"Thanks," I replied. "I...are you busy right now?"
She looked around the diner slightly pointedly, shrugging.
"Nobody else in here."
I followed her gaze, and had to admit that she was right. It was much quieter here than it had been the first time I had visited.
"I guess everyone must have found out about those cannolis at Ford’s, huh?" I remarked, trying to break the tension with a joke. She smiled slightly.
"Guess so."
"They really were great," I added, glad to have a chance to talk about our evening together. Because, as far as I had been concerned, it had been a lot of fun. We’d chatted all night, but things had taken this random turn and I still couldn’t put my finger on what had shifted so suddenly to throw her off her game.
"I had a good time the other night," I continued, running a hand through my hair, trying my best to keep my voice casual. I wasn’t entirely sure it was working.
"Yeah, me too."
"Yeah? Glad to hear it. I got the feeling..."
I trailed off, and she looked up at me, where she had been busying herself with arranging the cutlery. It seemed like whatever I had said had caught her attention.
"Got the feeling...?”
"I don’t know," I admitted. "That you wanted to get out of there pretty quickly."
She sighed, cocking her head to the side.
"I told you, I had to be up early for work…"
"I know."
A silence fell between us, neither of us sure what to say. I wasn’t sure if I would get any more of an answer if I went delving deeper, or if she had already made her mind up about the way this was going to go.
"I thought maybe we could do it again sometime," I offered. "While I’m in town. It’s good to talk with someone who really knows the place…"
"I think I’m good on that."
Her voice was low, but firm, as though she knew she would not be moved on this. My shoulders slumped slightly, and I looked down into my coffee, wondering if it might hold the secret as to what I had done wrong.
"Look, I don’t want to bother you," I told her, deciding I would just cut to the chase. That had been my mantra on all of these travels, to say what was on my mind, because I would be out of there soon enough that it wouldn’t even matter. "And if you had a bad time the other night or I did something that hurt your feelings, you can tell me…"
"No, it was nothing like that," she assured me quickly, her brows knitting together. "I meant it when I said I had a good time. I just..."
She chewed her lip for a moment, as though calculating whether she wanted to come out with whatever was on her mind. I leaned forward, eager to hear whatever it was she had to say. I didn’t want her to feel like she couldn’t be honest with me, and I wasn’t sure what I might have done to give her the impression that was the case.
"Mia, she recognized your surname when you paid the bill," she explained. "Kingston. Turns out that your family business did some business with her- look, it’s a long story."
My heart was already sinking, hearing her bring up my family name like that. There was a reason I had been on the road so long, and a big part of it was because I didn’t want to have to deal with the weight that came with bearing that name. Not that I wasn’t proud of what my father had achieved, setting up one of the biggest and most prominent real estate companies in the whole country, but that didn’t mean that I wanted it to be the first thing people thought of when they looked at me.
"And I...I guess you must get a lot of women who come to you trying to get something," she went on. "Maybe dinner, maybe travelling with you, maybe something else, I don’t know. But I never...I never wanted you to think that I would do something like that."
"Dina, why would I think you would do that?" I replied, incredulous. "I was the one who offered to take you to dinner. I didn’t think you knew something about me, or that you were trying to get something out of me…"
"No, I know," she corrected herself, shaking her head. "I just – I get the feeling that’s what people would think if they knew that we had been out together. And, well, I know that you’re going to be leaving soon enough, but I have to live here the rest of the year, and I don’t want people thinking that I’m the kind of girl who would...who would be interested in a man from a family like yours for reasons I shouldn’t be."
"What reasons?"
"Like, money reasons!” she exclaimed, tossing her hands in the air as though it should have been obvious. "I get that you’ve probably never had to think about money in your life before, Felix, but people like me, we have to. I’m working here to take care of myself, to support my mom, to put my bother through college...I can’t risk letting people change their judgement of me. I just can’t."
