We made our way through Shoreline Village to get to the restaurant. Donovan was no longer holding my hand, but he did walk rather close to me and treated me like I was the only woman he saw. I loved that.
“Want to check when the reservations were?” I asked.
“I already did. They are at 8:30,” Donovan said.
“And you still made me rush to get here by 7:30?”
“I just thought it would be romantic to walk around and look at the boats and stuff while the moonlight in its fullest form is over the ocean.”
“Donovan,” I said. I took a deep breath. “Why are you here with me on a Saturday night when you could be dating every supermodel from here to kingdom come?”
“I like what I like,” Donovan said, giving me an endearing smile and my heart completely skipped a beat.
“What exactly do you like?” I asked.
Donovan walked up to me and I thought I was going to die. He was so intensely hot. “I like your eyes. Your chin. The way your neck curves. That is very feminine. I like the person that you are. You seem like a really wonderful human being.”
I was almost mesmerized by his words. I was putty in his hands. But I couldn’t let him know that. “Looks can be deceiving,” I joked.
“You have that other thing,” Donovan said.
“What other thing is that?” I asked.
“You are just so inherently good that it makes your entire aura so beautiful.”
Wow. That about the most amazing thing I had ever heard.
“Thank you,” I said. Under a spell or not, he made me feel really special.
I began to feel emotional and guilty. I was emotional because I had no idea what was this guy’s true personality. I felt guilty because Robert really liked me and I was out here playing games with the super handsome Donovan.
Donovan looked at me and said, “What’s the matter?”
“Why do you think something is the matter?” I said to Donovan.
We were standing in front of a chocolate shop—a store where they only sold big chunks of incredible chocolate in bags.
“Do you want to go inside and get a treat before dinner?” I said to Donovan in my kind of sexy, flirty voice. It was less sexy and flirty, and more commanding. But I usually got what I wanted.
“I don’t eat chocolate. It’s bad for my complexion,” Donovan said. “It’s one of the few foods that gives me endless zits. Zits would be a career killer for me. I don’t mind if you get a piece of chocolate.”
So, we went inside the shop and I wasn’t too much of a piggy. I got a modest size piece of dark chocolate. We left the shop and we made our way to the docks. We talked the whole time. I enjoy every bite of my chocolate delight. I had one last piece and I asked Donovan to take the last bit.
“If I get a zit,” he said, “I’ll have my agent talk to you.”
“You’ll be fine. It’s delicious.” I fed Donovan my last piece of chocolate. I was hoping for this real, sexy moment feeding a gorgeous man chocolate. I didn’t get that at all. I shoved the chocolate too fast in his mouth and he cough half of it out on the ground. Very sexy.
“That was harder to get down than triple shot of Southern Comfort.
“I kind of jammed it in your face. Sorry about that.”
We were nearing the docks, and Donovan reached out and grabbed my hand.
He is so weird. He just holds my hands at weird moments.
Then I thought about what the two places had in common. It was when no one else was watching that he held my hand. I needed to not think about that and I could have been completely wrong.
“Have you ever been in love?” I asked Donovan. This should be an interesting answer.
Donovan looked at me and just smiled. His smile was very sweet.
He had been in love.
“When were you in love?” I asked.
“I was twenty-three and she was twenty. I had just started to lift weights because I was tired of being picked on and called ‘pretty boy.’”
“People did that when you were twenty-three?” I asked.
“Bullies are bullies. I was picked on most my life. I have always been told what a pretty man I was.”
“Well, you are, Donovan. You can’t stop that. You should embrace that,” I said.
“It has been a lot easier the last couple of years since I’ve gotten pretty big.”
“Your kind of big shouldn’t be called big.”
“What should it be called?” Donovan asked.
“How about ripped? Now, weren’t you telling me about your first love?”
Donovan looked at me and smiled, almost as if he’d tried to steer the conversation away from the one we were having.
“Do you really want to hear this story?” Donovan asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m the reason the cat is dead.”
“What cat?” Donovan asked.
“You know the phrase...‘curiosity killed the cat’?”
“Yeah, I think I heard that once.”
“Once?” I couldn’t believe he thought he had only heard that phrase once in his life. “Please start your story,” I said. “I’m dying to hear about your first love.”
Donovan stopped and sat on a white bench. I walked over and sat next to him.
Donovan was looking straight ahead at one of the boats in the dock.
“I remember seeing her on the street,” he said in a very soft, low voice. “She seemed lost and I did something that would be way creepy nowadays. But back then, it was something you did for people. I stopped and asked her if I could help her. I got out of my car, and I helped her sort out her directions. We exchanged phone numbers.”
