Love At First Night

32.

LISA IS PARKED four blocks from the bookstore, which is unfortunate, because it's still pouring rain when we make our walk of shame down to the first floor.

"You sure you don't want me to bring the car around?" She asks as I follow her to the front of the shop, studiously avoiding eye contact with the woman behind the cash register (because despite the fact that there's no way she heard what we were doing up in the attic, I have the horrible feeling that she'll see our rumpled hair and just know).

"Well just walk fast," I say.

Lisa hums. "Someone's impatient."

My cheeks are warm when I shoot her a warning glare. Then she offers me her rain jacket as we pause just inside the door to brace ourselves, and now I'm fully blushing, because five minutes ago I was kneeling on that jacket and doing unspeakable things.

"I'll be fine," I insist. "It's just a little rain."

We make it a solid ten steps down the sidewalk before a particularly fat and heavy drop rolls off a window awning and smacks me straight in the eye. l gasp, swear like a sailor, and then huff in resignation. Lisa refrains from saying I told you so as she hands me her sunflowers to hold, shrugs off her jacket, and pulls me close to her side so she can drape it over both our heads.

By the time we get to her car-unpretentious but very large SUV-we're both half soaked and breathless from giggling every time our hips bump.

Lisa holds the passenger side door open until I've climbed in and folded my knees out of the way so she can shut it for me, then tucks her bouquet of sunflowers carefully on the back seat. While she waits for traffic to pass so she can duck around to the driver's side, I rub my frozen hands up and down my thighs to try to get some feeling back in my fingers. I scan the interior of the car. It's comfortably clean, just like Lisa's room... and now I'm thinking about what we did in her bed, which makes me think about what we just did in the bookstore, and suddenly I'm not cold anymore.

Lisa gets into the car, starts the engine, taps the button to turn my seat-heater on, and meets my eyes over the center console.

"Don't look at me like that, Park."

"Like what?" I ask.

"Like you want me to fuck you in my back seat."

I choke on a startled laugh. "I-that's-"

Exactly what I was thinking about.

"Look, Park, you know I'm down," she says, her smile just this side of cocky. "But do me a favor and let me make your first time a little more special than that."

I could tell Lisa about my teenage obsession with Titanic, and that I'd be more than happy for her to play the young Leo DiCaprio to my Kate Winslet and fog up the windows of her car. I could tell her that my imagination can't decide if I want to straddle her lap and use her shoulders and my knees for leverage, or if I want her to drape me over the length of the seats and slot herself between my open thighs to use her weight to pin me down.

Instead of saying any of that, I fold my hands neatly in my lap.

"Fine," I say. "I'll behave."

Lisa looks like she doesn't believe me for a second, but she concedes by putting the car in drive and pulling away from the curb.

Tragically, there's no third act montage to get us to our long-awaited denouement as quickly as I'd like to. It's seven o'clock and pouring rain, so the downtown traffic is stop-and-go. It's torture. But Lisa connects her phone to the speakers and tells me to open a Spotify playlist Jisoo made for her as a joke (it's just forty duplicates of "Kiss the Girl" from The Little Mermaid and one lone Frank Ocean song) and suddenly I don't mind that we can't cut right to the chase.