He expected the next words out of her mouth to be telling him that she’d been kidding. That it had been a joke. It was so strange not to be able to look in her eyes and see if she was serious. Or if she’d been kidding. She had to have been kidding, right?
“I’ve never had sex. I’m a virgin.”
Okay, maybe not.
Wait. She was thirty-two.
There weren’t thirty-two-year-old virgins, were there?
Apparently, there were. Josh’s mind was officially blown. He honestly could not believe what he was hearing. He thought it was unbelievable that she’d never been on a date, but now this…
He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. He tried to think of what the appropriate response to hearing that information would be, but he was at a total loss.
“Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. Talk about TMI,” she laughed, but it was a forced laugh. He could tell that she felt uncomfortable with what she’d just revealed. He didn’t want her to feel uncomfortable with him ever.
“No don’t apologize. You can tell me anything I was just…I don’t…” He felt like such an asshole but he didn’t know the right words to say. He was in shock. Maybe he shouldn’t be. Maybe that information shouldn’t surprise him. But it did.
The curtain rustled and he heard Kenna walking into the room. “Okay, we have your entrées here. Are you finished with your salads? Do you want me to clear?”
“Sure,” he responded automatically even though he hadn’t finished his salad.
At the same time Audrey said, “Yeah.”
Kenna went into detail about their main dish, explaining the sauce that was dripped over the chicken, how the veggies were blanched before they were sautéed in herbs and oil, and how the potatoes were hand whipped and drizzled with a garlic butter before saying, “Do you have any questions, or do you need anything?”
“No.” Josh replied.
“Nope,” Audrey answered.
“Okay, just let me know if you do.”
With that she left and they were alone again.
“This smells delicious,” Audrey said.
“It does,” Josh agreed.
They both began eating their main dish and Josh was still trying to think of something to say to address the virgin elephant in the room.
But Audrey let him off the hook when she asked, “So how did you get roped into this?”
He told her that Nonna had told him he needed to go eat without the lights on, which she chuckled at. Then she explained that Viv had called her while she was at Golden Years because she was stuck in traffic and couldn’t make it.
The conversation then turned to the work she was doing at the senior living facility and how badly he wished that Nonna would move there. The rest of the meal and dessert continued, and they easily fell into their regular pattern of joking around and talking about everything and nothing. But in the back of his mind all he kept thinking about was that she was a virgin.
Audrey’s a virgin, was playing on a constant loop in his head. He knew that his brain shouldn’t be stuck on that, but it was.
He’d noticed when he was feeling anxious that would happen a lot. He would repeat things over and over in his head and get stuck on a certain thought, almost to the point of obsessing over it.
There was one moment between them when they both reached for their glasses and their hands brushed one another’s. The graze of skin on skin caused tingles to spread from his fingers up his arm and through his body like a wildfire. He had no clue if it had affected her the same way, but it took him a moment to recover from it. He had to take a few deep breaths and a large drink of cold water to get his body under control.
He’d touched Audrey before, but never when they were both blindfolded in the dark. There was something about those circumstances that made an innocent brush of hands feel much more intimate.
The rest of the meal went by without any further accidental grazes. And when they were done, Kenna escorted them out of the room the same way she’d escorted them in. As they walked out single file, Audrey’s hands were on Kenna’s shoulders and his were on Audrey’s. Josh tried not to pay attention to how soft her skin felt beneath his touch, or how silky her hair felt as it brushed against his fingers.
He heard the curtain being pulled back. They went a few steps and then stopped. “Okay, you can remove your blindfolds. You may want to shield your eyes or look down; the light can be a little jarring.”
Josh’s heart was pounding heavily against his ribs as he lifted his arms and pulled the material off his head. He squinted when he opened his eyes and saw that Audrey was doing the same. They both handed the blindfolds back to Kenna and she gave them back their phones.