Chapter Twelve

I’d taken a shower and begun getting ready at four o’clock, a full two hours before Jacob was set to pick me up. I straightened my hair, painted my fingers and toes and even applied a thin layer of nude lipstick.

Wear something really nice, he’d said, the words playing over in my head in the exact tone that he’d spoken them. I bit my lip as I stared in the mirror. It wasn’t a concern over my dress that was making me anxious, it was the entire statement as a whole. The fact that he’d prefaced our date with an expectation of, ‘really nice.’

I certainly didn’t mind ‘really nice,’ in fact it was exciting, but that same excitement had been twirling in my stomach since breakfast and had now grown into a flurry of anxious anticipation. I had no idea where or what we were doing. The nicest restaurant in town didn't really qualify as a “dressing up” kind of place, so that meant we had to be going to at least the next town over.

My belly felt empty yet somehow full, with weightless pulses of en