No Easy Choices (A New Adult Romance) Read Online Free PDF

platter on the coffee table. He took a seat next to me while more sizzling sounds continued in the kitchen.
                  “This is arepas. The recipe is from my grandmother’s kitchen. Here, you try.” He cut one of the circles with a small fork and rolled it in what looked like melted butter, offering me a bite. Okay, that’s a little personal for a first date, but maybe he grew up in a country that didn’t have a lot of forks and where everybody had to share.
                  “Wow,” I said, wiping a drop of butter from my lower lip, “that’s incredible! What is it?”
                  “Arepas are corn meal cakes, very simple, but these have garlic and aji pepper, because I like spicy things.”
                  My heart sank at the thought of us having garlic breath, before I caught myself. Why, exactly, did I care if we had garlic breath? I hadn’t planned on any serious making out with Javier. That whole train of thought left me confused and cursing at myself.
                  Luckily, I didn’t have long to dwell on the garlic breath because then the pepper he mentioned kicked in. I clamped a hand over my mouth, like I could somehow contain the burning pain. When that failed, I pleaded with Javier with my eyes to do something to fix the fire I had just eaten.
                  “Is it too much aji? I could not taste it,” he said, shrugging. He ran to get me a can of soda, which I gulped in as lady-like a fashion as I could considering the culinary agony I was in. It immediately squelched the burn in my mouth, only to replace the burn with the stale taste of overpowering beer. I turned the can over in my hand, only to realize the bright green can of Costeñita also had the word “cerveza” on the side. Beer. Not soda. Okay.
                  Javier had brought one for himself, and I had two choices. I could just go with it and enjoy the meal, or I could chunk it at him and demand to know what his intentions were, bringing me to his apartment, assaulting me with peppers, and then giving an under-aged sorority girl a beer.
                  Sorority girl. Those two words made my choice for me. I took a long, refreshing drink from the can in my hand—something else that was strictly forbidden by Theta Zeta Delta rules, as a sister never drank from the can—and speared another piece of arepas, prepared this time for the burn. Javier smiled, obviously pleased that I liked his cooking.
                  “Javier, you never told me anything about yourself,” I said somewhat later, spooning some of the arroz con coco onto one of the ceramic blue plates he brought over. “Where are you from originally? And how did you manage to make your way to Georgia?”
                  “I am from Colombia,” he began, but the muscles in my legs turned to mush over the way he pronounced the name of his country. “I am here to go to school, like you. My uncle is an ambassador.” It was breath-taking the way he said certain words by putting the accent on the wrong syllable. I almost needed to fan myself with something, just from listening to him talk. I swear, he could read a grocery list and I would be halfway to undressing myself.
                  “Ambassador? And you work in the library?”
                  “Yes. I work there as Spanish tutor, and it helps me with my English. I need to practice more my English,” he said with an embarrassed grin.
                  “Your English is just fine, I promise. Half the citizens of this state don’t speak it as well as you do.” He laughed at my joke, so I hope that meant he understood it.
                  “And you? Why are you studying?”
                  I looked confused. Well, so much for his great English skills. “I think you meant, ‘what’ are you studying,” I replied. “I’m in the