Page 101 of Smoke and Glitter

Autumn asked.

She didn't ask me to fix her life, give up Vibes or promise her forever. She asked what we were. She asked for one thing between us that wasn't the same thing I gave everybody else, and one true thing about me she hadn't already learned from somebody who knew me better.

I treated every one of those questions like she'd reached for something I couldn't afford to lose, even though I'd spent months taking everything she handed me. She came upstairs after a day of making decisions for everybody else and stopped. She bitched about work, fell asleep in my bed, left shoes under things and hair ties everywhere. She told me when she was angry and when she was scared, and she let me see her when she didn't have an answer.

I liked being the place she could do that. I loved being that place for her, and I probably loved her long before I would have called it that.

That's the part I pretended I could separate from everything else.

I knew how she took her coffee. I kept food she liked upstairs. I could tell when something happened at work by how she dropped her bag. I made room for her everywhere I knew how without ever saying I was making room. All of it let me feel close to her without handing over the one thing I couldn't control once she had it.

Me.

When she finally asked, I stopped even though I understood enough. Naming us meant admitting there was something important enough to name. Treating her differently meant admitting she was already different. Telling her something I hadn't given anybody else meant trusting her to have it even if she eventually walked away.

Bex asked what I would say if Autumn wanted more, and I gave her the answer I'd been building the whole relationship around.

It's not that deep.

I've spent weeks trying to make that sentence mean something less ugly. It doesn't. I never thought Autumn was nothing to me. I needed what we had to stay small enough that I could survive losing it.

I called it casual so when she left it wouldn't count. She left anyway. It counted.

I stare down at the envelope on the bar because there isn't much room to argue with that anymore. The worst part isn't even what I said to Bex. Autumn heard me and came back. She stood in front of me after hearing exactly how little I was willing to admit she meant and gave me a chance to tell her something different.

I understood what she was asking.

I still said no.

That one doesn't belong to Elise. It doesn't belong to the man who just walked out of here or what happened three years ago. That was me.

My phone buzzes beside the register and I reach for it. It's an email about Pilsen. I answer it, then set the phone back down without opening anything else.

Autumn's name would take seconds to find. I could tell her I finally understand what she was asking for. I could tell her the old company is almost gone, Pilsen is moving and she was right about the call. I could tell her I miss her.

Every one of those things is true, but none of them gives me the right to drop all of this in her lap because I finally caught up. She already stood in front of me and did the hard part. My turn isn't explaining myself better. It's doing something differently.

I take the envelope into the office and put the signed pages with the Pilsen paperwork. The schedule is still open on my laptop from earlier, and there's a Friday coming up when I've already rearranged half the day trying to make myself available at both places.

I look at it for a minute, then remove myself from Vibes completely.

My first instinct is to replace myself with instructions. I start typing a message to the person running the night, get three lines into everything I want checked before open, then stop and delete all of it.

Me: I'm at Pilsen Friday. You've got the room.

The reply comes back a minute later.

Bex: Got it.

I stare at those two words longer than necessary, waiting for the follow-up question that doesn't come. There are half a dozen things I could send anyway, but I don't.

I close the laptop.

Friday, I'm staying at Pilsen. Vibes will run without me because the people I chose to trust with it are capable of doing exactly that. It feels uncomfortable as hell, but I leave it that way.

Chapter twenty

Chapter Twenty