BWWM Interracial Romance 3: Family Heart (3 page)

Jessica found, when she woke up on Friday morning, that the date she had been looking forward to for a few days now filled her with dread. Logan had followed through on his promise to call her the next day; he had told her he made reservations for dinner, and asked if she had seen the new movie that had come out the previous week—an adventure-romance with a sense of humor, according to the reviews. Jessica admitted that she hadn’t, and for a while, after she confirmed that she would let him pick her up at home and finished the phone call, she had felt excited. But by the end of the day she was already starting to feel doubts.

That night, she’d dreamed of Evan. In the dream, she was getting ready to go on her date, changing out of her work clothes and into something more casual, doing her makeup, and her mother called her. Jessica had rushed out of her bedroom, heart beating faster at the thought of actually going on a date for the first time in over a year. But when the door opened, it wasn’t Logan on the other side of it; it was Evan. Jessica had nearly fallen backwards. “Evan?” she had said in the dream, startled and shocked. Evan, the man she had loved, with his dark hair and hazel eyes, was standing before her.

“What are you so surprised for, Jessie?” Evan asked her, grinning broadly. “I told you I’d always come back, didn’t I?” Jessica had tried to run to him, to cross the seemingly tiny distance between herself and the man she had lost—the man she had loved so much it had seemed like his loss would never stop hurting. But as she started to run the room stretched, pulling him farther away, and the more she tried to run to beat the room, the faster and farther it stretched. She couldn’t get to him. Jessica started to panic, her heart hammering in her chest, thinking that if she didn’t catch up to the strange stretching of the room, she would never be able to get back to Evan—that she was letting him down. He had come back to her, but he was going away again, and she couldn’t bear the thought of losing him again.

She had awakened in a cold sweat, just when she would have nearly reached Evan; and since then it had been difficult not to feel like agreeing to go on a date with Logan was some kind of betrayal, some kind of failure in her devotion to Evan. She knew, objectively, that Evan couldn’t possibly come back—she had been at his funeral and his interment. But the dream shook her up. As the days passed, Jessica had tried to keep her enthusiasm for the date up, but it had been difficult to make herself look at it with the same amount of anticipation and excitement as she knew she should have.

When Friday came, Jessica made herself go home early, knowing that it wouldn’t be fair to Logan to call off their date at the last minute. She knew, too—Gail had told her, over and over again, along with her mother, along with her own sister—that she would have to move on eventually. “You have to learn how to be okay with Evan dying, Jessie,” her mother had said when Jessica had confided in the older woman about the dream she’d had. “He isn’t coming back to you, and I hate that for you—I know you loved him. But you have to figure out how to start your own life back up again. All you’re doing now is going through the motions; you don’t have that look of real joy on your face that you had before.” Jessica wondered, thinking on the advice, whether she had the ability to feel that kind of joy—or whether it had gone away from her with Evan’s sudden death.

She took a quick shower, and she changed into comfortable clothes: a pair of jeans and a tee shirt that she loved. Jessica put on her makeup and did her hair and tried to push aside the feeling she had that she wasn’t ready, that she shouldn’t be doing what she was doing. Part of her mind told her that it wasn’t fair to Logan to go on a date with him when she was still so shaken up about Evan. But she told herself firmly that it was part of the process. She had to go on a date eventually. She had to get close to someone, she had to at least make an effort to put her sense of loss behind her and rejoin the world. Even if things didn’t work out with Logan, or didn’t move beyond a single date, it was good for her to make the effort.

Logan was—thankfully—five minutes early to pick her up. Jessica smiled to herself when her mom called her out of the bedroom, telling her that her date had just driven up. She took a deep breath.
He got here early; he must be at least a little interested.
Jessica’s cheeks burned with a blush.
I should give him a chance. Maybe it’ll be okay.
She came out of her room just in time for Logan to knock at the door and hurried past her mother, who hoped she would have a good time. “I won’t wait up,” the older woman said with a little grin and Jessica rolled her eyes. Whether the date went well or not, she fully intended to be home before midnight.

