april, year one, ii.
He gets knocked over by a cyclist as he crosses the road to get to her house, landing hard on the asphalt and tearing holes in his shirt. He rolls into a puddle to avoid getting run over by a car, and by then his carefully chosen suit is not only tattered but also wet, and he thinks she's never going to let him into her house looking like this.
He's so worried about it that he loses track of his own feet and trips over her front step, nearly face-planting into the hall wall as soon she opens the door. It doesn't help that it's been three days since they met in the supermarket and the mere sight of her is enough to knock the air from his probably-punctured lungs.
She gasps and grabs his arm and when they touch it's like an electric current, a pulse of fate, a warning sign screaming at them in bright, white neon this is the one.
"Are you okay?" she asks, and the sound of her voice alone is enough to comfort him.
"Fine," he replies, straightening up and ignoring the pain in his side. "I just fell."
"From where, the top of a building? Look at you, you're all raggedy!"
He scrunches his nose. "Raggedy?"
"Come on, Raggedy Man, let's clean you up a bit."
She takes him to the bathroom and gives him a towel to dry off a bit, tending to his cuts and wincing in sympathy when she touches one of his numerous bruises. He thinks the feel of her fingertips against his skin more than makes up for any of the pain he's feeling.
He tries to make small talk but it comes out as nonsense, and he wonders vaguely if he has a concussion.
"I think we should go to the hospital," she says, but he shakes his head.
"No, no, I'm fine!"
She chews her bottom lip, and he can tell she's about to argue, but he gently grasps her wrist and says, "Twenty minutes. If I'm not fine in twenty minutes you can take me to the hospital."
She searches his face, and he stubbornly holds her gaze, pleading with his eyes. He doesn't want to ruin this, to take away any time he could be spending with her.
She relents, and he has to stop himself from kissing her right then and there.
He manages to follow her into the kitchen without breaking anything {he catches the vase of sunflowers before she notices it wobble, so that near miss doesn't even count} and he tries not to stare too obviously as she bends over to put the fish fingers in the oven, but from the smirk she shoots him he's pretty sure she noticed that.
"So," he says, trying to think of something to say to divert her attention from his blush, "What do you do?"
"What do I do?" she asks, one eyebrow raised.
"Uh, you know, what do you do to earn money… what's your… uh, job! Job, that's it. What do you do for a living, is what I meant to ask."
She's smiling at him as though she finds his nerves endearing, but he's very quickly feeling as though this date {is it a date? Surely it's a date, what else would it be?} is slipping away from him. He takes a sip of the wine she's poured him {wine; definitely a date} and tries to remember how to breathe through his nostrils.
"I'm actually in between jobs at the moment," she tells him, but she doesn't look sad about it. "What about you?"
"Me? Me, oh, I'm a doctor. A teacher, sorry, I'm a teacher. I have my doctorate, so technically I am a doctor, but I don't know why I said that. I'm not a doctor, I'm a teacher."
She sips her wine and leans her hip against the counter. "Oh yeah? What do you teach, Raggedy Doctor?"
She's already given him a nickname! For a second he wonders if this moving a bit too fast but then he looks at her in her navy blue cocktail dress and he thinks, if anything, it's moving far too slowly.
"A bit of everything, really. Mainly science and history. Try to make it fun for the kids, you know… get them interested in learning and all that." He stops himself before he starts ranting.
She looks impressed by his occupation. That's a good sign.
"What did you do… I mean, what was your last job?" He goes to lean his elbow on the bench but it slips sideways and his whole left side free falls awkwardly. Oh, he's not very good at this.
"I was a kissogram."
"Oh, that's ni – What?" It takes a moment for her words to process, and when they do he can't help but stare. How old is she? Surely too young to be a – a kissogram.
She laughs, but he can see defensiveness in the slight hunch of her shoulders and the fire in her eyes. "I went to parties and I kissed people. It was a laugh."
He wants so badly to say the right thing that of course he ends up saying something totally wrong. "I bet you were good at it."
Oh, god.
She smiles though, almost predatorily. "I was."
And then the timer on the oven goes off, and he just about jumps out of his skin.
Five minutes later and she's staring dubiously at him sitting across from her, bowl of custard and plate of fish fingers between them on her kitchen table top.
"Well, this was your idea," she says, nudging the custard towards him, "Go on."
"Ladies first," he insists, pushing it back.
She holds out a hand though, stops the bowl from coming any closer and says, "I'm not trying it until you have."
So he takes the plunge, picks up a fish finger with his bare hand and dips it into the custard. The custard drips off the end of the fish finger, but it doesn't smell too bad, actually, so before he can overthink it he takes a huge bite and chews.
"Yum!" he declares, grinning at her as he finishes the fish finger and reaches for another.
"Seriously?"
"Seriously. Go on, try some."
He dips another fish finger in and then holds the dry end out to her, waggling his eyebrow insistently. She warily takes it from his grasp, sniffing it before taking a bite. But once she has, she grins back at him.
"Not too bad, Raggedy Man."