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

me about you.”
“M-me? Well—I’m just an average guy.”
“Average guy! Quarterback and MVP for the football team. Tell me how it feels when you win a game out there, with everyone screaming and cheering.”
“Um. . . ” In all his years of playing football, nobody had ever asked him this. ”Well—” There was something wrong with him; he was going to be honest. “Uh, well . . . Actually, really it feels a lot like this!”
“Like eating French bread in a restaurant?”
“Oh. . . ” Matt hadn’t even realized that there was any bread. He’d completely missed seeing it put down. Now he broke off a hunk and spread it lavishly with butter, suddenly remembering that he hadn’t eaten any lunch.
Elena watched him in amusement over a glass of sparkling water.
“I would have thought you football guys weren’t allowed to eat butter,” she said, twinkling her eyes at him. Yeah, that was it. She could make them twinkle when she wanted! What a skill!
“It’s one of the four food groups,” he informed her earnestly, hoping she wouldn’t think he was crazy.. “Sugar, salt, fat and chocolate.”
“—and chocolate!” her voice chimed in with his as he finished. They both laughed again together.
This was so easy. It was like being with your favorite relative, only better. You could say anything, no matter how dumb, and it wouldn’t matter. She’d turn it into something witty. He’d never felt like this with any girl.
The waiter came back, but Elena waved him off with a languid hand. She wasn’t intimidated by the guy in the slightest. Matt added “courage” to the list of her virtues.
Suddenly he got goosebumps. This year he’d had to take a drama class to fill out his schedule, and they were performing “Two Gentlemen of Verona.” Matt just couldn’t get his mind into the play. Maybe it was because the actress for Sylvia was Caroline Forbes, who in fourth grade had done things like giving herself Indian burns and then running to tell the teacher Matt had done it. But right now, looking at Elena, words from the play—word perfect—came into his mind:
Who is Sylvia? what is she, That all our swains commend her? Holy, fair, and wise is she; The heaven such grace did lend her. . .
Who is Elena? he thought. What is she? That all the guys commend her? Holy, fair, and wise is she, the heavens such grace did lend her . . .
Oh crap, now I’m getting really sentimental, Matt thought. That was awful. And from what he’d heard, Elena wasn’t too holy, either, but she sure looked like an angel.
“Matt, can you tell me something?” Elena asked, her finger tracing a tiny flaw in the tablecloth.
Matt’s heart jumped. He’d missed the last few minutes of conversation. “Sure, what?” he said.
“What is it about boys and cars? Why are they so into them?”
For a moment Matt flushed. Just thinking of his ancient, battered, skeleton of a car made him wonder if she was making fun of him.
But she wasn’t. Her face was perfectly serious. She seemed to have forgotten what kind of car he had and was asking a general question about all guys.
“Well”—he had an impulse to rub the back of his neck but didn’t. “Cars are. . . the ideal car. . . um . . .”
“I wondered if it might somehow go back to the days of horses,” Elena said, tilting her head.
Suddenly neurons lit up in Matt’s brain. “Hey—that’s—well, that could be it—for me, at least. I spent a couple of years on a farm when I was a kid—you know, just a rinky-dink, little farm, but it had horses. And behind the stable where its horses were kept, was a stable of thoroughbred horses, racing horse, right?”
She nodded and he sighed.
“I just loved to watch those thoroughbreds moving. They were the most beautiful things you could imagine—for animals, I mean,” he added hastily.
“How were they beautiful?”
“Well—just—I don’t know. They were just incredible. They had these delicate long legs, and these heads that were always up in the air, with these manes always tossing and flowing. They moved in a way I just can’t describe—sort of always lazily, but you could just tell they had a lot of pent-up energy inside them, too. As if they wanted to be running as fast as they could, forever.” Matt reached for his Coke, suddenly realizing that he’d been talking for a long time. “Sorry, got a little carried away there. What I meant is that horses are speed, and so are cars. And I guess that’s one reason I like to think about them.”
“Don’t apologize. I thought that was really fascinating,” Elena said, and he realized that she was telling the truth, that she was interested. She’d been holding a bite of bread in her hand, forgotten.
“Thanks for listening,” Matt said. “They . . . sure were pretty.” His voice got stuck somewhere in his throat as he gazed at the beautiful girl just in front of him.
“So speed is a part of it,” Elena said, smiling at him, her cheeks glowing pink in the candlelight.
“Speed, yeah. Like when I get to drive a better car than The Garbage Heap out there—like a convertible, and I put down the roof, and I drive really fast on a straightaway or around little sudden hilltop curves. Sometimes, somehow, you feel as if you’re part of the car and its part of you. It’s like flying.”
Matt stopped, suddenly, overcome with confusion. Somehow in his excitement he had picked up Elena’s hand and was squeezing it. bread and all. He felt himself flushing and he was just going to put it back where he’d got it, when Elena squeezed his fingers warmly and then took it back herself. Thank God the bread hadn’t been buttered.
