Thanks to Jen Bachand for her speedy beta.
Their first date didn't go so well; in fact, she sneezed so emphatically that while she did manage to cover her mouth and divert the expulsion of mucus and air; the movement she made to halt the sneeze had sent her water glass careening across the table to spill all over his pants.
As Jack Donaghy patted his pants dry, he made a comment along the lines of: "Well, at least it wasn't the wine." The wine she hated; the three hundred dollar bottle of wine that he had ordered that she hated. No, at least it hadn't been the wine.
Liz sulked into her salad after that, and followed it up with a healthy dollop of wallowing into her pasta. Jack, for his part, simply sat across from her and talked and talked, and then talked some more. It was a bad sign, all of it. From the water disaster to the horrible Pinot Noir to the venue to the ugly puce color of his tie.
Signs, all of them pointing to disaster.
"This sucks," she mumbled, as she errantly twisted a curl of linguini around her fork; sure it tasted great, but she was trying to make a symbolic statement, damnit. "I mean, on a scale of one to ten, this is just suck, Jack."
Miraculously, that made him stop talking and look at her. "This is suck?" Jack asked her inquisitively, taking a sip of the wine he couldn't seem to get enough of. "What do you mean by this?"
Liz smoothed her expensive cloth napkin over the expensive dress she bought for the occasion, "I'm not having a good time."
No one spoke; it was as if everyone in the vicinity of their table had stopped in their conversation in order to make her as uncomfortable as possible. Awesome. "And I can't imagine having a one-sided conversation with yourself is entertaining for you," she finished pathetically, thinking idly that it was probably fun for him.
"Pardon me, Lemon," he said gently, sliding the stem of his wine glass in between his pointer and middle finger, dragging it across the tablecloth. "I didn't mean to bore you."
It was nothing like she had ever heard before; he sounded... sad, almost shy. "But," Jack continued, with a bit more confidence in his voice, "I've never dated a woman like you before."
Immediately, her defenses shot up. Of course, of course. The backhanded compliment-
"And what I mean by that is that I can't say I'm sure what a woman such as yourself... would like to do." The way he said it made her feel like such... such... an asshole.
"Well, well, uh," Liz stuttered, suddenly wanting to stand and bolt from the restaurant, hail a cab and hide inside a box of Dominos. "I uh, why did you ask me out to dinner in the first place?"
"It seemed like a good place to begin," Jack responded immediately a bit flippantly.
That confounded her, "Begin what?"
"For a smart woman, Lemon, you're terribly-" Thinking better of where he was going he rerouted himself mid-sentence. "A relationship, Lemon. I thought dinner would be a good starting point for a relationship. As opposed to say, tandem skydiving."
Liz shrugged and pushed her plate away from her, folding her napkin carefully to place it alongside the salad fork that she never used. "I don't know, I think there's something to say about plunging at a hundred and twenty miles an hour towards the earth, trusting someone else to pull the cord."
Jack swirled the wine in his glass, staring intensely at the dark liquid. "Would you like to go skydiving?" There was a lilt to his voice; she couldn't tell if he was joking or not.
"Sure Jack, yeah sure, let's jump out of a plane together." She was joking.
Jack looked at her for a moment and then excused himself from the table. "Then I'll make that happen."
Well, she couldn't say that he wouldn't keep her on her toes.