Lauren swallows thickly. “Me, too.”
For a moment, we sit in silence. Then Lauren reaches for the wine bottle. “Time to finish this sucker off.”
She pours our wine truly to the top, and we both take a fewspill-preventing sips, watching the sunset dip lower on the horizon.
“I just remembered,” I say to her, “that you said there weretwothings you’d been holding on to.”
She swallows slowly, and when she speaks her voice comes out thick. “Yeah. I did.”
“It can wait,” I tell her. “If that’ll help. If today’s been enough emotions. I mean, it probably shouldn’t waitforever. But maybe you could tell me sometime this month, say, by the time we go to Savoureux for your birthday?”
Lauren freezes, mid-sip, then lowers her glass. She looks my way, and her eyes are filled with tears.
“Lo.” I clasp her hand. “What is it?”
Lauren stares down at our hands. “It’s going to have to be sooner than that.” She bites her trembling lip as she meets my eyes. “Because, in a month… I won’t be living here anymore.”
CHAPTER 11NOW
July 25, nine days until “vacation”
I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck. I haven’t slept well the past few nights, since the Holidays in July event. It’s taken me an eternity to fall asleep, and once I do, I’ve managed only a handful of hours before startling awake from a deeply hot sex dream about Alex, heart pounding, drenched in sweat, my body on the sharp-sweet edge of release.
After three days of this nonsense, I am wiped out and on frazzled, and not even being at The Bookshop today can make me happy.
Ro, a fellow staff member, comes in through the back door wearing a blush that jumps against their freckled skin and a dreamy smile that tells me their lunch break second date went just as well as their first.
When they see me, the smile drops from their face. “You’restillhere?”
“Nice to see you, too,” I tell them. Shifting on my desk chair in the staff room, I wince. Everything hurts.
Ro rakes back the short-cropped strawberry-blond curls that fall into their eyes. “You said you were going to go home to rest.”
“After I got this under control,” I tell them. “Almost there, and then I’ll be gone, promise.”
Ro sighs. “I’m sorry I panic-called. I feel awful that you’ve spent the entire day here, and you weren’t scheduled to.”
I glance their way. “Don’t be sorry, Ro. That’s on me—I didn’t walk you through what to do when this happens.”
“Yeah, but I could have called Fern instead of bugging you.”
The desktop dings with another disgruntled customer email. I click it open and start to type my now-memorized response. “Good luck getting ahold of her,” I mutter.
Ro frowns. “She has been, like,oddlyabsent lately, hasn’t she?”
It’s comforting to know that it’s not all in my head, that I’m not the only one who’s thought Fern has been scarce. She hasn’t shown in the office since the event, hasn’t reached out or said a word about it. Even before that, over the past month, she’s been dodgy about coming in or talking on the phone.
I should reach out to her and check in—about her absence, the event, the business proposal I’ve been waiting for the perfect time to put on her desk. Except between the tension with Alex and this impending “vacation” and my horrible sleep, I’m so fried and anxious, I have no confidence I’ll do any of those things well—most of all, the business proposal—and there’s a lot riding on my doing that well.
And Alex, the one person I want to talk to about it, is being just as elusive as my boss.
I expected that, after our flirty antics done in the name of scaring off Kate. That’s what we do, when we veer off thefriendship-only path—we go quiet for a couple days, or we stay chatty but avoid the topic.
Or, in my case, have highly detailed, very horny dreams three nights in a row inspired by our latest inadvertent, dangerously lusty detour.
Ro opens their locker and drops their belt bag and Bike da ’Burgh water bottle inside. “Do you think Fern’s sick or something?”
I freeze, hands hovering over the keyboard. That possibility never occurred to me. I’d just assumed I’d done something—or hadn’t done enough—to inspire Fern’s distance.