“So there anything more about ‘really good cars’?” she asked, almost teasing, but never breaking eye-contact with him.
“Well, there’s—there’s something”—he had to break eye contact with her to say this—“there’s something sort of physical about driving a car that lets you feel every bump in the road. When you’re part of it—and it’s just you out there feeling the air and the ground—it’s sort of—physical, you know? Sort of—sexy.”
He was almost afraid to look at her, then. But rippling laughter made him flush and then two warm hands took hold of his. “Why, Matthew Honeycutt, you’re blushing! But”—in a suddenly serious voice—“I think I know what you mean. You mean something I’ve felt with cars—but I’ve never been able to describe.” She went on talking, but Matt wasn’t even in the room anymore. He was circling the solar system somewhere around the planet Neptune and comets and asteroids were sailing around with him, bonking him on the head every so often.
When he came back she was laughing about a parasailing experience she’d had once when the sailors had accidentally landed her on the sand and not in the water. “But before that,” she said. “It was perfect. Just the rushing wind, with the inlet big and blue underneath me, and the feeling of traveling—fast—through the air. Almost like being a bird. I wish I had wings.”
“Me too!” Matt blurted. If his heart could have been pounding any harder, it would have started pounding. But it was at its maximum limit already. “I’d love to go parasailing. That must have been incredible.” He looked at his plate. “Tell the truth, I think the most incredible thing that’s happened to me is . . . tonight.”
Immediately, Elena’s mocking laughter cut him down to size—but that wasn’t happening. Elena wasn’t laughing. She was looking down at her round white plate and blushing. Then she raised her head and Matt could have sworn that there was a sheen of unshed tears in her eyes.
But she wagged her finger at him in a scholarly way. “Don’t be silly, Matt. What about that game against the Bullfinches, when you threw a 50-yard touchdown pass? Now was that incredible or was that incredible?” Matt goggled at her. “You like football?”
“Well, you’ve got me there. I don’t like all the injuries, and I don’t like most jocks. But my dad—he was a tight end with Clemson, and he helped them win the Orange Bowl. So I just had to learn about it. Dad has a lot of records, you know, most passes caught in a game, most passes caught in a season, most touchdowns caught in a season, most touchdowns caught in a career—”
Matt found himself staring. “Why didn’t he go pro? Or did he?”
“No, he started a business instead. But he left me his football instincts.”
Matt made himself laugh. He didn’t know how he was feeling. His heart was soaring in twelve different directions at once. But somehow he made himself look mock-stern and waved a finger back at her. “Well, I bet you don’t know about my real moment of glory,” he said. “We were playing the Ridgemont Cougers and the score was tied and I was desperate. The clock was running down and suddenly I had this crazy, grandiose idea, and I—”
“Ran to the right to fake giving the ball to Greg Fleisch, the halfback,” Elena interrupted smoothly. “But you kept the ball yourself and ran it—and ran it—and ran it for an amazing touchdown just before four Cougers tackled you at once.”
“Yeah; they broke my collarbone, too,” Matt said, grinning. “But I didn’t even feel it. I was soaring somewhere over the clouds.”
“People were screaming and kissing and throwing things,” Elena said. “Even the Cougers’ fans went crazy. One of them grabbed me and tried to French kiss me.”
And I bet his mind wasn’t on the game, Matt thought, and surprised himself by saying, “Tell me his name and I’ll break his jaw for him.”
“Oh, I already kicked him in the shin,” Elena said calmly. “Backward, so I could scrape all the way down the shinbone with my heel.” She added the last with a sweet little smile that a Spanish Inquisitor—Torquemada himself, maybe—would have envied.
“Well, I can see I’d better keep you from getting mad at me,” Matt said, and Elena laughed again, showing the even white pearls of her teeth.
“I don’t think,” she said, “that anybody could stay mad at you for long.”
Matt didn’t know what to say. All those idiots, he was thinking. All those losers who only want to go on dates with her because of her looks, are just missing the whole damn ballgame. Sure, she’s a knock-out, but more important, she’s like . . . the world’s perfect person: smart, and witty, and fun, and . . . well, just perfect. The way she makes everything easy, and how she makes you feel so good about yourself, and . . .
Matt had a crazy impulse to go down on one knee and ask her to marry him right then and there.
Then he burst into laughter at the absurdness of it all. He was just going to say something when someone behind him coughed with malice aforethought.
“Were Monsieur et Mademoiselle zinking of ordering at zis point?” the waiter ground out, obviously irritated.
“I guess it’s about time to look at our menus,” Elena said, putting her hand over her mouth to not-quite hide a giggle.
“We’ll be ready in a few minutes,” Matt said, in his most princely dismissive tones.
The waiter almost stomped off.
Matt looked at Elena. She looked at him over her curled-up hand and then they were both laughing hysterically, fighting for air.
“Poor guy,” Matt said.
“Oh, well,” Elena raised her eyebrows indifferently. “He is just a waiter, after all. Waiting is what he’s paid to do.”
This was the first time Matt had seen