what I've been proofreading



He tells her, “I love you Jinny.”
Her father has just left to go to the restroom, and so this is first time he has been free to speak. Isaac felt his bladder pinch suddenly at the mention of restroom, but he couldn’t pee beside his girlfriend’s father. And a professor at that. No, he just couldn’t.
Up until then the young man had been busy sucking down his last cigarette and drinking a Coke, putting it down, turning his fork into the chicken he’d ordered at the older man’s urging. Isaac laughed at the right times, and nodded when it was appropriate. She was caught in her love for him. Sometimes Jinny loved him almost to death. Sometimes the love was too much, too embarrassing. So she hid it away.
The older man, Professor O’Muil, like most professors, was caught in his own words and full of his personal brilliance. Now the sky darkened, and the high schoolers left, and Isaac Weaver, the young man, scowled murmuring, “They would leave just as we’re getting ready to go.”
The meal was over. They tipped well.
On their way out, Isaac pulled on his lambskin coat with the wool collar and then pulled out the chair from under his girlfriend, and put her coat over her. She was big and pretty. Isaac had never understood what was so great about skinny girls. Black people were right on this score, and he’d tell Efrem this when he saw him. And Efrem would throw his head back and laugh at him.
Suddenly she grabs his hand; she hooks it under his and through his coat. It’s so warm, so intimate. This handholding is more personal than sex. A little shocked he turns his blue eyes on her as if she’d just exposed herself. She is smiling. Her face is round, her hair is crinkly an reddish. Her eyes peat green. She is just so beautiful. Her perfume juat smells so good.
“I love you Jinny Oatmeal,” he tells her.
And suddenly he looks so alive and so happy and so serious, all at the same time that she knows why they have been together so long.
They are both only twenty-two.