“That too.”
I laughed and took the mug she slid toward me. Coffee, light enough to still taste like coffee and not dessert, exactly how she knew I liked it.
She looked at me over the rim of her own cup then, quiet for a beat too long.
“What?” I asked.
“You’ve been smiling all morning.”
“That sounds made up.”
“It isn’t.”
I sat down at the table and crossed one leg over the other, trying not to smile again and failing anyway.
That got her.
“There it is,” she said softly.
I looked down into my coffee. “I came over here to drop off a check, not get profiled.”
“You came over here glowing. The check just happened to come with you.”
That made me laugh into the mug. Because she was right.
Something in mehadchanged over the last few weeks, and even I had stopped pretending not to notice it.
Things with Micah had settled and deepened in a way I had not expected to feel this quickly. Not rushed. Not reckless. Just right in places I had spent a long time assuming were going to stay empty or temporary.
Dinners. Movies. His place. Mine. Falling asleep on his chest with a lamp still on in the other room and waking up in the middle of the night to him dragging a blanket higher over my shoulder without fully waking himself. Finding his bag by my stairs because he had packed for work the next day instead of pretending every night with me still needed an exit strategy.
Kendra pulling up to steal me back for one girls’ night and leaving twenty minutes later talking about, “I hate to admit it, but that man might actually be worth you acting funny.”
That one had stayed with me for two whole days.
Because Kendra did not give compliments to men easily. She handed them out like they came from her personal savings account, and even then, she usually included a warning label.
But Micah had slipped into my life with a steadiness I could feel even when he was not in the room. Not loud. Not forceful. Not trying to rearrange everything so it had his name on it. Just present in ways that kept adding up.
And if other women noticed him, I could not exactly pretend to be shocked.
Micah posted so rarely that whenever he did, people acted like he had stepped outside after a decade in hiding. A few weeks earlier, he had posted a picture of a plate of French toast I’d made at his place, thick slices dusted with powdered sugar, berries on the side, syrup catching light near the edge of the plate.
His caption was simple.
Sometimes I like my breakfast sweet.
I had smiled at my phone for entirely inappropriate reasons, remembering exactly how sweet breakfast had gotten that morning before we ever made it to the food.
Then I made the mistake of opening the comments.
A truckload of heauxs had apparently also enjoyed breakfast.
Who cooking breakfast for you now, Micah?
Let me know when you want something different on your plate.
I make pancakes too.
