“Yeah. I’m leaving for Berkeley in the fall.”
“Good choice,” he takes another sip. “But maybe kismet got it wrong, after all. If you’re leaving and all. Because apparently, I’ll be staying for a while. That is, after I find an apartment. A good one is hard to find around here.”
He’s so confident, so open. It doesn’t even feel odd that a total stranger is telling me these things, out of the blue, so randomly. I feel like I know him already, actually.
I stare at him. “An apartment?”
He stares back. “Yeah. The thing you rent, it has a shower and a bedroom, usually?”
I flush. “I know that. It’s just that this might be kismet after all. I might know of something. I mean, my father is going to rent out our carriage house. I think.”
And if I can’t have it, it should definitely go to someone like Dare. The mere thought gives me a heart spasm.
“Hmm. Now that is interesting,” Dare tells me. “Kismet prevails, it seems. And a carriage house next to a funeral home, at that. It must take balls of steel to live there.”
I quickly pull out a little piece of paper and scribble my dad’s cell phone on it. “Yeah. If you’re interested, I mean, if you’ve got the balls, you can call and talk to him about it.”
I push the paper across the table, staring him in the eye, framing it up as a challenge. Dare can’t possibly know how I’m trying to will my heart to slow down before it explodes, but maybe he does, because a smile stretches slowly and knowingly across his lips.
“Oh, I’ve got balls,” he confirms, his eyes gleaming again.
Dare me.
I swallow hard.
“I’m ready to ask my second question,” I tell him. He raises an eyebrow.
“Already? Is it about my balls?”
I flush and shake my head.
“What did you mean before?” I ask him slowly, not lowering my gaze. “Why exactly do you think this is kismet?”
His eyes crinkle up a little bit as he smiles yet again. And yet again, his grin is thoroughly amused. A real smile, not a fake one like I’m accustomed to around my house.
“It’s kismet because you seem like someone I might like to know. Is that odd?”
No, because I want to know you, too.
“Maybe,” I say instead. “Is it odd that I feel like I already know you somehow?”
Because I do. There’s something so familiar about his eyes, so dark, so bottomless. But then again, I have been dreaming about them for days.
Dare raises an eyebrow. “Maybe I have that kind of face.”
I choke back a snort. Not hardly.
He stares at me. “Regardless, kismet always prevails.”
I shake my head and smile. A real smile. “The jury is still out on that one.”
Dare takes a last drink of coffee, his gaze still frozen to mine, before he thunks his cup down on the table and stands up.
“Well, let me know what the jury decides.”
And then he walks away.
I’m so dazed by his abrupt departure that it takes me a second to realize something because kismet always prevails and I’m someone he might like to know.