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“Maybe I’ll take a bartending course sometime.” She shrugged. “They make good money. Tips. Maybe even someday open a place of my own.”
“Abs.” I knew she wasn’t happy. I knew she had more potential than that diner held for her. Everyone knew it. And I knew so did she. Deep down, she did.
“Lucas, leave it alone.”
“Leave what alone?”
“What you’re trying to do. Just don’t.”
“You make no sense, Abbie.”
“I make sense. Plenty of sense to myself. I don’t get why everyone thinks they have every right to chime in what they think I should be doing with my life.” Her eyes blazed with a level of anger I hadn’t seen before.
“Because we can see what you can’t. That you have talent, amazing talent. Behind the lens of that camera, you come alive, and when you put it down, the light in your eyes fades. That every single shift in that damn diner is sucking the life out of you. I don’t care if Jimmy and Marnie are the best friends you ever had in life and are your second family. Even they don’t want you to stay there forever. You’re too comfortable, you need to find a reason...”
“I’m too comfortable?”
“You quit that internship…”
That was it. She picked up her glass and threw it at the wall before I even blinked.
The glass shattered the second it made contact with the wall, the broken shards falling everywhere on the floor.
Her eyes widened.
I knew mine had, too. I had no idea what to say. I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want her to move.
She looked at me, her face a mask of emotion. She took a calming breath as I watched the last of the beer drip slowly down the wall. I’d grab a wet rag in a few moments and wipe it up and clean up the broken glass before she could hurt herself.
“Lucas, you may be my best friend, we may have slept together…we may have something between us, but that still doesn’t give you the right—”
“To tell you the truth? What are you afraid of? Failure? Success?”
Her shoulders moved up and down and she gulped for air. “How about the door being slammed shut on me again.”
“What are you talking about?”
She looked up with glossy eyes and took a shaky breath. “Since you mentioned my oh so wonderful internship?”
“Right.” She’d been overjoyed to get it. The woman had given a couple of seminars at the college and had handpicked Abbie and a few others…we’d gone out for a fancy dinner to celebrate. I still remembered her little blue sundress.
“How do you think that went?”
“Fine…you just decided it wasn’t where you saw yourself…you wanted to freelance…”
“Do you want to see my two dozen rejection letters I’ve gotten? Do you want to see the critiques of my work? Do you want to see the ones that got picked instead of me, the ones that—”
“So you keep submitting, you keep knocking on doors. Hell, you knock the damn door down and tell them you’re there.”
“Then you don’t know me.”
“The Abbie I met five years ago isn’t a quitter.”
“The Abbie in front of you knows what’s she capable of and what pays her bills. It’s not photography. It’s a nice hobby, it’s relaxing when there’s no pressure, no expectations, but that’s it.”
“You haven’t even pursued it.”
“Are you not hearing me? Do you want me to go work in a department store taking baby pictures of screaming babies eight hours a day? What do I need to do?”
