1. He takes her to see a movie they both know is going to be horrible. He shrugs at the box office as he hands the cashier his money. “This way I won’t feel bad for missing two-thirds of it,” he says, smiling and reaching out to tickle her side gently while the teenaged cashier rolls her eyes and slides their tickets over to him. She giggles and then makes him order almost every single candy they have in addition to a large popcorn and a large soda.
She eats all of it before the movie actually starts and when he kisses her during the first scene, she tastes like Raisinettes and salt.
2. She makes him dinner, trying a new recipe she found in a magazine. She isn’t the best cook and he stands in the middle of her kitchen, smiling at her back. Something in the way she wipes her hands with the towel slung over the handle on the oven reminds him of being a kid and he can’t help but kiss that soft spot beneath her ear and breathe her in. When she turns around, she glares at him, “How is this helping me not burn the chicken?”
It burns anyway so he just kisses her and opens the bottle of wine he bought on the way over.
3. For his birthday, she takes him out for steak and watches his hands as he cuts into the meat. She makes him wear a ribbon she found at the dollar store earlier that day that says, “It’s my birthday!” with a random picture of a penguin on it. She’d pinned it onto him in the foyer of his house before standing on her toes to kiss the corner of his mouth and say, “Happy birthday, Jimmy.”
He smiles with his mouth full and she’s just about as happy as she could ever be.
He tries almost every imported beer the restaurant has until he feels just a little more than tipsy and then he switches to water. Still, he can’t stop laughing when a group of waiters come over and sing Happy Birthday to him, placing a piece of chocolate cake in front of him.
When they leave, she asks him, “So, did you have a good birthday?”
He smiles and leans across the table to kiss her. “The best.”
4. On a Saturday in October, he takes her for a drive through the mountains. It’s sunny and cool out. She brings her big sketchpad and a handful of freshly sharpened pencils and bounces in her seat on the way up.
He plays a CD filled with songs that remind him of fall and songs she’d told him reminded her of fall.
She makes this sound that he can only describe as the best thing he’s ever heard when they turn onto a road where all the trees are this bright yellow color and it’s like this tunnel of pure gold as the sun pours in. She rolls the window down and breathes in deep, smiling with her eyes closed.
They stop when they get close to the top of one of the mountains and she draws for an hour or so while he just watches. She fills almost half of her sketchpad and then looks up at him, “Let’s go for a walk.”
She holds his hand, her fingers knotting with his. The smell of wet leaves makes her lean into his side and when he laughs to himself, she feels it. So she stops and looks up at him, the sun hitting just behind his head so he glows when she tells him (actually tells him and doesn’t just say that she feels the same way that he does or something else that isn’t really telling him) that she loves him for the first time.
5. He doesn’t tell her where they’re going. Just tells her to wear that dress with the straps and the neckline that makes it hard for him to breathe. He’s in the living room, listening to her heels click against the floor of the apartment they moved into together just three weeks ago. He adjusts his tie nervously and when she finally comes out of the bedroom, she’s struggling with a necklace and turns around, holding her hair up so he can clasp it for her. And as the ends hook together and his fingers brush against the soft skin at the back of her neck, he knows he won’t last all fifteen miles to the restaurant.
He proposes on the sidewalk outside of their building.
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