Double Date
finally wrote the drabble i’ve been trying to write for weeks based on this reddit post discovered by @rainymyx in this post. i had so much fun writing this!
i want to continue to add to this based on the original reddit poster’s updates, so we’ll see!
read this on ao3 here
“What can I say? College football days should always be the best days of a man’s life. Now your best days can be listening to me talk about them.”
Ugh. Katniss huffed out a puff of air as she listened to Cato speak. An hour ago, she had been so excited for this date. They were texting for the past two weeks, and their conversation was easy and funny and, most importantly, normal. Now in person, his vibe was totally different than who he portrayed himself as online. Now, he was a thirty-year-old man who wouldn’t stop talking to her about his glory days from ten years ago and the “boozing, blinkers, and babes” that came with them.
After only receiving their appetizers and a single drink, Katniss knew she couldn’t stick around. The thought of having to hear Cato talk about another frat party he attended before The Force Awakens was released was nearly enough to bring her to tears. Desperate, Katniss did what she always did in trying times like these: text Johanna.
“Katniss! Katniss! I need your help, quick!” Johanna’s voice rang through her phone not even a minute later. Her ability to sound like she was truly in agony was as impressive as always.
“Johanna!? What’s going on?” Katniss responded, hoping her acting was, for the first time in her life, passable.
“It’s the baby! I need you here now!” her childless, non-babysitting, kid-hating friend shouted before quickly hanging up.
Katniss darted her eyes to Cato’s, and his brows were knit tightly as if he were trying to to put together the pieces of the conversation that just transpired.
“I’m sorry, I’m not sure if you heard. My friend really needs me. She needs help with her… baby. I hate to cut this short, but,” she didn’t finish her sentence as she slipped on her coat. She shuffled through her bag and retrieved a twenty-dollar bill, smacking it on the table.
“Oh, yeah, it’s cool. You still wanna meet up at my place later, right? I have the best surprise waiting for you,” Cato responded while wagging his eyebrows, seemingly uncaring about her fabricated dire emergency or the quality of their date at all. This only irritated Katniss more. Her friend’s fake baby was in trouble, and all he cared about was getting laid!
“Uh… yeah, no. Definitely not. Let’s just forget about this, okay? Have the night you deserve,” Katniss practically snarled as she fled the restaurant.
Once she was in her car, she peeled out of the parking lot and quickly went around the block, looking for a place to park so she could call Johanna. She found a spot located outside of a small pub and dialed her friend.
“How was I this time? I feel like I’m really perfecting my blood-curdling shrillness. What do you say? Any pointers?” Johanna asked as soon as she answered the phone.
Katniss wanted to laugh, but now that the situation was over, she felt defeated. She actually had high hopes for this date, but she again found herself needing to bail.
At twenty-eight, Katniss finally felt ready to do things for herself. Before this, there was never the time. She was raising her sister Prim and taking care of her mother for more than a decade since her father’s passing. Now, Prim was in her second year of medical school where she received full funding for her work, and her mother has a live-in aide to help her with her daily needs. She finally did not have to spend all of her time focusing on school and work and money and bills, and without Prim nearby, she felt lonely. Her friends had convinced her to start going on dates, but after months of failed attempts, she still had nothing to show for it.
“Is it me, Jo?” she responded, “Do I just attract these weirdos?”
“Oh, shut up, brainless. You've been going on dates for a few months. Maybe if you gave yourself a little more practice when we were younger it’d be easier, but some people take years to find something that sticks. You’re hot. You’re smart. You’re caring. Maybe a little hard to swallow with the scowl, but anyone that gets to know the real you is gonna love you.”
She sighed, “Okay.”
“You wanna come over here? I was just going to watch some Dexter reruns, but there’s plenty of room on this couch for two.”
“Actually, I think I need a drink. I’ll let you know what I’m doing after.”
Katniss’s conversation with Johanna ended shortly after, and she made her way into the pub.
The pub was crowded, a symptom of it being a Friday evening in the winter, and Katniss had to shuffle past a group of freshly legal college students to make it to the bar. She wanted something simple, something just to take the edge off, and was quickly handed her rum and coke.
Eager to people-watch while she nursed her drink, Katniss scanned the crowd for an empty seat. Most of the tables seemed to be taken up by a larger group, but a single chair at a small table in the corner of the room was wonderfully vacant. Katniss closed her tab and swiftly made her way across the room.
