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“I’ve been told I skip the small talk.”
“You demolish the small talk.”
She turns her cup in a slow circle, and I recognize it, because it’s my thing, and I wonder if she picked it up from me or if we’ve just always been the same underneath.
“I’ve never let anyone get to the serious part,” she says. “That’s the truth. I’ve had real relationships. Fancy dinners. A few months here and there. And the second it started to feel like it might turn into something real, I’d find a reason it couldn’t. I’m too busy. Wrong timing. He chewed too loud.” A small, honest breath. “It was never about the guy chewing loud.”
I don’t say anything. She’s not looking for me to fix it. She’s handing it over, and the best thing you can do with something a person hands you like that is hold still and not drop it.
“I told myself I liked my life the way it was. Ordered. Quiet. Mine.” She looks up. “I built a whole life that couldn’t disappoint me, because I never let anybody far enough in to try.”
“And now?”
“And now a man I met by accident is sitting across from me talking about marriage on a Monday, and I...” She stops. Something works across her face, and I brace, because I know how this sentence ends in every version of her I’ve run in my head. This is where the reasons come. Too busy. Wrong timing.
“It scares me,” she says on an exhale. “But I don’t want to run from it.”
“You sure? Because I...”
She reaches across the table and puts her hand over mine, and every word behind that falls away.
“Luke.” She lifts her eyes to mine and keeps them there. “I’m excited. I want the all in.”
I turn my hand over under hers so we’re palm to palm, and I give her the smile Bo says gives me away every time.
“Good. Because I already promised my son I’d tell you he got a hundred on his spelling test.”
Her whole face changes. She lights up, her smile going wide and real. She wants this. She actually wants to know about my kid’s spelling test, and she doesn’t take her hand back while she waits for the rest.
“He missed ‘necessary,’” I add. “But he got it on the retake.”
“The retake counts.” She says it fast, a little fierce, a twinkle starting, already on his side.
“Technically that’s not a hundred, then.” I can’t help it.
“It absolutely counts, Luke.” She’s fighting a grin now, defending a ten-year-old she’s apparently decided is hers to defend.
“That’s almost word for word what he said.”
“Then he’s right, and so am I.”
Outside, the light’s going gold over the parking lot, and I’ve got a white mocha going cold because I’ve been too busy watching her to drink it.
A woman who lit up over a spelling test. A woman ready to go to war over a retake for a kid she’s met twice.
It’s crazy to think a wrong number is the best thing that ever happened to me by accident.
Chapter 21
Olivia
“Can I crack the eggs?”
Bo has his sleeves shoved up before I can answer.
“Yes, you can crack the eggs.”
Most of them make it into the bowl. He fishes a piece of shell out with the focus of a surgeon, flicks it into the sink, and never mentions it. Neither do I.
