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“It’d be a place you could hang out,” he said. “Someplace students could come in the afternoon between classes or in the evening while they were studying. There would be a big common area with couches and easy chairs and you could grab a coffee and something snacky or portable and sit there for hours. And then, there would also be a sit-down area where you could get the full menu and have a waitress bring you food. There would be tons of vegetarian options, Paleo, healthy food, you name it, we’d do it. And—”
“We?” she said softly.
“I mean… not ‘we.’” He laughed. “I sure as hell can’t afford to open a restaurant. And no one’s going to give me that money either. I mean, people’d just laugh at me. I can’t commit to anything. How am I going to commit to something like that?”
“Yeah, that’s what everyone says about you,” she said with a little laugh. “And it’d be stupid for us to try to do it together, of course, because you can’t work with someone and be in a relationship with them and be constantly up each other’s asses and not want to, like, kill each other. We haven’t even been together a month, so, we can’t start talking about this.”
“Definitely not,” he said.
“I’m going to be a social worker.”
“I don’t even have any formal training to be a chef,” he said.
“So, let’s change the subject,” she said.
“I need to text Max.” He picked his phone back up.
A MONTH WENTby.
It was too fast, too easy, too good.
Dahlia spent every night with him until she didn’t, because of needing to get up early for class or practicum hours. She and Tommy finally got another roommate in the other bedroom, and her rent went from astronomical to affordable again.
Things with Tommy were still stiff and a little awkward. When they talked, they didn’t have the same easiness that they used to. But he was still Tommy, and she was still her, and she didn’t think that she’d ruined everything between them.
She didn’t want to have done that.
She knew that Niles didn’t like Tommy, but that was rooted in jealousy. Tommy wasn’t a bad guy and he cared about Dahlia. She and Tommy had been close for a long time. She didn’t want to lose him. He was her best friend.
She told her parents she was dating a naga, and they were predictably horrified.
But they were grudgingly accepting of the entire thing, just as they had been of Tommy, even though she’d never indicated Tommy was her boyfriend. They accepted because she wasn’t really an elf, after all, and she was never going to fit into an elvish world. She wasn’t going to be coming to the temple with them or smiling at some respectable elvish man and having a big temple wedding with a long, white dress.
No, her parents had washed their hands of her a long time ago.
There was a reason she was here in Shepherdstown, after all. She was a weirdo and she knew it. It was a place to belong. She’d never belong with her family.
Her parents came and took them all out to dinner, and Niles wore a shirt, and he was nervous and polite, and she knew he hated it, but she was so pleased he’d done it for her anyway.
Tommy would never have agreed to an awkward dinner with her parents like that. Of course, Tommy would never have committed to her in any way.
Her field practicum was better this time than last time. Last time, she’d been working with a home for children, and she’d had a lot of teenagers who were understandably defiant. Dahlia knew that kids who had been abandoned by any parental figures, repeatedly tossed out of foster situations, and then settled in a group home, knowing they were close to aging out of the system, all alone, sheknewthat must be horrifying for those kids. She felt for them. She couldn’t imagine them being anythingotherthan difficult.
She wasn’t sure why every little thing they did to her she took so personally, though.
She knew that she was a representation of the authority that had hurt them. She knew they were just lashing out at her because she was there.
And yet.
It had been painful.
This time, she was placed with adults who were recovering from drug addiction, and she came into their homes to help them with the transition back into their lives and to help them get jobs, that sort of thing.
She wasn’t on her own, but was shadowing a licensed social worker. Many of the people they were working with were very self-motivated, and she felt good being able to do things for them, to help them help themselves.
There were a lot of rewarding moments.
But she came home to Niles and they drew pictures of the restaurant they wanted to open together and they figured out the menus and they daydreamed like crazy fools.
