Chapter 16: Date 1 – The Restaurant

My family were all sitting around in the living room when I walked in. I think they were there to make sure my date got off to a smooth start or something. For Tara the “or something” probably included looking for another chance to tease me. My date was standing in the middle of the room looking all spic and span. As soon as I walked into the room he smiled at me with the biggest, warmest smile you could imagine. And then he held out the cutest bunch of flowers.

I took the flowers from him and smelled them and gushed out my thankyous. I showed them to Mum and Nana who oohed and aaahed as if they hadn’t seen me being presented with them a few seconds before. Mum offered to put them in water and put them in my room. I accepted, so she took them from me and held them while I went back to give my date an extra hug.

My date is a big guy, much bigger than I am, so I had to stand up on my toes to give him a quick kiss. Are you supposed to kiss a guy when he collects you at the start of your first date? I wasn’t sure about the rules. It was only a quick kiss anyway so surely that doesn’t matter.

My date told me I looked absolutely stunning and that he was proud to be going out with such a gorgeous looking young woman. I told him he was looking pretty special himself and that wasn’t an exaggeration. He’s a great big hunk of a guy. He was wearing proper leather shoes that matched nicely with his trousers and loose jacket. Under the jacket was a button up shirt that managed to cover but not completely disguise his muscular chest and stomach. I’m nearly thirteen and he’s quite a bit older and, oh yeah, in case you haven’t been keeping track, he’s my brother.

Dan was taking me to dinner and then the basketball game for my birthday. It had been Tara’s idea to call it a date and my whole crazy family had gone along with it. That wasn’t so bad, I could live with that. What I found really weird was that, while I knew this was my brother, and so this was only a kind of pretend date, a part of my brain loved the idea that my first ever date was with this gorgeous guy. I’d loved him forever and now we were going on a date together. Sigh! To be honest I didn’t know any other boys I would want to go out with. So here I was, all prettied up and feeling just a bit tingly inside as we got ready to leave.

Tara jumped up and stopped us. “Wait, wait, wait! You can’t go yet. Dad, you have to give him the speech!”

“What speech?”

“Dad, every time I’ve gone on a date, you’ve done this whole speech about being careful. It’s humiliating! I refuse to let you do that to me and not have you do it to Bec too.”

“Oh! Er! Yes, well!” Dad stood himself up, straightened his clothes and turned to Dan with a serious look pasted onto his face. Dan just stood there watching him with a little grin.

“Young man, I expect you to treat my daughter properly. No drinking, drive safely, and have her home by ten thirty. It’s a school night and she has a curfew.” At that point I could see a glint start in Dad’s eyes. He was having fun. “You should treat her the way you would want your own sister treated. Just remember, if you don’t behave with respect towards her, I have a shotgun and I’m not afraid to use it.”

“Yes sir! I’ll look after her exactly the way I would want someone to look after my own sister,” Dan replied with a grin.

Just for the record, as far as I know, the closest my dad has ever been to a gun is when I was little and we went to one of those resorts where you can dress up and have your photo taken. Dad got all done up like an English aristocrat out hunting, with the pipe and the silly hat and a shotgun slung over one arm. I guess, because it was a resort, the gun was probably a fake. That photo hangs on the wall in the hallway outside my parents’ room along with a whole lot of other old photos.

Mum gave me a kiss and a hug and told us both to have a good time. Dan held out his elbow and I hooked my hand over it like a proper lady and we walked out the door together. The yellow sports car Dan had borrowed was pulled up right in front of the house. Dan held the door open for me and I got in. I had to wriggle a bit to settle myself back into that comfortable seat.

“I’m sorry Bec love, but I’m going to close the roof. It looks like it’s going to rain any second now.”

“That’s okay! It’s probably a good thing anyway, ‘cause then my hair won’t get all mussed up by the wind.”

Dan pressed a button on the dash and a little motor whirred. The roof slowly unfolded itself from the back and slid over the top of me. It was kind of cool to see it do that. I reached up and touched the material of the roof, it was a kind of vinyl sort of material. It felt weird to push against the roof of a car and feel it move. Dan showed me a little lever I had to click to lock the front of the roof to the windscreen. Then he pressed another button and the side windows wound up with a little hum. Awesome! In a couple of minutes, we’d gone from sitting in a car with no roof to sitting inside a fairly normal sort of car. Except it was still a sports car and it went VROOM VROOM when Dan started up the engine. Totally awesome!

