His gaze flicked briefly toward the back hallway. “Can we talk somewhere private?”
“Yeah,” I said after a moment.
I led him through the side door and down the narrow corridor behind the café, where storage crates were stacked unevenly against the walls.
The space was small enough that our footsteps felt louder than they should have been, and by the time I closed the door behind us, the sound of the café dropped away completely.
Suddenly, there was nowhere left to look except him.
“I, uh, didn’t know if you’d want to see me,” he started.
A short laugh slipped out of me before I could stop it.
“Why wouldn’t I?” I asked, though it came out lighter than I meant it to.
“Because you stopped reaching out,” he said simply.
I opened my mouth, then closed it again. That wasn’t how I remembered it.
Or maybe it was, and I had just been filling in the silence with something easier to believe.
“I thought you didn’t want to come by anymore,” I said finally, more carefully this time.
Dane frowned. “I came by twice.”
That made me pause. He must have come by while I was in the back, handling deliveries, or during the rush when the café was too full for me to notice anyone lingering.
The last two weeks suddenly shifted in my head as I replayed it like that. It was just timing.
Like two people moving through the same space and somehow missing each other every time they got close enough to actually meet.
Or worse, two people quietly assuming the other wasn’t there anymore, without ever checking if that was true.
“I thought…” I started, then stopped, because I wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence without making it sound worse out loud.
“No,” he said, simple and firm, like the idea itself didn’t sit right with him at all.
“I wasn’t trying to pull away,” I said after a beat. Even as I said it, I knew how thin that sounded. I hesitated, then added more honestly, “I just… didn’t know what I was supposed to do.”
Dane let out a slow breath. “Neither did I.”
Dane took a step toward me, not enough to close the distance completely, just enough that I couldn’t ignore him anymore.
“I just knew I didn’t like not seeing you,” he said.
I swallowed, feeling the weight of everything we hadn’t said properly sitting between us.
“I kept thinking it was going to turn into something that ended badly,” I admitted after a moment, the words coming out more raw than I intended.
“Because of before?” he asked quietly.
I nodded.
Dane let that sit for a moment, then reached up and lightly touched my cheek, steady and unhurried.
“I’m not him,” he said quietly. “And I’m not going anywhere.”
The kiss that followed was unhurried and soft, a quiet agreement between us that said nothing needed to be rushed.
