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Not even paying attention to the road. She had no intention of going. Thank

goodness there wasn’t anyone behind her to honk at her.

“Is that okay? I mean, I know some people get weird. Or they don’t like

it. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. I don’t want to get fired or make

anyone uncomfortable. I mean, it’s not that I’m not proud to be who I am,

I’ve just…I mean, I know that…I know how people have reacted in the

past, and I really like this job. I want to keep it.”

“You think that I would fire you because you’re…because you date

women?”

A vein started throbbing in Romi’s temple. “It’s happened to me before.”

“I certainly would never fire someone for something like that. As far as

I’m concerned, people’s private lives, their beliefs, their choices, all of that,

is their own business and none of mine. I actually haven’t ever fired a single

person before. Ever.”

“Good.” Romi visibly relaxed. “I hope that it’s not weird though.”

“Weird?”

“Again, past experience…”

“No. It won’t be weird.” Kiera realized she needed to do something. As

in, make her freaking turn and get back onto the road. She actually managed

to do it and get the truck back into cruise control. She was paying attention

to the road. She really was.

It was just that now her heart was practically pounding out of her chest

and her pulse was likely to rip clean out of her skin at her neck, it was

slamming there so hard.

Romi is a lesbian. She’s single. Available.

Just because Romi was available, it did not make herself available. Kiera

knew where she stood. She’d been burned too many times to believe that

happily ever after was a real thing. Happily ever after was for storybooks. It

was something you believed in as a kid, then grew up and learned the hard

way as an adult that it didn’t exist. Marriages didn’t last, if people even