When she opened the door, Logan was standing there, with a bouquet of flowers: daisies, in fact. Jessica’s eyes widened. “How did you know?” she asked him, startled at the insight. Daisies were her favorite of all flowers—a fact that even Evan hadn’t been able to keep straight in his mind. He had always thought it was pansies; a confusion that had become the basis of a running joke in their relationship, with Evan buying her pansy-covered gifts at every occasion. Logan smiled shyly.

“Gail, of course.” Jessica found herself echoing his smile, accepting the flowers from his hands and telling him to wait just a moment while she put them in some water. For a moment, in the kitchen, Jessica looked at the daisies in the vase she had selected for them: in yellow, orange, and red, the cheery, deep color couldn’t help but make her smile in appreciation. The fact that Logan had taken the time to find out her favorite flower—and had remembered it when Gail had told him—was definitely a mark in his favor. Jessica realized that she was keeping her date waiting and hurried back to him.

“Sorry! I was just admiring them,” she said, blushing again slightly. Logan extended his arm and, with only a heartbeat’s hesitation, Jessica took it, letting him lead her out of the house and to his car.

Logan put her at ease almost immediately as they rode to the movie theater, asking about her week and about her job. Jessica in turn asked about his work; she would never have thought that she could find a topic like construction interesting, but the way Logan described the interactions with his employees, with his clients, she found herself laughing. “You know, if I’d just seen you on the street, or wherever, I don’t think I could have pegged you for someone in construction,” Jessica admitted. Logan asked her why not, and Jessica looked down at her lap with a blush rising up into her cheeks. “I sort of always thought of construction workers as being like--big guys, with beer guts, or at least overdeveloped arms and shoulders.” Logan laughed.

“I’m stronger than I look! I’ve always been kind of on the slim side, but I can work a site fairly well. And anyway, most of my work is supervision--don’t need huge muscles for that.” He asked about the neighborhood where she lived, and Jessica found out that while they lived in different parts of Houston, when he had been younger, Logan had lived only a handful of blocks away from where she had grown up. Every so often, as Logan drove them from Jessica’s house to the theater, she stole little glances at him, comparing him to Evan, though she felt guilty each time. Evan hadn’t been quite as tall as Logan, and his skin had had a swarthy tone to it,  a product of his mixed race heritage--Native American, black, and white. In contrast, Logan’s skin was much paler, the freckles painting a picture of a man who didn’t pick up much of a tan even after spending hours in the sun. Evan had darker hair and lighter eyes, and had had a sturdier frame--more built through the shoulders and back, with thick thighs that Jessica had loved. Logan was broad through the shoulders, but not particularly muscular, though she could see the ripple and flex of muscles in his forearms where the sleeves of his shirt were rolled up.

Logan encouraged her to get a small snack at the counter after they collected their tickets, though he reminded her that they were going to dinner afterwards. Jessica chose red vines and the child size soda, while Logan got a frozen Coke and chocolate-covered cookie dough. “We both have sweet teeth,” he observed, leading her towards the number twelve theater.

“When I was younger,” Jessica told him, pausing as he opened the door and held it for her, “I used to be able to eat packets of sugar--just so many of them without making myself sick.” Logan chuckled.

“I liked to dump pixie stick powder on my jelly sandwiches.” Jessica made a faintly disgusted noise, though she knew that there had been a point in her life when she would have delighted at the idea.

“You know, when I was about seven that would have been delightful…” Jessica looked around as they came into the theater, trying to find the best possible seat. They had arrived a little bit early; there weren’t many people as yet, just a few teenagers up in the farthest-back seats. Logan gestured to some center seats and Jessica went in that direction. “As much as I still love sweets, I can’t tolerate as much of them as before--probably a good thing. Curvy is one thing, but round?” Logan chuckled behind her and Jessica shot him a glance over her shoulder.

