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Nick stared blankly at the road. Somehow they’d strolled right up to another door he didn’t want to open.
“You held on to me,” Hayley said softly, “and you knew exactly what to say to make it better. How’d you do that?”
After a while, he said, “I just said what I’d want to hear.”
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t sell yourself short.”
“I’m not,” he said. “I wish someone had said those things to me.”
She waited.
“My mom makes really good lemon chicken,” he said. “I wanted to learn to make it on my own after I got the apartment, so I could have my favorite food at my own place. So I followed Mom’s instructions, and I figured out how to use the oven without burning myself, and it turned out really well.”
“I can’t cook at all,” she offered.
“You can toast bagels.”
“Only if I don’t get distracted.”
He gave her a wan smile. “So I’m sitting in my apartment, eating my own food, listening to Ben Folds on my stereo,” he said. “And I’m maybe five bites in when I can’t breathe. Because none of it mattered. It wouldn’t make any difference to anyone if I choked on that damn chicken and died. I’d worked so hard atbecomingsomeone, you know? Getting a job and an apartment and being as functional as everyone else, and then I come up for air and I’m completely empty.”
Hayley touched his arm. “I get it,” she said softly. “I really do.”
He glanced at her. “Yeah?”
“Nick, I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve cried alone this last year.”
The ache to hold her was so strong that he nearly pulled the car over. “So that’s why,” he said. “I walked into the bar and you were drowning, just like when I wake up in the dark and feel like screaming. I tried to help.”
She smiled. “Thank you.”
“Happy to do it.”
Hayley got her phone out of her purse. “What do you want, Nick?” she asked.
“To sing with you.”
“We’ll get there,” she said patiently. “But I mean when you feel empty. What do you really want?”
He wanted years of car rides and birthday parties, late nights and lazy mornings and playful fights. He wanted to kiss her as the sun was rising above the ocean.
“I want to take you on a date,” he said. The panic came immediately. She was only in this car because he hadn’t asked for anything, and now he’d blown it.
“Okay,” she said.
It took him a solid five seconds to realize she wasn’t rejecting him. “Okay?”
“Okay,” she repeated calmly. “Singin’ in the Rainis playing at the Ohio Theatre Thursday night, and I very much want you to take me.”
He was suddenly afraid he was imagining this entire conversation, but there she was, in his passenger seat, smiling at him.
“Okay,” he said, a little calmer this time.
“You’ll have to dress up.” She started searching the compartment between their seats. “Is there a way I can hook my phone to your stereo?”
“There’s a white cord in there,” he said distractedly. “You’re not doing this because of what I just said, are you?”
She shook her head. “I decided before I even got in Rose’s tent.”
