the vampire diaries matt and elena first date - l.j smith (first color ebook reader .TXT) 📗

“he looks like a jumpy one to me.”
Meredith: “Then he can’t take her out. Nobody jumps Elena—”
Bonnie: “He can’t take her anyway. He hasn’t asked our permission!”
Caroline: “I think I’ll go with him instead. He and I go way back and he’s cute!”
Meredith: “Cute? He’s delicious! And a quarterback, too. Although he hasn’t filled out yet.”
Caroline: “He should eat more meat.”
Bonnie: “He has blond hair and blue eyes. Just like a fairy tale.”
Caroline: “I say we kidnap him and keep him for ourselves.”
Meredith: “It all depends on how well he pleads for it.”
Pleads? Matt thought. What are they going to make me do, get on my knees?
Elena, who had calmly been putting on a silvery-blue bolero jacket and checking her face in a small compact mirror, now snapped the mirror shut.
“They’re a nuisance,” she said to Matt, nodding at the three girls. “But it’s easiest if you just ask their permission to take me out. That’s what they want, but if we don’t hurry we’ll be late. Try to make it flowery, too; they like that.”
Flowery? Make a flowery speech in front of three of the harshest critics on guys that humankind had ever produced? While Elena was listening in?
Matt cleared his throat, choked, and felt a sharp slap from behind. Uncle Joe was helping him again. He opened his mouth with no idea of what was going to say. What came out was:
“O fairest blossoms of the night . . . help me in my desperate plight!
Please let me steal this flower rare—to watch her with devoted care,
I need to beg your kind approval
Before I risk her quick removal.”
There was a profound silence. At last Caroline shook back her bronze hair and said, “I suppose you had it all made up before. That halfback Terry Watson told you. Or that other guy on the football team—what’shisname—“
“No, they didn’t,” Matt said, getting his courage from two places: his back pocket, and his long association with Caroline Forbes. “Nobody told me and I don’t plan to tell anybody else. But if we don’t get out of here, now, we’re going to be late. So can I take her or not?”
To his surprise all the girls began laughing and clapping. “We say: yes!” Meredith cried, and then they were all yelling it, and Bonnie threw him a kiss.
“Just one thing,” Aunt Judith said. “Please tell me where you’re going tonight, in case—well, you know.”
“Of course,” Matt said, without a glance up at the girls. “It’s Chez Amaury.”
There was a rustle above him, murmurings in all different cadences, the gist of which was, “Wow!”
Elena said softly, “That’s one of my favorites.”
One of her favorites. Matt felt himself shrink—then, with a kick in the butt from Uncle Joe, straightened up and felt better. At least he’d picked a good restaurant.
And then, before Matt knew what was happening, he was being hustled out the door. And then he was alone on the porch . . . with Elena.
“I’m sorry about that circus,” she said in her smooth, gentle voice, looking up at him like a little girl. “But they insist on doing it to all new boys. It’s really juvenile, but we started it back in junior high. Yours was the best poem I’ve ever heard.”
Who could be mad at her? Matt escorted her to the car and opened the passenger door for her as quickly as he could and got her settled in. Then he ran around to his side of The Garbage Heap and got in himself.
“So,” Elena said after he’d made a turn away from town, “are we going somewhere before the restaurant?” She spoke without even seeming to see—or smell—anything unusual about the vehicle.
“Yeah, our first stop—that’s a secret. I think we may just make it by seven-thirty. I hope you like it.”
For the first time, Elena laughed out loud, glancing at him sideways. And the laughter was warm and genuine and like a soothing balm to all Matt’s senses. The glance was quick, intelligent and merry. “You’re just full of surprises,” Elena said, and to his surprise, she slipped a slender, cool hand in his.
Matt couldn’t explain the sensation then. It was simply like lightning flowing up from her cool fingers into his palm and up his arm and then on upward until it fried his brain with a million volts.
It was the best thing that had ever happened to him.
It was also lucky that his car knew the way to the flower shop all by itself, because hisbrain definitely wasn’t there to direct it. Elena talked without chattering, and
without leaving any awkward pauses when he had to gulp in air. She talked about decorating for the Fall Fling, told an amusing story about how, while trying to disentangle the colored spotlights for the Fling, she’d ended up caught in the rafters, and finished up with a genuinely funny joke that wasn’t dirty or a putdown of any culture, race or sex.
Matt Honeycutt fell in love.
He hadn’t realized he hadn’t been in love before: only infatuated. Of course anybody could become infatuated with Elena, the way that bees were drawn to flowers. She sent out pheromones; she conformed with the perfect image of the perfect girl that was somehow woven into every Caucasian boy’s genes, or else that was propagandized into them by the time they were three years old. Elena’s beauty was perfect, absolutely without flaw. But if that was as far as you went, you weren’t talking about love.
