Chapter Seven: Cute Children
The week passed by slowly. Ellie was jumpy and unable to focus, and so paranoid that she suspected everyone of knowing about her date when she spoke to them. Her friends had no idea why she was acting so tense, and she had no desire to tell them. She had no desire to tell anyone, and, yet, she needed to tell someone. But she didn't, because she was paranoid and thought it would get back to a tabloid somehow.
Friday rolled around, and Ellie found herself anxious for him to get to her apartment. She had bought a new outfit, done her hair and makeup… and all an hour before he was supposed to come.
There was a knock at her door, and she jumped up to get it. It was only six-forty-five; too early for Bruce to be there, but one could never tell. When she saw it was Alex, she initially was relieved, and then panicked when she imagined Alex not leaving before Bruce got there.
"Hey, Alex," Ellie greeted her friend.
"Hey. Why're you all dressed up? Going on a hot date, or something?" Alex asked, stepping into Ellie's apartment.
"Yeah, actually, I am," Ellie stated. "With a guy from work. But it's more like a business dinner, than anything. Totally informal. I mean, he'll probably wear jeans, or something. So it's… not really a date."
"After seven?"
"At seven."
"And you don't call that a date?" Alex shook her head. "If you go out with a guy to dinner after six-thirty, and you're dressed like that, then I think that qualifies as a one."
"Well, um…" Ellie wracked her brain for something to say. "I guess so. Doesn't really matter; he's cute anyway."
"Really? Can I meet him?"
"No," Ellie replied quickly. "Because… I don't know him that well and he might turn out to be a total weirdo or something and then it'll have been stupid for you to meet him. This way, you won't get an emotional attachment to anyone, or anything."
"Oh…" Alex nodded. "Well, I guess I'll get going now." Ellie walked her to the door, and watched as her friend walked down the hall. Just as she was about to turn the corner, Bruce appeared.
'Keep going,' Ellie mouthed, shaking her head and motioning for him to keep going past her door. 'Don't stop.' Alex looked, stunned, at Bruce, and then at Ellie, and mouthed, 'Beat him.' Ellie gave her a thumbs up as she disappeared around the corner. Once it was certain she was gone, Ellie called to Bruce.
"You can stop walking now."
"Who was that?" he asked, arriving at her door.
"My friend, Alex. I haven't exactly told her you'd apologized yet, so she might find it a little weird that you're showing up at my apartment right at the time that I'm supposed to have a date. Which she knows about."
"You told your friends about what happened?" Bruce asked, feeling mildly indignant.
"Well… yeah. I mean, Clara was there; she saw the whole thing. I couldn't just pretend it didn't happen. And if Clara knew then Alex needed to know. But those are the only two I told, and I know they won' t tell a soul. Can you hold on a minute? I have to go get my purse; I'll be back in a second." The minute she was behind her closed bedroom door, she slumped against the wall. "Why am I doing this?"
"What am I doing here?" Bruce asked himself, as he examined the pictures hanging on her walls. There were three people who showed up most frequently: an older couple, who seemed just the right age to be her parents; and a boy about ten years younger than her, possibly her brother.
And then he found it. The picture. The picture that took him back eighteen years into the past, when he'd first laid eyes on the chubby six-year-old. It was like six-year-old Ellie was looking at him all over again… except she wasn't making a funny face.
"You don't want to look at that picture," Ellie stated, popping out of nowhere and pulling him away from the picture. "You saw me back then; why do you need a picture to remember it by? Why do you need to remember I ever looked like that at all?"
Bruce grinned. "You didn't think you were cute back then?"
"Only if you find obese children cute."
"You weren't obese, you were…"
"Overweight."
"Chubby," Bruce corrected. "But some people just carry baby weight when they're younger."
"Baby weight that takes you seventeen years to lose?" Ellie asked doubtfully. "I don't think so. My parents used to pile my plate with food and then tell me to eat all of it. Fast. So I got used to eat lots of food really quickly." She sighed. "Anyway, enough about my troubled childhood. Are we gonna get going, or what?"
Ellie confused Bruce. He got the feeling that she wanted to talk about their… unique situation very badly, but felt as if she would be making him awkward by doing so. So, instead of actually bringing it up, she would gently brush against the subject, and then pull away from it quickly.
