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Kyle and Sarah walked the shore of Peach Beach in an awkward disharmony apparent to at least one of them. The primary thing ruining the moment was that Sarah seemed to think it was a delightful one, while Kyle couldn't stop frusing through the minute fraction of possible things to say that wouldn't send her walking home with one of the olympic bodybuilders running by who kept smiling at her. He was pretty sure one of them even smiled at him, which hit him with the cheese-on-broccoli mixed feelings of whether having redirected one less smile at Sarah was worth having been smiled at by an olympic body builder.
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He shrugged the issue off and resumed the stressful debate of what to talk about. He'd seemed to have mangled up everything he'd ever said to her, and the only thing he could do at this point was use his creativity to come up with a solution. If he prepared himself ahead of time for all the topics likely to come up, he could draft a slew of witty pick up lines, then refine whichever became relevant while delivering them. It was like a slow, low-INT squire playing speed chess against a chessmaster princess for the right to wed her. (With lots of olympic body builders running by the castle).
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Sarah was silent for quite a long dozen seconds or so, but instead of rejoicing with extra time to focus on the chess chat board, the pause simply created more stress at improving his prediction of what the first thing out of her mouth was going to be. It was probably about five to ten seconds away, and would probably be some personal inquiry about something she knew perfectly well but liked asking Kyle about anyway.
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She sighed a happy contented sigh, which hastened the countdown to about three seconds. Kyle was now sure. She was either going to ask how his book was coming, bring up a happy childhood memory of going to the beach with her grandfather, or ask what he was doing later this afternoon. As he couldn't keep all three in his head at once, he rolled a die and prayed.