When they finished their drinks, he helped her carefully from the stool, and they walked next door. They didn’t have to wait for a table even though the place was packed.

“I know the owner,” he said, just as the hostess took them to a quiet booth in the back of the restaurant. Instead of sitting across from her, Alejandro slid onto the bench beside her, their knees brushing again. They read the menu together as he whispered his favorite dishes to her as if they were a love poem, his right hand resting on her thigh. She let him order for her, something she never normally did, simply because she liked the way his voice sounded in Spanish, and she liked the way he made her feel cared for.

Alejandro was the most eligible bachelor on campus not just because he was attractive and perfectly groomed but because he seemed unattainable, completely out of everyone’s league. Deja had made a fantasy of him, imagining that he would be as perfectly calm and cool as he was on campus, but he wasn’t quite that at all. He was a lot like the restaurant, actually; beautiful aesthetics but warm and unpretentious, and she found herself sinking into him. They talked and ate, and their legs rested together — her left kneecap to his right — and she forgot to be nervous as she came to know Alejandro as a person, not just a figment of her fantasies.

He paid for dinner, frowning at her suggestion that they go Dutch. He grabbed her hand again as they walked back to his car. The night was cooler now, and she leaned into his side for warmth. The skirt of her dress fluttered in the gentle wind, and she smoothed it with her free hand. Alejandro pretended not to notice the flash of her thighs, but she saw him lick his lips, and she leaned into him just a bit more.

It might have been too damn long since Deja’s last date, but Alejandro obliterated the fuzzy memory of the last man she’d gone out with. Whatever that date had been like, this was better, and it was over too soon. Alejandro opened the passenger door for her, and as soon as her butt hit the seat, her mood started to plummet. She didn’t want it to end.

Instead of taking the freeway back to Centreville, Alejandro took the slightly slower path home on the state road. It was a straight shot on a dark road with no lights, deer hazards, and whiteout warnings in the winter, and something about the darkness enveloping them soothed Deja’s sadness at the end of their date. Alejandro held her hand over the center console as he drove, a wistful smile on his face, and more light jazz on the radio.