Chapter 13

The next few days went by fairly typically. Nothing big at work other than the usual trying to spend a little time with the handfuls of girls I was friendly with. The nice thing about it for me was that some of it even seemed to be reciprocated. Tonya and/or Tenille usually made it a point to come find me before they would leave for the day, even doing so on the days where I had come in early and found them while they were still working.

There was one thing that wasn't typical for me though that went on during the week. Chelsea was still trying to talk me into going with her and her boyfriend on a double-date. She wanted to set me up with a friend of hers from school. From what she'd told me before her friend hadn't had much luck dating, so Chelsea wanted to show her that there were good guys around and it just so happened I'd been tagged as the good guy. There were worse things I could think of being. I had personally always considered myself a good guy at heart, just sometimes proof that the old saying about nice guys finishing last was true.

Initially I told Chelsea I would think about it, since I didn't have a day off anyways. One thought I had about it was that in my experience most girls our age hung out with girls who were similar in looks to themselves. Chelsea was fairly short, probably about 5'4 or 5'5 and a little thick. She wasn't fat by any means, just not the model thin that some guys seemed to go for, she actually had curves. The other thought was she seemed to genuinely think that her friend and I would get along. Coming from a female I had a tendency to trust her opinion in setting me up – I didn't think she had ulterior motives in doing it like a guy might have in doing the same thing.

It also made it a little easier for me to trust Chelsea on this that in the time I had gotten to know her over the summer she had shown herself to be a sweet girl. I had also never seen her in anything but a good mood, so that was a point in her favor, too. There were too many girls who could flip a switch seemingly and go from nice to bitch. The older of my sisters could do that. My dad had even gotten her a t-shirt that said 0 to bitch in 2 seconds. Personally, I thought that had almost seemed like giving it too much time.

It was Friday when I finally let Chelsea know that I would go out on the double-date with her and her friend. We both worked the weekend but made a plan for either Monday or Tuesday and she took my number so that she could get in touch with me to make sure once she talked to the other two. She didn't tell me a whole lot about her friend, just that she hadn't had much luck with guys before. She was also from Morgan, a small city up the canyon from where I lived. That would make it about a half hour drive to get to her place. Thinking back to my time with Tonya I wasn't sure it would work as a long distance thing, but I figured the date at least could be enjoyable. Even if it wasn't it was only one night that I was committing myself to, so that wouldn't be much of a loss. After all, it wasn't like I had anyone else beating down my door for me to take them out.

The Saturday and Sunday were fairly typical for working weekends. The hours were a little longer: on a weekend day Lagoon would overlap the red badge (the 15 year olds) and black badge (over 15) shifts to have more people working to keep up with the crowd flow. As had been becoming the norm for me I was assigned to Boat Tag again both days, working with a couple of guys. The nice thing for the first part of the shift at least – at least on Sunday - was that I had Tonya working on the game next to me. Her game was one of the water gun racing games called Up, Up, and Away. The object of that game was to hit the target causing your balloon to rise and eventually pop, shooting off where ever it would go at that point. The disadvantage was that it was a fairly busy day, so we didn't have much time for talking. I did have a little time though to admire how she looked in her uniform. As I've stated before both her and Tenille were petite but still had some curves. Tonya for one did have a sexy looking ass in those shorts, at least in my opinion.

We worked like that for about two hours before Tonya's shift was up and she went to go check out. She stopped for a minute by me, stepping in close to say something low and quiet so people around couldn't hear it. "Spend enough time staring at my ass, or do you need more time?"

I could only chuckle on that one. Sure, I had been looking. I probably wasn't even surprised that she had seen it, either. I took a quick second to debate on how to answer: playful or maybe embarrassed? "I did, but if you're going to offer more time to look at it I wouldn't complain." Playful it was, now just to see how she would react to it.

She actually blushed a little bit, but there was a slight smile there as well. It definitely beat getting smacked for it. She did give me a light smack to the chest, but it was the type that was harmless and obviously meant to be that way, just a light tap. "Asshole. I've got to take off though, have some stuff going on later, so I'll see you around." With that she gave a wave and started off down the midway, headed back towards the office to check out.

