How about something Italian? You should really try out their Italian recipes. They’re really good.”
“Okay. What Italian dish should we have? I think you’ve been here before.”
“Yeah… with a blind date. But you should try out their Italian pasta varieties. My favourite is? Filatieddi-”
“Fill-a-teddy what?” I asked, scrunching up my eyebrows. It was not the first time I was trying an Italian dish, but the names confused me.
“Filatieddi. We should also try? Fusilli-”
“Fuse-a-lily what?” I asked again.
“Fusilli,” He repeated.
“Okay. I don’t know what to order. Do it for me please. But it should be at least edible.”
Darren rolled his eyes, “Of course.”
He turned to the waiter and ordered… something. I didn’t know what he ordered for me but I hoped it would be good. Knowing Darren, he wouldn’t go wrong with food. He always had a passion for cooking. He would often cook up a food haven in his kitchen and let us have the pleasure of tasting his invention. Most of them were good, but others were… let’s just say not friendly with my stomach.
“We should also try? Acquacotta. It’s a broth-based hot Italian soup that was originally a peasant food. Historically, it’s primary ingredients were water, stale bread, onion, tomato and olive oil, along with various vegetables and leftover foods that may have been available.”
I just stared at him, “Are you Wikipedia? Because all that information just went over my head,” I said as I grabbed my glass of water and chugged it down.
He chuckled a bit, “Sorry. I just couldn’t resist myself. I love food so much so that I’m thinking of becoming a chef.”
“Really? Wow. I’m sure you’ll be a great chef,” I said, leaning forward in interest.
“Yeah. What about you?”
I shrugged, “For now, I don’t know what to do other than taking in oxygen, converting it into carbon dioxide and releasing it.”
Darren chuckled.
Soon enough the waiter brought our food. He served us and left.
I picked up my spoon and fork and eyed the dish in front of me.
“It looks and smells good,” I commented. Yeah, I sniffed it like a dog and was pretty embarrassed when I caught Darren staring at me with amused eyes.
“It tastes even better,” He said.
“Well then, let’s start I guess,” I said before digging into whatever the name of the dish was, I forgot. One of the dish sounded like paper-deal and the other one sounded like camp-a-nail. Whatever, as long as I was eating and actually liking it, names didn’t matter.
And it certainly was delicious.
Darren and I talked about a lot of things during our date. We went through topics on family (I didn’t tell him about my dad though and thankfully he didn’t broach the subject), friends, life and other random things.
I was actually having fun on my date with Darren. And I really liked him. But of course, not in the way it was supposed to be. I liked him like a guy best friend. One I could trust things with, no matter how personal it would be.
And he was funny. He told me about the pranks he played on his little sister and how she would react. It made me laugh out loud.
Darren really deserved a girl as good as him. Apparently, I was not good enough for him. The guilt of what I was showing and what I actually felt for him was eating my insides. Being with him, I was just hurting everybody around me. And I was being selfish by being with him. I should let him go because he didn’t deserve someone like me. He deserved someone much more better than me. Maybe, this would be our last date. Maybe, I should let him about the truth. He would understand.
I felt weird.
I nodded my head at one of his cooking stories. I laughed when he told me how he once had set the chicken on fire and added salt to cupcakes, instead of baking powder because they looked the same.
Why was I feeling so strange? We now had finished our pastas and Darren called the waiter to order the soup-um, what was its name, something which sounded similar to aqua-quota. Why was I so terrible at remembering names of such delicious dishes?
I looked away and around our surroundings. I didn’t know why but I was feeling really strange, and self conscious. Like someone was watching me. There was a table far away from ours but it was empty. The other one was directly behind us at some distance, and my eyes widened as I laid my eyes on the two very familiar figures sitting opposite each other. And one of them was looking directly at me. My breath hitched as I felt the weight of his stare.
Brian and Gemma were on their own date, sitting right behind Darren, at some distance from us. Gemma was babbling to him about something as she twirled a strand of her hair around her index finger. Her back was to us and she had on a really pretty black backless dress on. She was talking non stop to him hut he was looking directly at me. I doubted Gemma even knew she was not getting any attention by her date.
“Is something wrong?” Darren asked me and my eyes snapped to meet his. He was going to turn his head to look in the direction in which I was looking but I stopped him.
“Darren!” I almost shouted his name. His looked at me with wide eyes, surprised by my outburst.
“Yeah?”
I tried to smile?, “Um… you were saying something about an Indonesian dish? Tell me how to make it!”
“Oh about that, okay. So I was basically saying that the first dish I tried to make without it tasting like crap was an Indonesian dish called? satay. And then after that I tried other things like? bakso? and? soto.”
He rambled on about other dishes I never heard of but my eyes often drifted behind him, to meet Brian’s. Brian was staring at me with an expressionless face. Gemma was still going on about God knows what but it seemed like Brian wasn’t the least bit interested in her.
Why were they here? Out of all the places they could’ve been to, they had to choose The Grand Paradise for their date?
“Darren, I need to go to the bathroom,” I interrupted Darren from one of his stories. I had enough of his cooking stories to last me a lifetime.
“Oh, okay,” He said.
I got up from my chair and made my way to the ladies’ restroom. Okay, I wasn’t here to pee or anything but I just needed some time to calm myself down. I decided I should just have that soup and ask Darren to drop me home as soon as possible. I didn’t need to see Brian and Gemma have fun on their date.
I stared at myself in the mirror. The whole bathroom was empty, despite the fact that the restaurant was quite crowded at the moment. I spent a few minutes in the bathroom hoping that I was just imagining things up, that Brian was not here. I wanted this date to end soon.
I walked out of the bathroom, hoping this night would get over soon. As soon as I came out, a hand wrapped around my wrist and pulled me away and into the quietest part of the restaurant where no one was there. I looked up at the figure and recognised Brian.
“What’re you doing here? Out of all the places you could have gone with Gemma for your date, you chose this?” Why was he inviting trouble?
“I know. I just wanted to check on you.”
“Huh… for what? You should probably be back on your date with Gemma,” I said, before remembering something. “And how did you know that we were going on a date at The Grand Paradise,” I asked skeptically, crossing my arms over my chest.
I raised an eyebrow as he remained silent, “I may or may not have intentionally chosen the same place for a date as you and Darren,” He said, before smiling sheepishly at me.
“So you had all this planned out to crash our date?”
“Maybe.”
“Brian, why would you do that?”
“I didn’t want to leave you alone with Darren.”
“Well, it’s not like he’s going to try something on me,” I scoffed.
“I don’t trust him.”
“But you-”
“Shh, you talk too much. Keep quiet, would? you?” He said, stepping closer.
“What are you doing?” I asked, my arms falling to my sides as he advanced closer towards me.
“There is something I was meaning to do for quite a long time,” He started, staring into my eyes as he took another step towards me.
“What?”
“Something, I think Darren might do tonight, no matter how much I wish to prevent it, I can’t. But at least, I want to be the first one to do it.”
“What?” I asked exasperatedly as he stepped into my personal space. We were literally just a few centimetres away from each other.
My eyes widened as he cupped my face in his hands, forcing me to gaze into his blue eyes. Oh my dear God, was he going to do what I think he was going to do?
“Something I wanted to do from the first time I broke into your room,” He said before closing his eyes and crashing his lips on mine.