“It would be curvy still--just probably not the kind of curve you like,” he said with a playful smile. “But I do think you’d still be a beautiful woman even with a handful of extra pounds on you.” Jessica rolled her eyes and sat down, snatching her drink from him in mock-protest.

As they settled into the movie, Logan’s hand reached out across the arm rest and took Jessica’s, his fingers twining between hers as the lights went down. She looked down, feeling an odd spurt of electric sensation between them--and admired the contrast of her dark skin against his pale tones, the play of shadow and light as the previews started. Their fingers and arms created an almost-design that reminded Jessica of the chiaroscuro-themed photo shoot the
Texan
was including in the next issue. She turned her attention back to the movie--or did as best as she could to. She was keenly aware of Logan’s presence next to her in the seat; when his thumb swept along the inside of her palm, Jessica nearly jumped at the frisson of tension that shot through her, the electric tingling of sensation that the simple, idle caress had caused.

More than once her mouth went dry as she caught a whiff of Logan’s cologne when he shifted next to her, or when she was pulled out of the film--which she otherwise very much enjoyed--by the brush of Logan’s shirt against her skin, or his knee against hers. Part of Jessica felt as though she was betraying Evan by being so attracted to Logan, but part of her was just as anxiously excited as she had been when she had gone on movie dates as a teenager, wondering if the man she was with would make a move on her in the darkness. She was almost disappointed that Logan, apart from a few idle caresses, didn’t seem inclined to try and cop a feel or start making out with her. But Jessica reminded herself that she and Logan both were adults and that it would be childish for him to try something like that.

After the movie, Logan kept her hand in his as he led her out of the theater and back out to his car. They talked idly about the film, though Jessica’s body was thrumming and humming, buzzing with excitement from having been in the dark, so close to the man whose thumb still occasionally swept across the sensitive creases and lines of her palm. She noticed that his hands were rougher than hers--his fingers callused, though not as hard as her father’s had been when she had been a child. Jessica heard Gail’s voice in her head, suggesting that Jessica would end up going home with Logan--and heard herself telling her friend that she was not the kind of woman who went home with a man on the first date. They continued their chat in the car on the way to the restaurant, just up the street from the movie theater, and Jessica made herself calm down, taking deep breaths to dispel the tingling, electric feeling of deep physical attraction that Logan had somehow inspired in her. It wasn’t like her at all--she couldn’t quite believe she had responded so viscerally, so physically to someone other than Evan.

At the restaurant, their conversation turned to food--what they liked, what they didn’t like. Jessica had done a study abroad while she had been in college, and told Logan about the night she and her friends had dared each other to try the strangest foods they could find in the city of Edinburgh, where they were all staying. “And so, of course, someone came up with haggis as an absolute requirement,” Jessica said ruefully.

“Is it as gross as it sounds?” Jessica shrugged, taking a bite of her hamburger; the restaurant had done it just how she liked it--right on the edge between medium and medium-rare, juicy but not quite bloody.

“Honestly, it’s not bad. It isn’t something I’d go out of my way to eat, but if I ever find my way back to Edinburgh and someone puts it in front of me, I’d be able to eat it without being grossed out. The worst thing is head cheese.” They both shuddered at that idea.

“I’m glad you’re an adventurous eater,” Logan told Jessica with a little smile. “I mean, hamburgers aren’t exactly adventurous fare, but Zachary, my son, has had me on a pretty steady diet of bland food lately.” Jessica chuckled.

“Picky eater?” she asked. Logan shook his head.

“It’s not so much that he’ll refuse to eat something,” Logan explained, “As it is that he’ll develop an absolute fixation on something and want it for every meal for days at a time. The most recent is macaroni and cheese--the boy is mad for that stuff.” Jessica laughed out loud.

“You know, when I was about that age, I had mac and cheese mania myself. So don’t worry, Zachary could totally grow up to eat haggis and blood pudding and pate with happiness and verve.”