"It's an hour away, Dad."
"An hour is still—" He checked his watch. "They said eight?"
"They said eight."
"It's seven fifty-four."
"I know."
He nodded. Looked at the boxes. Looked at me. "I want to meet him."
"You're going to meet him."
"Before you leave. I want to?—"
"Robert," my mom said.
He stopped.
"She's twenty-six," my mom said. "Let her go."
He looked at me and something moved across his face—all of it, all the years, the apartment I'd moved into at twenty-three and was now leaving, every version of me he'd watched become the next one.
"Okay," he said quietly. "Okay, sweetpea."
I crossed the room and hugged him and he held on a second longer than usual and I let him. Then I stepped back before either of us made it worse.
"They're here," Daniela said from the window.
She was looking down at the street with the neutral expression she used when she was clocking something and choosing not to editorialize. Daniela had been doing background work and commercial shoots long enough to have a very good professional poker face. She deployed it now.
"Hm," she said.
"What."
"Nothing." She stepped back from the window. "Just—your man is punctual."
I smoothed my tank top. Told myself I was not nervous. I had met this man. I had negotiated a contract with him on a tailgate. I had nothing to be nervous about. Sure, I hadn’t seen him in two weeks…but that was fine.
We were in abusiness arrangement.
My mom straightened her blouse.
My dad put his shoulders back.
A knock.
I went to the door and opened it.
Gage Holt was standing in my doorway in a plain white t-shirt and worn jeans with his dark hair slightly damp at the temples, and he was exactly as I remembered and somehow more. In my apartment doorway with the morning sun behindhim he was justlargein a way that reorganized the available space, and those brown eyes found mine immediately and my body noted his arrival with the same inconvenient enthusiasm it had shown in the parking lot.
It struck me all of a sudden that he was older. That I hadn’t mentioned that to my mother.
That she and my dad might be about to freak out.
But he was charming and Texan and outgoing, and his eyes found them immediately after me, and I knew he had this handled.
He stepped inside and shook my dad's hand first, which I noticed and suspected was intentional.
