The Frog Prince by Jane Porter

Author:Jane Porter [Porter, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781940296272
Publisher: Tule Publishing Group
Published: 2014-03-20T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

The manager takes the two menus from the hostess. “If you’ll come this way,” he says, and leads us to our table. Table 37. Right in the middle of the long wall, right where Paul didn’t want to be.

Paul hesitates at the table as the manager waits silently, expressionlessly. This is what he does for a living. He can wait all night if necessary.

“Where would you like to sit?” I ask Paul, desperately ready to move beyond the seating stage of dinner. I hate tension—avoid conflict like the plague—and I can’t bear to continue in this vein.

Paul shrugs. “I don’t care.”

“I’ll sit on the booth side, then,” I offer, and I slide carefully between tables and settle into the booth, the seat sinking slightly.

Paul sits in the chair opposite me. The table’s small, we’re practically touching, and the restaurant is beginning to fill up. The hostess seats a couple on one side of us. The middle tables are virtually full.

As I pick up my menu, Paul mutters, “I can’t sit here.”

I look up at him. “Why not?”

“I can’t face the wall. I always sit with my back to the wall. I have to be able to see the door. I have to see who’s coming and going.”

If I had known Paul was going to be such a pain in the ass, I would never have agreed to dinner. “Would you like to switch places with me?”

“Yes.”

I get up and give the hostess an apologetic smile as I have to squeeze past the couple she’s now trying to seat on the other side of us. And now Paul’s squeezing past the couple, and it’s a four-way traffic stop with everyone backing up, moving forward, turning a corner, sitting down.

It’s a damn production, and I’m roiling on the inside, but I take his chair. His chair is hard. And warm. For some reason that gives me the creeps. I suppose if I liked him, if I were more attracted, it’d be a nonissue, but right now, thinking of my butt sitting where his butt has just been is making me feel a little squirmy.

But Paul’s still not happy. “Now you’re too tall.”

I look across the table, try to avoid my reflection in the big mirror running behind Paul’s head. “What?”

“Can you scrunch down a little?”

I smile, but I feel peculiar on the inside. I’m not understanding. Something’s happening, and I don’t understand what it is.

“People are going to think I’m short.” He’s talking again, probably because I’m just staring at him, my mind blank, my face blank, unable to process anything.

“People will think you’re taller than me,” and he’s still talking. His mouth is moving, and I’m watching his mouth, thinking this is weird, he’s so weird, but I can’t seem to say or do anything. “But you’re not taller than me, Holly. I’m taller than you.”

“I know. And nobody is going to think that.”

He gives a little bounce on the bench, and yes, okay, he is rather low, but he’s no lower than I was, and I never worried about who was taller or shorter.

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