“What happened next?” I asked.
“She moved to Rome.”
“Rome?”
“Yes, Rome...Italy.”
“Why did she go there?”
“She was Italian. That was where all of her family lived.”
“Was she on vacation?” I asked.
“That was the sucky part. We eventually figured out that we had lived just two miles apart all of our lives. But now, thousands of miles separated us.”
“So have you and me,” I said. I had no idea why I thought I needed to tell him that when he was trying to open up to me. “What did she look like?” I asked.
“She had long beautiful reddish-brown hair, just about your length. I have always been a sucker for redheads.”
“You loved her?”
“We would write letters. Remember those? We wrote the most spectacular, beautiful letters. I mean we were up there with the romance letters of the Civil War.”
I laughed. This guy was very cute. “What was it about her that made you feel the way you did?”
“She had such a deep soul. I loved her with all that I had,” Donovan said.
“What happened?”
“She stayed in Rome and met a guy. They got married and had a couple of kids. She seems very happy.”
“What about you?”
“Heartbroken.”
“Even still?”
“A part of me is,” Donovan said. “I think there will always be this part of me that is a bit broken because she is no longer in my life. I’m not stuck by any means. I’m wide open for someone to love me the way I know I can love.” Donovan gave me a look like, ‘Holy shit! What did I just say?’ He looked deeply into my eyes and just nodded and said, “Yeah.”
I almost fainted.
“Inside me is a deep soul, too,” Donovan said. “And I have an insane amount of love to give.”
Wow. An insane amount? What an answer. If this was a game show, he would have won the first prize.
“What about you?” he asked.
“Have I been in love?” I thought about the answer and I had one for him. “I thought I was in love a couple times in my life and I even told one man I loved him. But I realized I have never loved in the way I used to dream about when I was a younger.”
“Look at Miss Open Book,”
Donovan said in a rather unsmooth way. “I like it. I’ve never been more attracted to you than I am at this moment.”
“Are you serious?”
“Why do you question so much? Let my yeses be yeses and my nos be nos.”
“That’s from the Bible,” I said, realizing that Robert had said the very same thing to me. Hey, what’s going on with that?
“Yeah, it is. My mom taught me that when I was younger before she died.”
“Were you two very close?” I asked.
Donovan looked at me and gave me the cutest, simplest smile. “I have loved no other the way I loved my mother.”
“She sounds amazing,” I said. “What about your dad?”
“My dad?” Donovan laughed. “When I was growing up, his name for me was Sissy Boy. Just because of my good looks.”
“That’s awful,” I said, almost dumbfounded with Donovan’s openness.
“He used to tell me I looked like a girl when I was a kid. He never did anything weird, but he was hurtful with his words. I never made him proud. Ever.”
“He died when you were ten,” I said. “You made him proud; he just had a hard time showing you.”
“Was your father like that?” Donovan asked.
“My father went into a metamorphosis during my lifetime when he was still with us. When I was a little girl, like ages six to ten, I remember my dad being extremely strict and very overprotective. But after my tenth birthday, he started chilling out more and more, all the way till the day he died. I swear, if you heard some of things he was saying right before he died, you would have thought he lived his entire life as a hippie.”
“That was because his true self was a hippy,” Donovan said.
“Why are you certain?” I asked.
“Aren’t you? The man finally can be all the things he wants to be and he chooses to be completely liberal.”
“He was leaning toward Libertarian points of view,” Especially toward the end there.” I looked at Donovan and smiled. “I have to say I’m impressed with your social insight.”
“You’re amazed that I’m not completely stupid for a model?”
“I don’t think you’re at all stupid. That’s a horrible thing to say about yourself.”
Donovan looked at me and said, “I’m sorry. I just have been told those words for a very long time by a lot of different people.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that.” I was getting emotional.
What was I doing? I cared for this man. My defense of him was the most obvious sign. I didn’t like him calling himself stupid.
“I think both of our fathers weren’t fathers of the year,” I said. “Mine had good intentions.”
“I think mine did, too,” Donovan said. “He died before I ever really got to know him.”
I felt bad for Donovan. I felt sorry that he didn’t get to share adulthood with his parents. I thought that being an adult and having your parents still alive was a very special relationship one could have.
“I’m sorry that you had a tough childhood,” I told Donovan.
“I so want to pig out right now, it’s insane. Let’s head over to the restaurant.”
Chapter Twenty-six