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Dante snorts. “Yeah, actually, you could have. I was an ass to you. Second I saw you, I had you all sized up and figured out.” He smirks. “And I’ve never been more glad to have been wrong. I won’t forget that night you agreed to come out with me in search of this guy,” he adds with a nod at Tye. “I owe you, Connor.”
I smile at him and pray a tear won’t dislodge itself from my eye. “You owe me nothing. I can’t wait to do a feature piece on you and your work.”
Dante winks at me. “You got my number.”
When I come out the doors of Piazza Place, it’s just plain serendipity that Zak and his man Richie are strolling right up to the steps. “Well, well,” says Zak in his smooth, sultry voice. “Looks like we got here just in time to bid you farewell, I’m guessing.”
Seriously. Trying. Not. To. Cry. “Thanks for making my life at Aubergines that much easier,” I tell him. “It was good to know that, even on my worst days, I always had a friend there.”
“Don’t let anyone stand in your way,” Zak tells me with a firm pat on the arm. His eyes glimmer with a moment of self-reflection. “… especially not yourself. The future’s yours for the taking.”
I join Alan by the car, and when I look back at the steps of Piazza Place, I find Brett and Skylar at the top with Dante and Tye, and Zak and Richie at its base, all of them creating an unintended picture in my mind I’ll remember forever.
Ah, who am I kidding? I’ll make new pictures every time I come visit them. Oh, shoot. I have to set a reminder in my phone about Sunday brunch, which Brett and I are totally going to make a thing.
My gaze drops to the front step, where bright bubbly rainbow letters artfully spell out “C-YA LATER CONNOR” in chalk, complete with a big dragon breathing green fire over my name, causing it to glow.
A beautiful chalk-illustration farewell from my own personal teenage Van Gogh, wherever he is.
I pull out my phone suddenly. “Stand together, all of you! I want to take this moment with me!”
After a chuckle from Zak and a knowing smirk from Dante, the guys oblige, squeezing together on the front concrete steps.
Alan comes up to my side. “Go up there. Stand with your boys. I’ll snap the shot.”
I turn to my boyfriend, touched, and hand him the phone. “Take several,” I ask him. “Y’know … in case Brett does his weird wide-eyed thing.”
Brett, having heard that, protests. “I don’t do a weird wide-eyed thing!”
I jump right up the steps and, for one last time, find my place among the boys. Squeezed together on the steps with my heart as full as it’s ever been, I smile brightly. Alan lifts my phone, prepares for a picture, then calls out, “You guys ready?”
There is nothing in the way of my future. It is as bold as the chalk under our feet—colorful, bright, and limitless. “You bet your ass we are,” I call out.
Flash!
The End of Season 2.
