At First Sight by Nicholas Sparks Page A

“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. A few months later, he wrote another column about the differences, using excerpts from the letters as examples.
But even if he could understand objectively that he’d ordered the tuna because he’d wanted Lexie to admire him-thus making him feel powerful-it still didn’t help him decipher what made her tick, and pregnancy only complicated the matter further. He admitted that he didn’t know much about pregnancy, but if there was one thing he was sure about, it was the fact that pregnant women often had strange cravings. Lexie may have been an expert on virtually everything else, but he was ready for whatever she might throw at him in that particular department. His brothers had told him to expect anything; one sister-in-law had craved spinach salad, another wanted pastrami and olives, still another would wake up in the middle of the night to eat tomato soup and cheddar cheese. Consequently, when he wasn’t trying to write, he found himself heading to the grocery store to fill the car with whatever he could think of, anything that might satisfy Lexie’s cravings, no matter how odd they might be.
What he didn’t expect, however, were the irrational mood swings. One night, about a week after their dinner at the Carriage House, he woke up to the sound of Lexie sniffling. When he rolled over, he found her sitting up in bed with her back against the headboard. In the dim light, he could barely make out her features, but he noticed a pile of used tissues in her lap. He sat up in bed.
“Lex? Are you okay? What’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry,” she said, sounding as if she had a bad cold. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“That’s okay . . . no problem. What is it?”
“Nothing.”
It sounded as though she’d said “nudding.” He watched her, still unsure what was going on. The fact that he