Page 173 of A Taste of Vanilla

This is desire. This is respect.

This is an attachment forming when I told myself this would only be temporary help. Temporary proximity. This is me coming back after closing because I couldn’t stand the thought of her alone with doubt. This is her anger making me want her more, not because things are easy, but because she’s being honest. This is me standing in one place where I have no business getting comfortable and already knowing everything about her.

This is not simple.

Halston nods slowly, as if my silence confirms everything.“Right.”

“Halston, you’re angry. Let’s?—”

“And you’re not?”

I stop.

She laughs again. “Of course you’re not, Warren. You don’t get upset. You’re too practical.”

“That’s not true.”

“Then what are you?”

The question feels loaded.

I’m worried and angry.

I’m still hard from kissing her and ashamed of being hard while she looks at me like I’ve rejected her. I’m jealous of a city that had her before I did, of customers who get pieces of her every morning, and of a bakery that knows where she keeps the best parts of herself.

I’m leaving.

I’m leaving because I always leave. Because staying has never been the plan. Because Maryland is temporary, and Marley needs help only until she doesn’t, and I have spent my entire adult life not building anything in a place I could be asked to leave.

I say the smallest part. “I’m supposed to leave.”

The words feel cruel.

She stiffens, her eyes searching mine like she knew what I was going to say and still hoped I wouldn’t.

“When?” she asks.

“I don’t know.”

“But eventually.”

“Yes.”

Her mouth presses together, and she looks down at the table.

When she looks back up, her voice is low. “You keep acting like I’m a mistake you can schedule your way out of.”

Everything stops.

For a second, I’m twenty-eight again, standing in a bakery in Stuttgart after being told I was talented but not the image they wanted out front. Tattoos covered. Sleeves down. Jaw tight. Passport in my bag. Already calculating the next city. The next job. The next place I could leave before it left me.

Then I’m nineteen, looking at Marley asleep on a couch too small for her, promising myself she would never know how scared I was.

Then I’m thirty-eight, standing in Halston’s kitchen, realizing I have spent years calling retreat a plan.

A mistake you can schedule your way out of.

“No,” I say.