Love was when you got to know the girl behind the mask—as he was sure he was getting to do now. Love was when you saw the world through the eyes of an innocent, merry, amusing young girl, all of which he couldn’t help doing when she spoke. Sure, she was a little bit stuck on herself, but how could she not be, the way everyone treated her? He didn’t think it was such a bad thing. He wanted to pamper her.
“Okay,” he said, “We’re coming up to the first stop. Shut your eyes.”
Elena laughed. The very sound of her voice was like birdsong. Matt got out of the car.
And then his heart started pounding—and not in a good way. The door to The Flowery was closed and its windows were dark. He’d planned everything out beforehand, had even paid beforehand for a single, white rose. He was going to give it to Elena, with
one single piece of feathery fern behind it and a spray of baby’s breath in front of it—and he’d even asked for it to be tied with a blue bow!
And now—the door wouldn’t open under his wrenching hand. He’d wasted too much time. He’d blown it. The florists had gone, and they hadn’t even left his rose in a box by the door.
Matt didn’t know how he got the courage to get into the car again.
But Elena was smiling at him, her eyes open.
“Elena, I’m sorry—I—just—”
“It’s not your fault—it’s mine for making you late. Oh, Matt, I’m so sorry! But this isn’t a dance. You didn’t need to get me flowers.”
Matt opened his mouth to tell the story of the white rose, then shut it again. He wanted so much to tell her, but wouldn’t that make him seem even more pathetic? In the end he gritted his teeth and said in a voice he tried to make light,
“Oh, it was just something I was going to get for you. Never mind. Maybe I’ll have another chance tonight.”
“Are we at least on time now?”
Matt looked at the clock. “Yeah, just barely. Make sure you’re strapped in.”
And then Matt had a once-in-a-lifetime experience: seeing Elena do her comfort act. At first, she said nothing, did nothing, just sat a little forward, smiling to show she liked the song that was playing. And then, when he managed to gulp the ball of disappointment down his throat and swallow it, he realized that she was looking at him and smiling. And he couldn’t help smiling back.
“Hey, we’re going to be on time,” he said, and he realized that he was saying it happily. The night had just begun. There might be those strolling flower sellers at Chez Amaury. He’d get her a whole sweetheart bouquet. How could he be unhappy when the incomparable Elena Gilbert was with him?
They wheeled into the parking lot at 7:59 p.m., seatbelts already unfastened as they cruised up to the valet stand. Matt hurriedly handed his key to a valet driver, and tried to turn away before he could see the man’s reaction to Matt’s car.
He didn’t turn fast enough. But he saw no revulsion, no sneer of disgust on the valet’s face. Instead he saw fascination. Following the valet driver’s gaze, he saw a slim, swaying figure in blue waiting for him.
That was when Matt knew that his luck had changed. Elena had chosen to wear just the bolero jacket that matched her stunning little dress. She must be freezing but she looked gorgeous. He slipped around her and held the door open for her and they both entered the dim, plush interior of Chez Amaury.
The employee who led them to their booth was snooty. He smiled graciously and a little wonderingly upon Elena, but when his gaze swung around to Matt he merely sniffed and looked sarcastic.
It didn’t matter. They were in a bubble of their own little world together, Matt and Elena, and everything was right. Matt had never been any good at talking to girls. He got by by being a champion listener. But somehow Elena drew words right out of him without seeming to try to. He liked to talk to her. She was fun. Her words . . . sparkled.
And she had a will of steel behind those lapis eyes and that magnolia blossom skin. When the waiter rather deliberately gave them their menus, murmuring something
about alcohol and I.D.s, Elena let loose a volley of French which had the effect of sending the man creeping—almost slinking—away.
“I’m studying French for this next summer,” Elena told him, cheerfully watching the waiter depart. “I can already insult people in it pretty well. I asked him why they’d kicked him out of France where everyone our age drinks wine.”
“What’s happening this summer?” Matt asked.
“I’m going to France. It’s not an exchange thing; it’s just something I want to do. To stave off boredom, I guess.” She gave him a smile that seemed to turn the whole world into dazzle. “I hate to be bored.”
Don’t be boring. Don’t be boring. The command thudded through Matt’s brain as Elena began to tell a story, while his higher thought processes were in a whirl of confusion.
She’s so beautiful. . . delicate, like fine china. . . her hair like old gold in the darkened restaurant . . . and by candlelight her eyes are almost violet—with gold splattered across them. Jeez, I can even smell her perfume in this tiny booth—I guess they gave us the worst that they had . . . but it’s still pretty impressive to me.
Elena finished the story and began laughing. He laughed with her, unable to help it. Her laugh wasn’t shrill; it wasn’t sharp; it was as melodious as a brook winding its way in and out of a forest glade. Wow, check it out, that was almost poetry, Matt thought. Should he tell her he’d written a real poem about her at home? Nah, he’d bet dozens of other guys had said that to her.
“But I’ve been doing all the talking,” Elena said, with a little side glance as if to say, And you’ve been doing all the staring. “Tell