The Man He Chose

Chapter 23

A/N: The image above does not belong to me. It belongs to the person who uploaded it on the internet.

Santa's POV

"Easy, easy," I said as I caught Barcode in my arms.

Something had made him lose his balance just as he stepped onto the escalator.

He slowly straightened himself, his face turning a bright red.

"I'm sorry," he murmured. "I got careless. My mind was on nothing else but..."

He stopped mid sentence turning even redder in the face.

When it looked like he wasn't going to finish his sentence, I said, "Let's go".

We went up to the third floor and headed straight away for the Italian food booth.

We scanned the menu that was on a small lighted board high up against the wall.

"I will have the chicken alfredo fetuccine," I said.

"That sounds good," Barcode said. "I'm thinking of having the Frutti di Mare."

I looked at the image of the dish he was referring to. It did look delicious to me.

After we had our food trays with drinks paid for by Barcode, we proceeded to bring them to a table close to the glass wall overlooking a side street lined with shops of different kinds.

"You wanna taste my dish?" Barcode offered when he noticed that I was studying it intently.

I noticed that there were several pieces of mussels and cut up squid tentacles on top of spaghetti noodles red with tomato sauce.

"Hmhmm," I nodded. "Just a little bit of it."

He scooped a forkful and placed it close to my mouth.

I instinctively opened my mouth to receive it.

"Just one day away from our unit and this is what you do to me???"

The loud angry voice of Cooheart made Barcode drop his fork and it clanged on to the metal table, spilling the spaghetti noodles and squid tentacles all over the shiny metal surface.