I'm sure she expected it, so as she walked I turned slightly and took the opportunity to watch the sway of her hips as she walked. Sure enough she stopped for a second, turning back to see me watching her walk away, shaking her head and chuckling before continuing on her walk. It was a little playful flirting I thought may even be worth seeing if something were to come of it down the road. There was going to be time to figure that out either way, after all we'd be going to school together and having at least the one class of orchestra together.

The next couple of hours went fairly regular. It was hot, but not really feeling hot enough that we felt the need to 'fall' in to the water of the game to cool ourselves off. With a couple of us running the game it worked though, gave us one person to ring up the people buying the boat rides or buckets of balls for outside and another person by the docks to scoop the balls out of the water and reload the buckets. By about mid shift things had slowed down a little bit. With a game like Boat Tag it wasn't unusual for the evenings to be slower. After all, part of the appeal of it was the fact you could get wet, if not soaked. Summer evenings there were still some people who would go for it, but things definitely slowed down.

Chelsea decided to take advantage of the fact that it slowed down and came down to talk to me. We ended up firming up the details for the double-date coming up: we would meet up at the Layton Hills Mall at 5 for a scavenger hunt and then from there we would figure out what to do for dinner based on what everyone felt like doing at the time. I also ended up finding out my date's name finally: Julie. In Chelsea's opinion at least she was an attractive girl, I trusted her to think she was I just wasn't sure whether her definition of an attractive girl would match with mine. Chelsea described her as about 5'5 with brown hair that was a little longer than shoulder-length and being reasonably skinny. Chelsea herself was what most guys would probably call a little chunky, but overall she was cute I thought. She was the type of girl where her personality helped add to her attractiveness.

I had to admit I was a little skeptical in her judgment of her friend. People have a tendency to be biased where friendship is involved and it seemed girls in particular had a tendency to hang out with people of a similar look. I thought it was at least worth the effort of trying. I had never been on a blind date before, so it was a new experience at the least. I would get to see how I could do with breaking the ice with a person I had never met and knew very little about. I think Chelsea knew I was a little nervous as well, she just told me to be relaxed and be myself. She knew I was a nice guy, it was one of the reasons she'd thought to ask me to go out with her friend. The other reason she told me was that she legitimately thought the two of us would get along well and at least have a good time together, if nothing else.

Chelsea left after about ten minutes of our discussing the date for Monday, after all she had only come over during her 'dinner' break. Breaks for us were short, a half hour at a time. Well, at least a half hour unless you could talk your relief into letting you take longer, which wasn't very often unless they were doing you a favor. The rest of the evening went fairly smooth, if a bit slow. One nice thing for working at Boat Tag was the close out process. On other games you had to do an inventory of what prizes were given out and what was still left in the game. At Boat Tag there were no prices involved so all we had to worry about was the money brought in.

Once my game was closed I stuck around a little bit to talk to Chelsea and make sure we were still good for meeting up at the mall the next evening. Even though they lived in Morgan the Layton Hills Mall was the closest mall for them, roughly about 30-40 minutes away. For me it was just two exits down the freeway. I suggested just meeting up outside of the food court area since it would make it easy for us to find each other that way.

The next morning started much the same as any other. Waking up and taking the dog for a walk before deciding to go for my run. I felt like I needed the run that morning, with the pending blind date that night I had some nervous energy that needed an outlet. Music was a good one to help with that, it gave me something to focus on other than the fact I had a date with a girl I'd never met and knew very little about. The music for this morning was a little different from my usual. It was the soundtrack for a movie called Pure Country. Country wasn't a big interest for me, but there were a couple of artists I could listen to and in this case, George Strait was one of them. The movie itself had come out a couple of years prior and was a music-centered romance pretty much. I was though a fan of the love song at the end of it, Cross My Heart. It was only mildly twangy, with an acoustic guitar and a subtle string accompaniment that I thought worked well together.

With this run I decided I was going to do more than just a steady pace run. My mileage had been pretty good in recent days so I decided a little speed work couldn't hurt, so a fartlek run was on the agenda for the day. In that type of run you vary the pace over the course of the run. If you do the first half mile at an 8:00/mile pace you'd speed up the next half mile, at least depending on how long you wanted to maintain it. I'd always been good at pacing and could get a pretty educated guess at the actual pace I was doing. It also helped that I had a few routes in the area that I could do where the distances were already measured out and familiar. With a fartlek run especially this was important so you would know how long you had been at whatever pace you were doing.