Once we were driving, Dan glanced over at me. “By the way, Dad doesn’t know it, but I also make sure I have a little talk with any boy Tara dates. I’m going to do the same for you when it’s time. Before you go on any date make sure I know who the guy is and where he lives. I’ll make sure he understands that if he hits you, or forces you to do anything you don’t want to do, or bad-mouths you at school, then I’ll be paying him a visit.”

I didn’t know how to reply to that. I mean I always knew Dan was protective of us. I didn’t realize he would threaten the boys we went on dates with. I’d heard about girls who’d gone on dates and had a bad time because the boy got rough and made her do stuff. I’d heard about girls who went on dates and then the boys spread stories about her afterwards. I didn’t want anything like that to happen to me. I guess what Dan was saying was sensible but ... I did a little shrug inside my head. I figured since no boy was likely to ask me out anytime soon, I shouldn’t worry about it.

“Did you pay a little visit to Ray Staunton?” I asked.

Dan scowled. “Yes, I did. Ray has promised faithfully to treat the next girl better than the way he treated Tara. I wouldn’t trust him to follow through on that. Some boys take a few lessons before they actually learn anything. I hope when it comes time, that you’ll choose someone better than Ray Staunton.”

I nodded. “So do I,” I said.

Rain started falling and Dan slowed down a bit. The sound of the rain pattering on the soft roof was a bit strange. The wipers did their little dance with a regular scrape and squeak. The rain provided the background percussion. And the car vibrated underneath me like a cat purring to itself – a really big cat. The whole thing was kind of musical in a way. We drove along and I listened to the music in my head and then I started humming along to it.

Dan glanced sideways at me, “I think I recognize that tune. What is it?”

“Um...” I had to think about it for a second. I hadn’t realized I’d been humming an actual tune. “It’s Avril Lavigne, her latest single.”

“Oh yes, it’s been getting a lot of airplay lately. Do you like Avril Lavigne?”

“Sure I do.”

This led to a long discussion about what types of music we both liked to listen to. It turns out that Dan liked an enormous range of stuff, not so much jazz or classical but pretty much anything since rock was invented. When I asked what was his absolute favorite band or musician, he said it was probably U2, which I thought was weird because they’re like a band that’s been around for ever. I was expecting something a bit more modern. I decided that when I had time I should borrow some of his U2 CDs and listen to them so I could see if I understood why he liked them so much.

The restaurant Dan took me to was really nice. It was fancy enough that you had to book a table so you didn’t have to wait in a queue, but not so fancy you felt like someone would stare at you if you used the wrong fork. Like I said, it was nice. Dan told the waiter that we had tickets to the game and asked if we could order quickly. We were within walking distance of the arena so I guess they were used to that. I ordered grilled salmon and Dan ordered a steak with mushroom sauce. Of course the menu gave them fancy names, but that was basically what they were. When he asked about drinks, we both ordered sodas. The waiter disappeared to place our order and we were left alone to talk.

“Dan, what do you think about going to the community college? Are you disappointed that you didn’t end up playing football for one of those big name colleges?”

“I was offered a couple of football scholarships, but I turned them down. Neither of them was for a full ride so we would have had to come up with the rest of the money ourselves. Or I could have taken out a student loan and been in debt for half my life. I’m pretty good at football but I was never going to be the star recruit or anything.”

He shrugged and grinned. “That’s okay. I play football for fun. I never wanted to make a career out of it. I’m real happy going to my college. The course that I’m doing has a good reputation and I have my job three times a week so I have a little bit of money and I can live at home with all of you and I still get to play football.”

“Yeah but face it, your team sucks. You’re going to end up somewhere like eighth in your competition.”

“Tomorrow night’s game will decide that. It’s the last game of the season since we didn’t make the finals and it will pretty much decide which of us ends up in seventh or eighth place. And we don’t suck! We won a few games this season. We go out there and play as well as we can and have fun while we’re doing it. We love to win, but we don’t get too upset if we lose. That’s a good thing about playing for this team instead of playing with one of the major colleges.”

A waitress arrived with our sodas and we thanked her and sipped our drinks before continuing the discussion.

“I guess that’s a bit like me and basketball,” I said. “I love playing but I don’t want to commit my life to it. You pretty well have to totally commit yourself to that one thing if you want to make it to the pros and I don’t want to do that.”

“That’s fair enough! I’m glad you’re still having fun playing basketball. If you keep playing like you did on Monday night you should have no trouble making the team when you get to high school. After that it’s up to you.”

“I think Monday night’s game was a bit of a fluke. Thinking back, I was probably having an episode.” I did the fingers in the air, double quotes thing around that word.

