I’d spent half the night thinking about what was going on with Gentry and me, and whether we could put labels on what we had. The other half of the night I’d thought about missing little boys in the area, and the files that I could go through to hopefully help locate them, possibly find a connection.
“You okay?”
Gentry’s low, rumbly voice had me glancing over at him from the passenger seat of his truck.
Gentry drove me to work again, thanks to a new dusting of snow on the ground when we’d woken up.
“I’m fine,” I lied.
I wasn’t fine.
I had all the questions.
What were we doing? Did he feel the same way about me that I felt about him? Would he want me to stay with him again tonight? Were we telling people that we were together? Were we together?
The questions were endless inside my brain, and I wasn’t going to voice a single one of them.
He grunted, then pulled off the main road into a parking spot along the front of the only coffee shop in town. “What do you want to drink?”
I blinked at him. “Ummm…”
“I’ll just go in there and get hot chocolate or something if you don’t know,” he warned.
I bit my lip. “I like hot coffees. Anything with a lot of sugar and milk.”
His lips quirked. “I think I can handle that.”
He bailed out of the truck and headed toward the front door of the coffee shop.
I watched him through the window as he greeted the older woman behind the countertop.
A large man came from the back room and offered Gentry his hand. The two shook hands, and then the man behind the counter went to work pulling stuff out of the display case and putting it into a box.
The older woman went to work on two coffee orders and then placed them on the counter with a straw.
By the time that Gentry made it outside, I was practically hyperventilating.
The man knew that I drank my coffee with a straw.
He also knew that I liked something sweet with my coffee, hence the box he was carrying alongside the coffees that he had balanced in one hand.
I rolled down my window when he got to me and took the box from his hands.
When I had it safely in my lap, he handed me the straw and the coffee.
“I told her to surprise me on the drink,” he said as he waited for me to get settled before he rounded the truck.
By the time he got back in I had the straw in the coffee cup and was taking a hesitant sip.
“Ohh.” I pulled back and looked at it. “What did she make me?”
“I have no idea,” he admitted. “I told her your specifications and she went with it. I’ll ask her next time I take you.”
I nodded, peeking into the box as he pulled away from the curb.
“What are these?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” He chuckled. “I just asked for whatever they had. I’m sure everything is good. Everyone at work raves about their Danishes.”