As she approached, she stopped in her tracks. Hidden from her initial view was a man sitting on the other side of the table, somewhat hunched over with a book in his hands. Before she could backtrack and look for another open seat, he picked his head up and locked eyes with her.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I was gonna sit here but didn’t realize you were already here. I’ll just…” her voice trailed off. Katniss had a habit of not finishing her sentences when she was flustered, and after meeting the man’s gaze, she was very flustered. Not only was she not expecting someone to be sitting at the table, but now that he was looking at her, his blue eyes piercing through to her even under the pub’s dim lights, she realized he was around her age and absolutely hot. Her hands began to sweat, and her tongue started to feel like lead.
The man smiled, an endearing smile that quirked more on the left side of his face, highlighting a sole dimple on his cheek. “Don’t worry about it. You can sit here,” He replied, his eyes scanning the room. “Besides, it doesn’t look like there’ll be much room anywhere else.”
“Are you sure?” She asked, and he nodded. “Thank you so much. I promise I won’t even bother you. We don’t even have to talk or anything…” Katniss said as she placed her bag on the table and took her seat.
Katniss started scanning the other patrons of the pub to observe their activities, but her eyes frequently darted back to the man seated across from her. She gathered more bits and pieces of his appearance in the brief moments she allowed herself to study his features. He had blond, curly hair that looked intentionally tousled. His shoulders were very broad, pulling the fabric of his navy henley taut across his chest. He had freckles across the bridge of his nose, and he drummed the table with his left hand while holding the book he was reading in his right.
After a few minutes, he lifted his eyes up from his book and offered her a soft smile. “My name is Peeta, by the way.”
“Katniss,” she said, offering a shy smile of her own.
“You know, I really don’t mind talking if you want to.”
Her grin grew. “Okay, then.” She paused, unsure of where to start, but her curiosity eventually got the better of her when she asked, “Can I ask why you’re reading a book at a crowded bar on a Friday night?”
Peeta chuckled, a laugh that let Katniss know he wasn’t offended. “You waste no time getting to the deep stuff. I actually just moved into my first solo apartment, and as much as I’m happy to have my own space, the silence feels kinda deafening.”
“Ah,” she began, appraising him up and down, “so you find comfort in the chaos.”
“Yeah, I guess I do. I grew up in a house with two older brothers, and the two of them used to practice wrestling no matter where they were. In the dining room, the backyard. One time they threw each other down the stairs,” he chuckled again, “Our mom wasn’t too happy about that one.”
“You’re joking,” Katniss laughed.
“Not even a little bit, I swear. And then I lived in a house with my three friends all the way through grad school. My best friend Finnick used to play eighties pop at all hours of the day. Think, like, Donna Summer or Cyndi Lauper on full blast at three in the morning.”
“And you guys never asked him to stop?” Katniss asked, finding she wanted to know more and more about him.
At this, Peeta hit her with a dead stare, his blue eyes piercing her with a combination of humor and seriousness. “See, that is something only someone who doesn’t know Finnick would ask. If we made any attempts to get him to stop this relatively-harmless-if-not-mildly-annoying behavior, we would only trigger severely worse outcomes for us all.”
“And you said this is your best friend?” Peeta let out a boisterous laugh in reply.
While sitting with Peeta, Katniss found the guard she had put up during her date with Cato had come crashing down.
They spoke about their jobs. Katniss explained how she works as a forest ranger, but she hopes to finish school to become an environmental engineer. Peeta said that he just finished graduate school to become a doctor of architecture.
“I really liked art, but it wasn’t enough to satisfy my parents or pay the bills, so I tried to do the next best thing I could think of.”
“So you became a literal doctor? In a field that’s focused on math and design? Are you a genius?”
“Time Magazine did call me the reincarnation of Albert Einstein.”
“Hm. And to think I placed you more as a Michelangelo.”
They spoke about their families. Katniss spoke about her mom and Prim. She bragged about her sister’s accomplishment in getting a full ride to a great medical school across the country. She felt so comfortable with Peeta, she didn’t even shy away from speaking about her late father, even if it was in the briefest of terms. Peeta nodded his head as she spoke, squeezing her hand across the table when he sensed certain details were particularly hard for her to get out. Peeta, the son of bakers, grew up really close with his older brothers. His oldest brother took over the family business, and while Peeta loves baking, he enjoys it more as a hobby than a career.
This seamlessly led to them speaking about their childhoods. Katniss was mostly shy, harboring two friends, Madge and Gale, through her schooling, despite her being a star on her school’s track and archery teams. University allowed her to come out of her shell and meet friends that didn’t matter her reticent personality, like Johanna. Peeta wrestled, painted, did debate team, and wrote. He had a solid group of friends during school, but he found his lifelong friends in college.
