Hill, no Jenna, he had to call her Jenna, though he always thought of her as Hill because, his eyes swept quickly over her curves, well, it suited her. What was he…? Talk that was it, he should talk. No more gazing at her when she wasn’t looking. Two years of doing that hadn’t gotten him anywhere.
His grip on the steering wheel tightened, the silence hanging in the car unbearable. He had to say something, Gwynn told him what to say, something about… oh, yeah, that was right, her shoes. “Those are cool shoes.”
“Thank you.” Jenna looked down at her white sneakers. Gwynn groaned, not glancing up from her phone. “I like your shirt.”
He didn’t. He felt like a wrinkled mess. “I’m told this is what all the undead are wearing.”
“Edward’s not the undead, Uncle Barker. He’s a vampire. Jeez.” Wasn’t that the same thing? “And I had to dress him, Aunt Jenna,” Aunt Jenna? Jenna’s big blue eyes widened. “Because what he was wearing before.” An eye roll like no one had ever worn a dress shirt to the mall before. “O-M-G. I also tried to fix his hair.” It was now a gelled up, itchy disaster. “Tried. But it’s too short to do much with. Uncle Barker more Jacob than Edward but then some girls prefer Jacob, I don’t know why.” More rapid texting.
“I’m one of those girls,” Jenna confessed.
Barker straightened. What did that mean? She preferred him the way he was or she liked her men extremely hairy, this Jacob person supposedly some sort of werewolf?
“O-M-G,” coming from the back seat and then silence again.
Barker searched his brain for things to say. “The flow rate totalizer-”
“Uncle Barker!”
Right, he wasn’t supposed to talk about work. What else was there? He didn’t watch tv. “There was a great article in Popular Mechanics about-”
“Uncle Barker!”
“I saw that article on Surrogates, how the movie’s premise is close to being a reality,” Jenna volunteered.
Barker’s stomach flipped. His Hill read Popular Mechanics? Could she be any more perfect?
A long suffering sigh from behind him. “Uncle Barker was just saying how he wanted to see that movie.”
“I was?” He couldn’t remember the last time he watched a movie all the way through. Why would Gwynn say that he… ohhh… “I mean, I was.”
“I’d like to see it too.” Jenna’s beautiful face brightened.
“We could go tomorrow.” Five minutes in and he’d have his second date. The rest of the day he could relax and know that-
“It doesn’t release until September.” Damn it. Rejection. “But The Time Traveler’s Wife is playing. That movie looks good.”
Good? A movie about time travel? How could that possibly be good? Science fiction garbage, pure make believe, technological fairy tales. Then Jenna looked at him expectantly and “If I pick you up at five, we can have dinner first,” he heard a voice sounding very similar to his own say.