Dan grinned a bit. “I’m pretty sure you’re right about that.”

“I don’t think I can rely on having that happen every time I play.”

“Speaking of which, how are you coping with all that stuff?” asked Dan.

I was about to paste Little Miss Normal on my face and give him a stock answer, but then I found I couldn’t do it. I mean I didn’t want to do it. I love Dan with all my heart and I didn’t want to lie to him about something important like this. I searched back through my brain and checked what condition it was in. I looked straight at Dan and nodded a bit.

“Actually right now, I’m doing okay. I’m having little panic attacks every so often about what might happen in the future, but right now, sitting here with you, I’m doing okay.”

That was pretty honest.

Dan smiled warmly at me. “That’s good to hear. You know that we all love you and want to help you through this, don’t you? More importantly, I love you and I want to help you through this. If you feel a bit panicky, or want to have a cry, that’s okay. I’m guessing those sorts of feelings are pretty normal.”

“Thank you Dan.”

“You pushed me away last night, but that was okay because Liz stayed with you. But anytime you want me to hold you, I will. I hope you know that I’m happy to do that.”

Do you get why I adore this guy? I picked up Dan’s hand from where it was sitting on the table and looked straight into his eyes. I could have said thank you again, but instead I looked into his eyes and tried to send him psychic messages about how much I loved him. A bit of my brain was trying to remember having pushed him away last night. Nope! Drawing a blank there! Damn! How can I fix this when I don’t know what I did? Damn! Damn!

“I’m sorry about last night. I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m fine now, truly I am.”

The waiter chose that moment to arrive with our meals. “Your steak, sir ... and the salmon for your lady friend.”

A little thrill ran right up my spine when he said that. Dan’s lady friend ... I could live with that! More than live with that, this was like my wildest dream come true. I was sitting in a restaurant having a conversation and a meal with the most wonderful guy in the world, and as far as everyone else here knew I was his girlfriend. I let the feelings rush through me, leaving little tingles in their wake, and then I looked down at my meal.

The food looked fantastic. It was on square plates. Can you believe that? Who ever invented square plates? I mean what’s the point? But I must admit it made the meal look extra special. My grilled salmon had a light creamy sauce poured over it and came with big thick fries and a side-salad. Some people might say it was pretty simple but I loved it. We stopped talking and started eating. The whole thing was scrumptious. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast so I was quite hungry ... no that’s not true, I had that energy bar Nurse Wanda gave me. Anyway, I was hungry and the food was delicious and we sat there and ate.

After a bit, I asked Dan how his steak was, so he put a bit of steak on his fork, dipped it in the mushroom sauce and held it out for me to taste ... divine! So of course I had to feed him a similar taste of fish on the end of my fork. Okay this is the stuff I imagined happening on dates, especially dates with Dan. Oh God! I’ve died and gone to heaven! I want this moment to last forever! Oh God! Thankyou! Thankyou! Thankyou!

I couldn’t eat all the fries, but Dan was happy to help with that. The waiter came to collect our plates. We still had plenty of time so Dan ordered dessert for himself. I said I was too full, but Dan looked at me and then asked for an extra large serving and a second spoon. The waiter glanced at me and then nodded to Dan. Huh! What’s he trying to say?

Once the waiter had left, Dan turned back to me. “So now for the big questions, tell me about you. Is there some boy at school you have a big crush on? Who is he? What’s he like?”

I stared at Dan. Do you mean apart from the big crush I have on you? I wondered.

He gave a wry little grin, “Yeah, I meant apart from the big crush you have on me.”

What? Oh no! Did I say that out loud? Oops! I felt my cheeks start to go red and fought the temptation to look down into my lap and hide my face. How embarrassing! Blurting out one of the Big Secrets like that! Oh I want to die. Please earth, open up and swallow me whole!

I heard Dan chuckling and realized I was looking down, despite all my efforts not to.

“What? Did you think I wouldn’t notice? It’s okay, Bec. I don’t mind. In fact I think it’s a nice compliment that you feel that way about me.” Dan’s voice was gentle and sweet. It started to sink in that he didn’t think I’d just made a huge idiot out of myself.

“Bec, look at me.” He gripped my right hand, where it was sitting on the table. His enormous hand completely swallowed mine. I forced myself to look up, my face still red.

“Bec, I don’t mind. You’re a smart, pretty, talented, gorgeous girl and if you weren’t my sister, I’d be asking you to be my girlfriend in a heartbeat.”

Huh? I snorted at Dan in disbelief. What a pile of horse manure! I forgot to be embarrassed and started to get angry.