“Let me get my planner.” Nina carried the remaining books back to the counter and dug underneath for her planner.
“Wow,” said Tom, once she’d pulled it out. “That is a serious planner.” He thought about his own planner, which was a small section of his brain that rarely had anything to do. If he had more than two or three things to remember, he might jot them on a Post-it, but that was about it. This girl might be a little hard-core organized for him. What would she be like in bed? Two minutes on this nipple, please, then forty seconds of . . .
Nina looked at her planner as if seeing it for the first time. It was big and heavily accessorized. It had bookmarks sticking out at various points; it had ribbons and tabs; it had a pocket full of special, planner-sized equipment.
“I enjoy being organized,” she replied. “It’s just . . .” She opened the planner to that week, and Tom frowned when he saw how full the page was.
“Wow,” he commented. “You’ve got a lot going on.”
“Yeah.” Nina nodded, suddenly a little embarrassed. “Uh, this week isn’t good. How about next week?” She flipped over a few pages. “No, that’s pretty full, too.”
Tom watched her face as she looked through the planner. Her nose was straight and delicate, with a speckling of freckles. Tom had a relatively active love life—he was an attractive thirty-year-old man in Los Angeles—but he hadn’t fallen for anyone in several years. He liked the women he dated, but none of them had captured his imagination the way this woman had. He thought about her, wondered how her skin might feel, how his hand might fit on her waist, about holding her against himself . . . He frowned and tried to focus on the actual person in front of him rather than the adult version he suddenly had in his head.
Nina looked up at Tom and found him gazing intently at her. She blushed. “Uh, how about three weeks from now? I have a Friday night . . .”
Tom clunked back into reality, hard. “Three weeks?” He was nonplussed, taken aback. “Really?”
“Yeah . . .” She looked down at this week.
He craned his head to look at the page. “What about that?” He poked his finger at the page. “It literally says you have nothing to do tonight.”
Nina shook her head. “Nothing actually means something.”
He looked at her.
“I mean, it means something to me; it means reading.”
“You have enforced reading?”
“It’s my job.” And I’d rather be reading than anything else, but that’s not relevant.
“Wait, what about that?” He pointed to the entry that said Movie Night. “We could go to a movie together.” He looked triumphant. “You already have a ticket.”
“Good point,” replied Nina, “but not this weekend. I’m going to see Aliens with my friends. It’s set up already.”
“How about the week after?” Suddenly, Tom was embarrassed. If Nina didn’t want to go out with him, he wasn’t going to keep pushing it. It wasn’t that he expected her to clear her schedule for him completely and immediately, but a little bit of mutual interest would be nice.
She had flipped ahead. “No, I’m going to a Jane Austen movie marathon with Liz, my boss.” She looked up and smiled. “Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility. Awesome, right?”
“Uh, sure.” This was maybe not the good idea he had thought it was. Maybe this girl wasn’t a good fit for him after all. He hadn’t read Jane Austen, hadn’t seen any of those movies, didn’t like reading, didn’t like being organized, didn’t like knowing what every minute of every day held for the next week, let alone the next month. Then she moved her head and there was that scent again, honey and lemons, and he knew he still wanted to take her out. Wanted to see if he could get under that organized layer.
Nina was still flipping through the planner. “But I can do the week after. Probably.”
Probably? “Do you have a piece of paper?” Tom asked, his smile fading.
Nina found him one and handed it to him, frowning. He took a pen from the pot next to the register and scribbled on the piece of paper. He handed it to her.
“That’s my number. If you get a cancellation, text me. I’ll see if I can fit you in.”
He turned and walked out of the store, trying to cover his disappointment and—at least from where Nina was standing—being completely successful.
“Well, that’s a load of balls,” said Polly, when Nina told her about it later.
Nina looked dubiously at her. “Is it? Or is it that I’m lame for being too wedded to my schedule.”
Polly was nothing if not fair minded. “Well, there’s that, too. I mean,” she added quickly, “I’m not saying you’re lame; I’m saying sometimes you get a little anal about your schedule.”
“I do?”
Polly leaned back against the nearest bookcase and nodded. “Do you remember the time the Spin studio flooded and you were completely thrown, because you had scheduled a Spin class and you weren’t sure if you could fit anything else in?”
Nina tugged her away from the bookcase, straightened the books, and frowned at her. “Well, Spin takes eighty-two minutes, and that’s what I had allotted.”
“Exactly. The very fact that you know Spin takes eighty-two minutes . . .” Polly paused. “Wait. Spin class is forty-five minutes long.”
Nina nodded. “Yes, but it takes three minutes for me to walk there from here, seven minutes for me to change, a minute to adjust the bike and get a towel, two minutes afterward to cool down enough to leave the gym without dripping on everything, fourteen minutes to walk to Chipotle and get a salad, and then ten minutes to walk home from Chipotle to my place.”
“How on earth can you predict that getting dinner will take fourteen minutes? What if there’s a long line, or their salad bar catches fire?”
“They don’t have a salad bar. Plus, lettuce isn’t the engine of combustion you seem to think it is.”
Polly looked exasperated. “That’s not the point. I’m saying life is unpredictable. Any number of random things could happen.”
“Of course,” said Nina. “My plan is based on averages and experience. It takes that much time, like, most of the time, so I plan accordingly. I can be flexible. I can roll with the punches.”
Polly snorted. “What about when Phil got worms and you had to take him to the vet?”
“That’s a great example,” replied Nina, starting to be a little stung. “I cleared my schedule completely that day. No hesitation at all.”
Polly laughed. “Yeah, because you couldn’t work out how to reschedule everything to allow for the vet appointment, so instead of trying, you canceled it all.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is that you’re inflexible.” Polly smiled at Nina. “And that you’d rather blow it all up than spend time fixing things. But it doesn’t really matter, unless you care that you missed out on a date because of it.”
Nina shook her head. “He wasn’t right for me, anyway. He didn’t read.”
“Reading isn’t the only thing in the world, Nina.”