The Intimacy Experiment (The Roommate #2)(57)
After a while, Naomi pulled back. “The syllabus gets us through seven weeks, if we’re lucky. After that, we’re on our own.” She narrowed her eyes. “Why are you smiling again?”
He wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to stop. “You said ‘after that.’”
Naomi spoke into his shirt collar. The ocean crashed against the shore. “You do realize if this intimacy experiment doesn’t work, it means we’re failures both professionally and romantically?”
“No.” He pulled her closer. “That’s not how science works.” Ethan reached around her to open the car door. “Even when they fail, experiments move us closer to the truth.”
Chapter Twenty
NAOMI FOUND HERSELF welcoming the structure of using the syllabus as a road map for her controversial courtship with Ethan. Going on a first date after spending multiple nights a week together for almost two months was a recipe for awkwardness. In the midst of so much uncertainty, having any kind of reference material to cling to went a long way.
After minor debate the night before (interspersed with more heated kissing in the beach parking lot), she and Ethan had settled on dinner and a movie as their initial outing. Something about adopting such a traditional model for their untraditional pairing held irresistible appeal.
This morning, Naomi had texted Ethan three restaurant choices.
He had chosen her least favorite.
She hated trendy restaurants. The kind that spent more money on light fixtures and whiskey tumblers than they did on actually testing their menu or paying their staff a living wage. They’d only been here ten minutes, but already her ass was sore from the midcentury modern chair’s flat wooden seat. She supposed it served her right for issuing a low-key compatibility test out of the gate, but old habits died hard.
Ethan lowered his menu and smiled at her from across the table, every inch of him wholesome, eager in a way most people learned to hide.
“Do you come here a lot?”
She tried to decide if the house salad was a safe bet, even though it came, inexplicably, covered in kelp.
“No. It’s my first time.”
So far, nothing about this date was her idea of normal. For one thing, Naomi had spent an inordinate amount of time getting ready. Usually, she didn’t waste energy considering what to wear, especially for dates with men. She cared what women thought about her clothes. But in her experience, men usually unanimously agreed less was more. Of course, in this matter, like so many others, Ethan remained an outlier.
He barely seemed to notice her slinky silver dress. Thankfully, the long sleeves covered the grapefruit-sized bruise on her shoulder. Not that Ethan would know. His eyes hadn’t slipped below her neck once. He was probably too busy thinking about world peace or the capacity for human suffering or something else equally righteous while she sat here shimmering like a horny disco ball.
Ethan, in all his dark-chinos-and-perfectly-pressed-dress-shirt-with-the-sleeves-rolled-up-to-reveal-his-taut-forearms glory, scanned the room and seemed to come to a conclusion.
“Did you offer to come to this restaurant as a trap?”
Naomi took a long sip of her water, trying to decide if it was unnerving how quickly he’d seen through her plan. “If only you’d figured that out before they brought the bread.”
He closed his menu and leaned forward, keeping his voice low. “I picked this one because it’s the closest to your house. The other options you gave me were all the way across town.”
“Wait, you picked this place because you wanted to cut down my commute?”
Measuring the distance between the various restaurants she’d picked from their respective work neighborhoods hadn’t occurred to her. She knew people like Clara, who consulted menus online before deciding where to go, but not Google Maps.
“Well, yeah.” Ethan took a bite of the aforementioned bread and then very quickly put it down on his plate with a look of distaste. “Traffic on the 405 sucks, and there’s construction again this week.”
“That’s really . . . sweet,” she said, chewing on the foreign word.
“Not that sweet.” Ethan fiddled with his napkin. “I figured you’d be in a better mood if you didn’t have to battle rush hour. If I’d known that you would dock me points for picking the only restaurant on the list with four types of bone broth on the menu”—he shook his head, teasing—“I’d have let you hike out to Koreatown.”
Ethan crumbled a corner of the weird bread between two fingers and lowered his voice even further. “I’m not sure anything here is actually edible.”
Naomi frowned. Why was he worried about her mood? Sarcasm and snark were the calling cards of her hard-won persona. Had her surliness lost its charm already?
She had no desire to sit here and question her every move, but she also couldn’t stop thinking about how high the stakes for tonight felt.
Even people who knew Naomi well occasionally accused her of being fearless. They didn’t realize that her daring didn’t come naturally, that she’d built a persona to protect a girl who’d had her plans for the future taken from her. The first time Naomi had stepped on set and shrugged out of her clothes, it had been a dive into the deep end.
People were always saying “Oh, I could never do that,” when they found out she had performed. Of course you couldn’t, she constantly wanted to answer, you’d never have the guts.