Shimmy Bang Sparkle(12)

“Ooh!” she said, with her mouth half-full. “I’ve always wanted to see a movie there!”

I slid my hand back under the table and put it on her knee, an inch farther up her leg than last time. It was the best slippery slope there was. When I tightened my grip, I could have sworn that goose bumps prickled up her arms. “Full disclosure: I don’t even know what they’re showing. I just want to spend some more time with you.”

Stella swallowed, and her eyes glimmered. “You do?”

“Oh yeah,” I said, cracking a lentil cracker in half. “I do.”

“Me too,” she said, pausing with a piece of chicken halfway to her mouth.

The relief was intense. It brought me back to the first time I’d ever asked a girl out—that high, that rush. Two seconds of utter invincibility. “I picked dinner,” I said, and gave her thigh a squeeze under the table. “You pick dessert.”





5

STELLA

We sat side by side on super nice folding lawn chairs that the outdoor theater provided for everybody. Between us was a six-pack of beer, so cold and frosty in the Indian-summer heat that the paper labels were already wrinkled. To top it all off, sitting in each of our laps, on waxy paper bags, were my last-meal-on-earth favorite treats: caramel apples.

The caramel on mine was crusted in a thick layer of teeny chocolate chips. He’d opted for pecans. To get them, we’d had to drive all the way to the mall, and he hadn’t minded one bit. What a sweetheart.

As the sun went down, a breeze kicked up, and I instinctively put my hands to my arms. Nick didn’t miss a beat and put his jacket over my shoulders. A hush fell over the crowd, and the movie started to roll. At first, it was that splotchy old-fashioned thing that happens at the beginning of old filmstrips. And then came the opening frame.

A huge, glorious diamond, as big as an egg, with gleaming facets that caught the light.

I froze with my apple stuck in my mouth. Uh-oh.

The camera zoomed in on the jewel. The screen went pink . . . and the Pink Panther appeared, wiggling his little tush in time with the good old Pink Panther theme. The title popped up on the screen. Double uh-oh. It wasn’t the first film. It was the second one.

The one with a female thief.

In my head, I heard Alanis Morissette singing a previously unreleased lyric to “Isn’t It Ironic?” or whatever it was called: “It’s a heist movie right before your biggest heist.”

Oh God. I bit off an enormous chunk of apple, so big I could barely chew. Next to me, Nick leaned forward and gave my leg a rub to get my attention. “This OK?”

I nodded about ten times in quick, panicked succession. I hiccupped, I coughed. I pressed my hand to my mouth. “Yes!” I squeaked around the apple. “Sure!” Chewing furiously, I watched the animated panther tap-dance along the screen, with a cane and a top hat. “Wonderful!”

Very, very rarely in my life had I ever thought, I can’t do this! I was a can-do kind of girl! Change my own oil? Can do! Make fake gems? Can do! Do my own taxes without alerting the government to my secret income? Can do! Whip up some homemade cannoli? Can do! Make fake IDs with functioning magnetic strips? Can do!

But just then, right there, thinking about watching a movie about a notorious female thief stealing a notorious jewel . . . Everybody had a limit. And apparently, this was mine. I felt like an astronaut trying to sit through Apollo 13 the night before a launch.

Houston! Abort mission! Cannot do! Repeat, cannot do!

But then Nick pulled my chair closer to his and put his arm around me. He was warm and alluring and so very masculine. He gave my side a little squeeze and turned his attention to the movie. He didn’t stop smiling, not once. And his grip got a little tighter.

I tried desperately to center myself and my swirling thoughts. I didn’t have to focus on the finer points of a massive, nonviolent, incredibly gutsy jewel heist. I could focus on him. On his pecs. On his woodsy cologne. On the way his forearms rippled when he gripped his apple stick.

Can do!



What felt to me like an eternity later, the lady thief was negotiating the laser security system that made a web around the Pink Panther. She bobbled the diamond in her metal pincers, and Nick said, “Stella.”

“Yes,” I gasped, without turning away from the screen. I’d been so swept up in the heist, I had forgotten to blink. My eyes felt like they were in dire need of some moisturizing drops—stuck open and stinging. Yet still, I couldn’t tear myself away from the movie. The crystal dome that was meant to protect the diamond swung perilously on the makeshift zip line system she’d rigged across the display area.

“I think you might be breaking the bones in my hand.”

I looked down at my fingers, enmeshed with his. His knuckles were white, and his fingers were slightly swollen. The spoon ring I wore on my thumb had put an indentation in the back of his hand that reminded me of a couch leg on carpeting.

“Sorry!” I let go of his hand, realizing as I did that my palm had been sweating profusely the entire time. I was nothing if not elegant. I wiped my palm off on my jeans, trying to be as subtle as I could about it, and trying to disguise the wet smudges now appearing on my knee. “I’m so sorry. Are you OK? Need more Advil?”

He shook his hand in the air violently, like he’d pinched his finger in a doorjamb. “No worries. I’m left-handed. I hardly need this one at all.”