“Maybe?” she purred. “I just don’t want to take things too fast.”
“I think we’re taking it a little too slow,” I admitted. “What’s fast about what we’re doing? I want you. Always have. I know who you are. You know who I am.” Though, really, she didn’t know all parts of me until last night, and my Nina secret was like my dick—big and long and certainly uncomfortable if you weren’t ready for it. “This is not two people dating each other for the first time. We have history. Chemistry. And a shit-ton of sentiments toward one another. I’m serious as hell about this,” I said, in case a thousand roses, dinner with her friend, and making her breakfast didn’t tip her off.
“Sold.” She smoothed my unbuttoned shirt, reminding me that I needed to get dressed for work—and shit, I never stayed home beyond eight o’clock in the morning. People at work must have thought I was finally murdered by one of my flings. And I bet Sue was already planning the party memorial. “I guess a drawer would be nice. Thank you.”
“Do you have a shift today?” I found it hard to let go of her waist.
“Not at the café.” Rosie shook her head. “But I’m going to the children’s hospital for a shift later this afternoon.”
“Can I visit you there after work?”
She laughed. “I don’t think it’s a good idea. New parents are a little icky over strangers hanging around their premature newborns.”
“Go figure.” I rolled my eyes, ignoring the stab in my chest when she said that.
“Yeah. Tomorrow?”
“It’s a date.” I nodded, watching her walk toward the door, the realization that the decision whether she came back up or not was completely hers hitting me in the gut.
“Oh, and Dean?” she said when she was at the door. I looked up.
“Yeah?”
“I really enjoyed last night. You can let your inner Pierrot come out to play more often if you’d like.”
I bit my fist as she closed the door behind her, knowing for a fact she was going to come back up.
Well, fuck indeed.
What makes you feel alive?
First dates. Holding hands. Forming jokes that are only ours. Memories that no one else but us has. Creating life with a man who doesn’t even know that I cannot create life, not really, and feeling the remorse churning inside me.
SEPTEMBER CAME AND WENT, AND October followed suit. Seasons bled into one another. The trees had changed, but we hadn’t. In fact, it was when the leaves started falling, dancing together in orange, pink, and yellow, that what we had grown together became stronger and more alive.
Dean and I fell into a routine. It wasn’t flawless, but I learned at a very young age that nothing was. Even if it seemed so from the outside.
We spent every waking, available moment together.
When he was at work and I didn’t have a shift at The Black Hole, I came to see him. We would always lock the door to his office and close the electric blinds. Sometimes, it would be enough to hide what we were doing there. Mostly, though, I walked out with cheeks the color of beetroot and watched the whole floor judging me with their gazes as I fixed my hair and covered my stubble-scratched neck with my hand.
Sue, especially, would look at me like I sacrificed innocent babies for a living.
One time, I came in wearing a thick coat and nothing else. When he slipped the coat off of me, he was so happy to find me naked, he ate me on his desk for forty minutes and missed his Skype meeting with the rest of the HotHoles. He did scold me right after for not wearing clothes.
“You could get sick.” He bit my ass cheek—and not softly. “Stop fucking with what’s mine and wear a goddamn sweater.”
When I did have shifts, we tried to do lunches together. Sometimes he would drop by unannounced, sit at the bar, ask for an Americano, and pretend like we didn’t know each other. Especially if there were other customers around, we would play a game where he hit on me by dirty-talking his way to a quiet orgasm that came in pleasant chills. It always made the person sitting next to him squirm. One man even asked me if I wanted him to call the cops on Dean.
I said yes before I declined, just to see the look on Dean’s face.
We laughed. A lot.
We cried some, too.
Well, I did all the crying. When you volunteer at a children’s hospital and work with premature newborns three times a week, sad things are bound to hit you in the face. At the end of October, we had lost a newborn. A baby girl named Kayla. She was tiny, born at twenty-four weeks yet wrinkly as a hundred-year-old woman. I broke down in tears in the hospital hallway the night her doctor told me that she didn’t make it. When I got off from that shift, Dean was waiting for me on the other side of the road.