At First Sight - Nicholas Sparks [33]
“I will,” he said, feeling defiant. In the silence, he watched her study the menu, thinking about the porterhouse. It was a lot of red meat, now that he thought about it, packed with cholesterol and fat. Didn’t the experts say you should eat no more than three ounces at a time? And this steak . . . what was that? Sixteen ounces? Twenty-four? It was enough to feed an entire family.
Ah, who cared? He was young, and he’d make it a point to work out tomorrow. Go for a jog, do some extra push-ups. “What are you thinking about getting?”
“I’m still deciding,” she said. “I’m not sure which one I’m in the mood for, but it’ll either be the broiled tuna or the stuffed chicken breast with the sauce on the side. And steamed vegetables.”
Of course that’s what you’re getting, Jeremy thought. Something light and healthy. She’d stay fit and thin, even though she was pregnant, while he would waddle out of the restaurant.
He reached for the menu again, noticing that she made a point of ignoring him. Which meant, obviously, that she did notice. Scanning the items, he moved to the seafood and poultry sections. Everything sounded wonderful. Just not as wonderful as the porterhouse. He closed the menu again, thinking this was guilt he could have done without.
Since when had food become such a reflection of character? If he ordered something healthy, he was a good person; if he ordered something unhealthy, he was bad? It wasn’t as if he were overweight, right? He would order the porterhouse, he resolved, but reminded himself again to have only half of it, maybe less. If wasn’t as if he’d waste it, either. He’d bring the rest home for leftovers. He nodded to himself, pleased with his decision. The porterhouse it was.
When the waiter appeared, Lexie ordered a cranberry juice and the stuffed chicken breast. Jeremy said he’d have the cranberry juice as well.
“And for your dinner?”
He felt Lexie watching him. “The . . . tuna,” he said. “Medium rare.”
After the waiter left, Lexie smiled. “The tuna?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It sounded good when you mentioned it.”
She shrugged, unreadable.
“What now?”
“It’s just that this place is famous for its steaks. I was kind of hoping to try a bite of yours.”
Jeremy felt his shoulders sag. “Next time,” he said.
Try as he might, Jeremy wasn’t sure he’d ever figure out women. There were times while he’d been dating that he believed he was getting closer, that he would be able to anticipate their subtle expressions and mannerisms and use them to his own advantage. But as his dinner with Lexie demonstrated, he had a long way to go.
The problem wasn’t the fact that he’d ordered the tuna instead of the porterhouse. It went deeper than that. The real problem was that most men wanted a woman’s admiration; consequently, men were willing to do nearly anything to achieve that. Women, he suspected, had never fully grasped this simple fact. For instance, women might assume that men who spent a great deal of time at the office did so because they viewed their job as the most important thing in their life, when nothing could be further from the truth. It wasn’t about power for power’s sake—well, okay, for some men it was, but they were in a minority—it was the fact that women were drawn to power for the same reasons men were drawn to attractive young women. These were evolutionary traits, traits passed down since the caveman days, and neither gender had much control over them. Years ago he’d written a column about the evolutionary basis of behavior, pointing out that among other things, men were drawn to young, shapely, attractive women because they tended to be fertile and in good health—in other words, a mate likely to create strong offspring—and that women were likewise drawn to men who were powerful enough to protect and provide for them and their offspring.
He got a lot of mail about that column, he remembered, but what was odd about it were the reactions. While men tended to agree with this representation of evolution, women tended to disagree, sometimes vehemently.