Page 72 of The Perfect Rom-Com

I can’t say it.

I can’t open up something like this. It’s a tin can. Once opened it cannot be resealed.

He waits for me to finish, but when I don’t he just nods slightly. Stands.

We walk around after dinner and in our wanderings end up past the massive bookstore and the bustling groups of people and cars, past several smaller businesses, and finally onto a quieter neighborhood street.

They are older houses, lined up side by side with perfectly manicured lawns of St. Augustine grass and zoysia. Palm trees and scrub oaks. Stained glass features of seagulls and wind chimes swept up in the salty breeze.

Night comes upon us.

And we continue on, talking about little nothings as all the while my mind is preoccupied, my thoughts elsewhere.

Who knows? Maybe for him too.

Nobody can be that intrigued by the location of a piano through a windowpane into somebody’s living room, right? Nobody can be that interested in talking about concrete turtles in a yardscape, surely?

And yet, there he goes. Perfectly content it seems to walk alongside me. Strolling along beneath a clear evening sky, dim stars twinkling above, hands in his pockets without a care in the world.

“Do you think that’s an addition they added on above the workshop?” he begins.

“What exactly is happening here?”

I’ve done it.

I’ve blurted it out.

I clap my hands over my mouth. And yet a part of me is relieved.

Perfect, Bryony. Looks like you can make it roughly twelve hours before you need to have a talk about the status of your next relationship.

He looks away from the workshop in mild surprise at my outburst.

Stops.

Turns.

Studies me.

“Well,” he says after a pause. “We just went out to dinner. I told you you were acting bizarre, the waiter became smitten with you and decided to loathe me—nothing new—and now we’re walking off the three-pound cheesecake you made me eat because you said it was blueberry, and you went on about how I love blueberry cheesecake, but it turned out to be raspberry, and you made me eat it anyway. So here we are. Cue”—he waves his hand at the house opposite—“palm trees.”

He says it like it’s the most casual thing in the world.

“Right, I know that, genius, but”—I look around me—“just, I just, well, I just feel like something is different.”

“Nothing is different.”

I shake my head. “Something is different. Do not challenge me on this, Jack. Something is different. I want—I need—to know what it is.”

He cocks a brow. “Do you really, Bryony? Do you really need to know what it is?”

I hesitate. Take a breath.

Do I need to verbalize it?

Tackle it, right now?

Against all Gloria’s (and usually my own) wisdom? “Yes.”