Ellie is Cool Now

Chapter 27

I all but skip into the house. Mom and Dad watch me suffer with the side effects of full-blown lovesickness like I have an extra head growing out of my neck. I launch myself onto the couch and put my feet up on Dad, who is eating a salad on the couch and watching a Frasier rerun with Mom.

"Wasn't this guy engaged two days ago?" Mom asks with a raised eyebrow and voice filled with skeptical motherly concern.

I pull my purse off the coffee table and reach in for my lip gloss, using my cell phone as a mirror. "They broke it off," I say, smacking my lips together. I feel Mom staring at me intently, waiting for an explanation. I shrug. "Their relationship was already on the rocks. How Mark feels about me put the nail in the coffin."

"You know what they say about cheaters." Mom turns back to her show.

"It's not like that," I say, getting angry. "It's not a 'once a cheater, always a cheater' kind of deal. Sometimes people just...want something else."

"The heart wants what it wants," Dad chimes in with fatherly wisdom. He shoves a cherry tomato into his face.

"Exactly," I say, nodding at him. I'll take fatherly wisdom over motherly skepticism any day of the week.

"Well, just be careful. That's all I'm saying."

"What's the worst that can happen? He breaks my heart? That's better than the perpetual dry spell my love life has been until now."

"I don't want you to get hurt," Mom reiterates. I roll my eyes at her like an indignant teenager. I'm not proud of it.

"Then you shouldn't have had kids, Mom, because it comes with the heartbeat."

The doorbell rings and Dad pats my feet.

"Have fun, honey," he says, oblivious as always to the mother-daughter spat.

"I will." I sling my purse over one shoulder and shoot a tongue at Mom, who pretends to ignore me for the TV.

When I open the door, Mark is waiting with his hands tucked into his pockets. He looks deliciously disheveled and I resist the urge to grab his face between my hands and kiss him.

Oh, what the hell.

I take his face between my hands and stand on my tippy toes to kiss him. He tastes like coffee.

When I pull back, he's smiling. Swear to God, he has the prettiest smile. All symmetry with lots of teeth, but not too many teeth. The perfect amount of teeth. His sparkly eyes lock with mine. It knocks the wind right out of me.

"Should I come in and say hi to your parents?"

"Please don't." I push him a little too hard toward his car. "They might never let us leave."

"Where are we going?" I finally ask Mark after minutes of driving in silence across hilly country roads. What was once my favorite thing to do as a kid now makes me a tad carsick, especially on an empty stomach that is simultaneously swarming with butterflies.

"If I'm doing a traditional midwestern first date, it starts with Cheesecake Factory and then a movie, maybe ending with some over-the-clothes action in your driveway." Mark waggles his eyebrows at me.

I crinkle my nose at him. "Over-the-clothes is all you get for microwaved frozen food and stale popcorn at a crappy mall theater."

"I suspected as much, so that's not where we're going," he says.