Ready to Roll by Melanie Greene

Chapter One
     
    Janice bounced on the balls of her feet .
    Right there on Miguel’s front stoop, she found herself in a perfect kickboxing front stance, arms up in guard position. Nerves jangling from head to toe. So she shot her fists out for a few quick hooks, one-two-three, except she’d forgotten about the dang flowers in her left hand. As ‘two’ ended and her right wrist straightened for ‘three,’ she slapped herself in the face with the tulips.
    “Fuck a duck,” she muttered, examining the bouquet. What normal, sane, competent-at-life woman brought tulips to her date, anyway? But she didn’t drink wine, and he was cooking for her. Janice’s mama, despite repeated lectures, hadn’t taught Janice a ton of mannerly things, but not showing up empty handed when someone cooked for you was an inviolable rule.
    So she was nervous, so what? It wasn’t like Miguel had given her a lot of notice. And she’d had to skip her bike ride so she could scoot home and get ready, putting on a fresh shirt--her jeans weren’t too mucky after a day in the warehouse, and it wasn’t like she was going to put on her one skirt. Which left her to pick between jeans and workout gear, and again, even Janice had to concede Mama would be rightfully aghast if she showed up at her coworker’s door in spandex.
    Then she’d spent forever talking herself into the tulips, and all in all she hadn’t had time for any kind of workout at all between the office and pulling her car onto Miguel’s crushed-shell driveway.
    He’d repainted the front door since the last time she’d been there. Since the one time she’d been there. Just to drop him off, a couple of months earlier when his truck was out of commission. He’d asked her in then, but she’d been late for dance class, so she’d put him off. Maybe put him off too much, since it took this long for him to ask her back.
    Not that she’d been waiting on him to ask her back.
    The invite was almost out of the blue late that afternoon. They’d just sent the dock crew home after unloading the day’s last shipment, and when he pulled her aside she thought it was to go over Monday’s schedule. Instead he told her to skip going to Eddie’s monthly burger night in favor of showing up at his place for dinner. Just the two of them.
    “It’s a date,” he’d clarified.
    She’d hardly known what to say.
    “I’m making you steak tacos with my Hatch chili salsa. And you’re going to love them. And it’s just going to be the two of us.”
    “Oh?”
    “Si. Be there at seven.”
    And fortunately a vendor had called then to schedule the plotter maintenance, so Miguel had taken off, and Janice hadn’t had to answer. Not that he’d asked. Just told her what to do. And like a Santa Gertrudis moving from pasture to pen, she’d gone and allowed herself to be herded right to his front door.
    Clever vaquero that Miguel was, he didn’t wait for her to knock. The pine green door opened, and there he was, drawing her into his stark entry, with its beige walls and bleached wood floor and a huge corn plant in a big brown pot. “Hey, welcome,” he was saying, and Janice was looking at his bright crooked smile and the way the skin at his throat gleamed against his clean white shirt and wondering when she’d gotten familiar enough with his wardrobe to recognize that the jeans he wore now were different from the jeans he’d worn that day at work.
    He was talking but all the visual info was somehow short-circuiting Janice’s ears. And Miguel was wearing some kind of cologne, something that was stronger when he leaned at her. Not an aftershave; he hadn’t shaved, and had she ever seen his dark stubble up close before? And then she was slapping the tulips against his chest when she meant to be just handing them over, but it wasn’t her fault. He’d gotten too close. If he’d stood still, she’d have just handed him the flowers politely like a gal with actual manners and some awareness of how to