“No,” he replied and flashed that incredible half grin again. “But if you want one, you can order it, and I’ll slip you some cash when no one is looking.”
I think my mouth must have dropped open as I stared in disbelief. Ethan suddenly looked away, and his hand went up into his hair, making it impossibly messier than it already was.
“I’m nineteen,” he blurted out.
I felt my heart sink.
Chapter 4—Decision
I looked across the table at him, meeting his eyes and trying not to register shock in mine, but I could tell by his expression, he saw it anyway.
“Wow,” I finally said softly. I waited for him to ask me how old I was, but he didn’t, so I decided to offer it up anyway. “I’m twenty-six.”
“I figured,” he said simply.
“How’s that?”
“Four years in undergrad, plus two for your master’s. Assuming you started college right after high school and didn’t fall behind at all, you would have to be at least twenty-four.”
I couldn’t fault his logic.
“I was nineteen when I graduated high school,” I said. “Summer baby. I also took a year off between my undergraduate degree and master’s program.”
“Is that going to bother you?” he asked, his intense eyes boring into mine again. “The age difference, I mean?”
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “If we were in a relationship, maybe…”
“What did you like studying in college the most?”
His abrupt change of topic was extremely welcome, but there was still distance in his eyes that wasn’t there before.
“I liked a lot of things,” I said. “Obviously I had a lot of accounting and finance classes as well as economics…”
“Are those the classes you liked the most?”
“I needed them for my major.”
“What did you take that you liked?”
“Well, the past two years I have mostly focused on the classes I needed for my master’s,” I told him. “There wasn’t a lot of time for anything extra. I took a couple of lit classes.”
“Literature?” Ethan’s eyes brightened again. “What kind?”
“English and American, also one of German women writers. Those were all during my undergrad, though.”
“Who is your favorite author?”
“I have a lot of them,” I admitted. “It’s hard to choose just one. I love Austen, Bronte, Shelley, Poe, Tolkien, Anne Rice, and Stephen King—lots of different ones.”
“Sweet,” he said, and his smile glowed with the light of the fireplace and the light from his eyes. “I loved the Lord of the Rings movies.”
“They were all right,” I replied with a shrug. “I usually hate it when they take a great book and ruin it with a movie though.”
“Ruin it?” Ethan’s eyes widened. “Those were some of the best movies ever. I mean, the cave troll alone would have made a great flick! And you can’t tell me that Orlando Bloom wasn’t the most awesome Legolas there could ever be.”
“And that’s just the sort of thing I’m talking about. It was a journey about loyalty and friendship, and the movie had to make it a constant bloodbath just to keep teenage boys entertained.”
“That’s an extremely narrow-minded view of film,” Ethan argued. “Actually, if you look at…”