Page 103 of A Real Goode Time

“Thank you, Harlow,” I said. “For the coffee, and the hospitality.”

She smiled at me. “You’re more than welcome. And please, call me Low.”

And with that, she vanished back inside, and I was alone with Rhys. He sat in the chair recently vacated by Low.

“You have fun last night?” he asked me.

I nodded. “Yeah. Maybe a little too much. And yeah, this is why I tend to smoke rather than drink. No matter how stoned I get, by the time I wake up I’m fine.”

“I feel like you may be onto something, there,” he said.

“How about you?” I asked him. “Have a good time with the guys?”

He nodded. “Coolest dudes I’ve ever met.” He was quiet a moment. “You’re walking into a pretty amazing situation here, Tor.”

I swallowed hard at the implication. “It’s too early for hard conversations, Rhys.”

He sipped. “I think I gotta rip the Band-Aid off.”

I hid behind my coffee, and hoped the sunglasses hid the haze of tears. “I know.” A thick pause. “When?”

“Today.”

“So soon?”

He turned away, probably for the same reason I was hiding behind a coffee mug and Harlow’s bug-eyes sunglasses. “The longer I stay, the harder it is. I don’t want to leave. I like it here. I like all the people. You, most of all. But…”

“You have a life back down in New Haven.”

He shrugged. “Been thinking about that, too.” He turned back to me. “If…if I got to a point where I could…cut some ties loose down there, would…would I be welcome, here? With you?”

I shook all over, holding back the tears, but only by virtue of extreme effort. “If you’re asking if I’ll wait for you, then yes. I’ll be here, and it’ll be…just me. I won’t be with anyone else. Not in any way. And if you come back up here, yes, there’d be…there’d be an us to figure out.”

He nodded. “I’m not trying to, like, get away but still leave myself an in just in case. I just…I can’t just stay here, no matter what I want or how I feel. I have clients and a boss and financial stuff I have to figure out.”

I swallowed around a hot lump. “I’m not asking you to give up your life in New Haven for me, Rhys. I’m not saying you have to choose between me and your life there. I just…I need to be here. And you need to be there, and it just sucks because…because I’m in love with you.”

A big, deep, pounding silence. He sucked in a breath, let it out slowly, shakily. “I’m in love with you too, Tor. I am. I have been. I will be.”

He wiped at his face.

“And I know you’re not asking me to choose, Torie,” he continued. “I just...I can’t offer you anything more concrete than I know how I feel about you, and it’s making my life back in New Haven seem a lot less attractive than it used to be. I just don’t know how I’d go about transferring my life here. I own property there, I have clientele there, and I’m almost done getting my realtor license. I’m about to be promoted to Jeremy’s framing crew, which I’ve been working toward for months. I just don’t know how or evenifI can cut all that loose and come up here. It’s all off-plan. I just…I need time, I guess. To figure out a new plan.”

“I don’t know how to say what I’m feeling,” I whispered. “I’m in love with you. I want to be in your life. But I need my own future. I need to figure it out—what I want my life to look like. Who I want to be besides a stoner and a waitress.” I sighed, soft and quiet and tremulous. “But it’s hard to even think about that when everything inside me is screaming at me to not let you go.”

“So…so maybe this isn’tit, like goodbye. Maybe it’s just…both of us need some time to figure out how and when our lives can intersect again so we can be together.”

“I hate it,” I whispered, tears now on my cheeks. “I wish you were an asshole.”

“I wish you were a bitch.” He laughed. “I guess there’s just one thing left, then.”

“What’s that?”

He reached over, picked me up, set me on his lap. Held my face. “This.”

He kissed me. Soft and slow at first, then hungrily and with building passion. It wasn’t sexual, though. It was him telling me nonverbally that he was past the I think phase. It was a declaration of love.

“Dammit, Rhys,” I breathed, a tear-wet sigh.