"Yeah, sure." He whipped out the yellow roses he had been holding for several minutes. "I almost forgot; these are for you."
"They're amazing," she sighed, burying her face in the bouquet and inhaling deeply. She put them in a vase.
"I guess we should get going; our reservation's for seven-thirty."
"Did you get a good Italian place, Mr. Wayne?"
"Why do you keep calling me that, Ellie?"
"Because… you're my superior and it's respectful?" she offered helpfully.
"Well, we," and at this he took her arm and threaded it around his, "are on a date now. And when we're on a date, I want you to call me Bruce. Okay?"
"Okay." She grinned and blushed, looking away for a moment to hide the fact that she was slightly flustered. "So where are we going, exactly?"
"If I told you that, it wouldn't be a surprise," he replied, raising his eyebrows.
"What if I don't want to be surprise?" she asked.
"Then that's too bad," he stated severely, "because I'm paying."
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She hadn't been right about the jeans, Ellie decided, when they slid into his car a few minutes later. He was wearing a polo shirt and khakis, something a New England girl like she could appreciate (and swoon over).
"How did you know I liked pink?" she asked, looking over at him as they sped down one of Gotham's less busy streets in his Mercedes. It was expensive but not too expensive, in a way that he could go out and enjoy an expensive car, but not attract a lot of attention with it.
Bruce glanced narrowly at her from the driver's seat. "Ellie." He gave her outfit a once-over. It wasn't entirely pink, but it certainly had an overall pink theme. "You wear something pink almost every time I see you. You were wearing pink the very first time I saw you."
"I was only six then," she reminded him, in a tone that meant once again that she wanted to skirt around the topic. "So, no butler tonight?" He shook his head. "And you don't have any bodyguards, or anything?"
He chuckled quietly, in a way that made Ellie suspect there was something he knew and she didn't. "No, no bodyguards. Let's just say… if I ever have any trouble, I can handle it on my own." Most people would have left it at that.
But not Ellie Harold. "Do you take some sort of self-defense class?"
"I practice regularly," he replied curtly, not entirely answering her question.
"Karate?"
"A little bit."
"Kempo? Jiu-Jitsu?" She rolled her eyes. "Come on, you've gotta give me something here!"
"I dabble in a little bit of everything." He grinned. "Why are you suddenly so curious about me?"
"Well, we've sort of had this… thing for the past eighteen years, and I get the feeling you know a lot more about me than I know about you. Plus, I'll bet if I read the papers – which I don't – most – or all – of the stuff they write about you isn't even true."
"You don't read the papers?" he asked, cocking his eyebrows. The brunette shook her head, frowning slightly. "Not a single one?"
"Nope."
"Why not?"
"Well, you're a prime reason of why I don't read the paper. You can't rely on them anymore; they've become too biased and gotten too much of an agenda. I mean, either they're portraying you as a rich pretty-boy, or a blue-blood totalitarian snob! No one ever even touches on the fact that you run Wayne Enterprises expertly."
"You have a lot of opinions, don't you?"
"It's better than not having opinions at all," she pointed out.
"Not always, Ellie. Not always. Although, I have to say, it does make you a much better conversationalist. And then you really get into something, you start waving wildly." A little bit more color crept into her cheeks, and he laughed. "I'm sorry; did I touch on a soft spot?"
"No. I just think it's funny that you notice stuff about me that other people haven't. Some of the people I've known my entire life don't notice things that you do after being with me for ten minutes."
"Like how you talk with your hands? Or the way your bangs are too long, so you always have to push them out of the way? Or how, whenever you laugh, the edges of your eyes crinkle up a lot, and you get these two dimples in your cheeks?"
Ellie laughed, brushing her bangs out of her eyes. Her laugh was loud but not overly so, not fake or contrived; you knew she meant it. "My brother always used to make fun of me for the eye thing."
"Is he the boy in the pictures?"
"Boy?"
"I noticed that there was one boy in a lot of the pictures. In some of the more recent ones, he looked about sixteen."
"Oh, yeah. That's my brother, Woody." She rolled her eyes as he went to open his mouth. "Not like in Toy Story."
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Author's Note: I hope you guys enjoyed this. It's one of my favorite chapters (after chapter six!) because it brings the back story and tensions created by it back into play a little more sharply.
More coming soon! Woot!
