Olivia sits quietly staring off into the distance as if in deep concentration.
“Hey, Liv! Where are you going?” Nicholas interrupts her daydream.
“Ah! Sorry. I do that.” She responds with a smirk.
“I’ve noticed. You do that a lot! You gonna eat?” He asks as he points to the half-eaten pizza sitting on the table in between them.
“No, thank you. I’m stuffed.” She responds, politely.
A quiet moment passes, as they both sit wondering what each other is thinking about.
“Ya know, there’s always room for dessert though!” Olivia blurts out to do away with the silence.
Nicholas looks directly in Olivia’s eyes, squints and tilts his head.
“You don’t want to eat any more either…”
Olivia tries to hold back a smile in order to keep from reaffirming Nicholas’s theory.
“You slowed down eating 5 minutes before I stopped and you’ve only touched your soda since. You don’t want to eat dessert because you have room left.” He stares far off again.
“You…You want to stay,” he looks back at Olivia “here. Longer.” Nicholas tilts his head a bit further to conclude his statement.
Olivia stares at Nicholas for a brief moment trying to think of a response.
“You! You always do that! Why do you do that to me! Stop it. Get out of my head!” She says trying to hide her smile. “And so what? So what if I want to stay here longer, its nice here.” She crosses her arms.
Nicholas lowers his voice and looks off into that nothingness that he always does.
“Yeah…but that’s not it.”
Olivia lowers her brow.
“So what are you saying?”
A brief pause, then Nicholas quickly snaps out of it.
“Nothing… What do you want…”
Olivia, exasperated, cuts him off, “I don’t know!”
He, continues, “…for dessert?”
Without missing a beat, Olivia responds, “Pie.”
A wry smile comes over his face. “Me too.”
She hesitates for a moment. Suddenly, she gasps. “You! You’re bad!” She tries to hide her now blushing face with her napkin.
Nicholas, chuckles. “You know, I’m only teasing.”
She throws her napkin across the small table at his face. “I bet you are!”
With an expression of focused intent, he abruptly puts forty dollars down on the table and stands. Extending his hand for hers he says, “Come on. I know a great place for pie.”
She smiles and pulls herself out of her chair by his hand. They walk hand in hand out of the restaurant and into the night.
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