They spoke about the little things. Their favorite colors. Favorite snacks. Movies. Shows. And their answers were so similar across all categories, they had a near total eclipse on a venn diagram of each topic. Their responses were so alike that, at one point, Katniss plastered her face with her signature scowl Peeta had not yet been acquainted with, asking him if he was being totally honest with his responses.
He raised his hands in mock surrender, “Look, that scowl is too intimidating for me to not come clean. So the truth is, I’ve been being honest this entire time.”
Before Katniss realized, nearly two hours had gone since she first sat down with Peeta. They fell into a comfortable silence, and she studied his features more in the muted light. She tried to picture what he looked like out of this setting. Hunching over a sketchbook. Cooking in his kitchen. Laughing with his friends. Cheering on his nephews at their little league games.
She studied the way the dim light caught onto the golden strands of his eyelashes, becoming mesmerized by the way they fluttered against his cheek when he blinked. She didn’t even realize she was staring until he spoke again, causing her to jump slightly.
“So what about you?” He asked, a small grin on his lips.
“What about me?”
“Well, before you asked what I’m doing at a bar alone on a Friday night. But what are you doing alone here on a Friday night so that I, a stranger, was able to take up so much of your time?”
Katniss contemplates what she should say, unsure if she should reveal her failed date with Cato. But as Peeta looked at her with sincerity in his eyes, she has the hunch that she could really trust him.
“If I’m honest, I came here because I had left a really, really bad first date,” she responded sheepishly.
Peeta cocked his left eyebrow expectantly. “How bad?”
“Well… it was so bad I made my best friend call me and say she was having an emergency with her fake baby to give me a reason to bail,” Katniss blurted out, her tone hitching at the end to make her statement sound more like a question. Like she was questioning if she really did that herself.
Both of Peeta’s eyebrows were raised, his eyes glinting with amusement, lips curling in to stop him from laughing. “You’re kidding me,” he managed to croak out.
“In my defense, he only spoke about his college football experiences, and after I started leaving to go help my friend with her fake baby, he still asked if we were having sex later!”
At this, Peeta burst out laughing, and after Katniss realized exactly what she said, she joined him. As Katniss clutched her stomach, tears leaking out of the corners of her eyes, she almost missed what Peeta said next.
“That’s why I’ve kind of given up on dating.”
“Given up?” Katniss asked, her voice airy from her recent laughter and something silly like concern that she might have been wrong about the connection she felt with him all night.
“In grad school, every date I went on just didn’t have any spark. They were just mediocre. Then, I got so busy with trying to finish my degree, I just gave up on the whole thing.” For the first time that night, Peeta responded without meeting her gaze.
She’s not sure what made her say it. Maybe it was the second rum and coke she had gotten while talking with Peeta. Maybe it was that she felt like she had nothing left to lose after her first failed date of the night. Or, maybe it was because she knew she’d majorly regret if she didn’t try to continue with the something that she felt burning between her and Peeta, but she had to say it.
“I find that hard to believe considering this is probably the closest thing I’ve had to a good date in what feels like forever.”
At this, Peeta drew his head back in what appeared to be shock. His eyes met her again, an indecipherable expression plastering his features as he searched hers. Katniss shifted in her chair, somewhat uncomfortable with his unreadable scrutiny.
Finally, Peeta’s features relaxed. and he looked Katniss right in the eye with a neutral, if not somewhat strained, expression. “Tell you what,” he began, “I have to go to the bathroom, but when I come back, I’ll ask you out for real.”
Katniss shot him a curious expression, but as Peeta began to move, it clicked. He did not stand from his seat – he wheeled back from the table, towards the back of the bar with the bathrooms. His left pant leg tied off just below the knee. Katniss understood: he wanted her to see everything about him before she agreed to go on a date with him. He was giving her an out.
At this, Katniss’s gut twisted, both with regret and butterflies. She felt somewhat bad for him, wondering if this was a move he made from being rejected for his physical condition before. Wondering how anyone could do that to anyone, let alone a guy like Peeta. But overpowering this feeling were the butterflies. He liked her. He wanted her to see all of him. He was laying his insecurities bare for her. Most importantly, he already trusted her. In mind, body, and spirit, he couldn’t be any more beautiful.
A minute later, Peeta emerged from the bathroom, a goofy grin plastered across his face to perfectly match hers.
As soon as he reached the table, the words came tumbling out of Katniss’s mouth before she could stop them.
“So, I’m free all weekend. What do you have in mind?”
