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“Look,” he says in a way that makes me instantly want to harden my heart. Nothing good ever comes after that word. “I’m not in a position to date anyone right now . . . not with this insane schedule . . .”
“You don’t have to give me a speech. I get it.” My cheeks flush, cherry hot, as I stare at the ceiling, wishing I could melt into the covers and take back every question.
“No,” he says. “You didn’t let me finish.”
I swallow the hard lump in my throat, realizing our fingers are still intertwined and he hasn’t moved an inch. Most guys retreat when they give you “the talk.” At least they do in my experience.
“Things are going to be crazy for me for the next couple of years,” he says. “I’m working on outsourcing a lot of what I do so I don’t have to be on site with the band all the time . . . I’ll still manage them, but I’ll be able to do what I need to do remotely. At least, that’s the plan.”
Dorian rolls to his side, resting his head on his hand as he studies me.
“Will you wait for me?” he asks.
I’m too stunned to give him an answer.
This is not the direction I thought this conversation was headed . . .
“I know it’s asking a lot for you to put your life on pause,” he elaborates, “but I just . . . if I leave this place and never see you again, I’m always going to wonder.”
Me too . . .
“Give me two years, and we’ll pick up right where we left off,” he says.
“Y . . . yeah,” I finally manage. “Yes. Okay. I can wait two years.”
Taking a break from the exhausting dating scene and focusing on my career wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for me to do, and having something to look forward to—like knowing we’re going to pick up where we left off—would make the anticipation half the fun.
“No texting,” he says. “No phone calls. No emails. It’ll turn into some long-distance thing, and I don’t want that for us. I don’t want to waste those first two years living for the rare trips home and missing out on everything we could be doing together. All the firsts. I don’t want to be calling you from backstage in Seattle to tell you happy birthday, and I don’t want to be FaceTiming you from Ontario on New Year’s Eve.”
Waiting for him for two years is one thing . . .
Radio silence is something else.
But before I have a chance to talk myself out of it, I’m nodding and kissing him and agreeing to his crazy little idea.
How could I not?
This man is everything I never knew I wanted.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
BRIAR
Present Day
“I’m sorry, I need to sit down for a second.” I run my hand along the curved brick wall inside the Driftway lighthouse and take a seat on one of the narrow steps. As someone who has never been inside a lighthouse before, I had zero expectations. Turns out, I should’ve done more research besides looking at pretty pictures in a coffee-table book.
Most lighthouses are composed of circular rooms on top of circular rooms. Aside from the tiny windows or the occasional crack in the wall, there’s not much airflow in here. That, coupled with the dark, narrow space, is making me claustrophobic and breathless.
Still, I don’t want to seem ungrateful for the fact that Dorian miraculously agreed to give me a tour. I’m not sure what Burke said to him, but I’m willing to bet there was some kind of bribe or ultimatum involved, because never in my wildest dreams did I expect Dorian to say yes.
“You okay?” He sighs like he’s annoyed he has to ask, which is a step up from earlier today when we ran into each other in the hallway, and he told me through gritted teeth that I was like glitter because I was everywhere. I drag three stale breaths into my lungs, close my eyes, and nod.
“You want to keep going?” he asks.
I rise from my step, grip the skinny metal banister, and continue the climb. We’re only three levels up—past two oil rooms and a coal room. We haven’t yet reached the actual light, and I’m not leaving here without checking out the living quarters.
I didn’t endure an awkward, silent, ten-minute ATV ride for nothing.
Dorian stops when he reaches the next doorway, leaning in and giving the rusty-hinged door a good shove with his shoulder.
“Living room,” he says, continuing his pattern of saying the fewest number of words as possible to me.
We step into another brick-walled room, this one with a saggy orange couch that looks like it’s from the set of an Austin Powers movie, as well as a dusty rocking chair, a crooked bookcase chock full of tomes that are falling apart by the second, and a pile of knitted blankets as old as the universe.
