“No way. This is just a phobia. I mean something bigger than that. Like what mistake would you most regret making? What’s the one thing you could never get over?”
He didn’t answer for so long that her stomach started to hurt, and she wanted to retract the question. She shouldn’t be prying, not when she knew there was something he didn’t want to tell.
His reply came as a relief. “You have a gift for asking weird questions, you know that?”
“Sorry. I—ow! Son of a biscuit!” Her shin had slammed into something.
“What?”
Amber felt around with her free hand until she could make sense of it. One of those rolling racks of basketballs. If she remembered correctly where it was, that made the wall ten or twelve feet farther ahead. “I ran into some balls.”
Great. Now even normal conversation sounded dirty.
“You bleeding?”
“No, I’m fine.” She started walking again, Tony in tow. “My worst fear is that I’ll get to my deathbed and realize I’ve never done anything with my life.”
“You’re not even twenty-five yet.”
“So?”
“So that’s a stupid thing to be afraid of.”
She forgave him the insult, since his palm was sweaty, and it was hard to be kind while freaking out, and clearly her question had punched a button she needed to learn to avoid if she was ever going to talk to Tony again. “It doesn’t seem stupid to me. You know, I have a younger brother in the army, and he’s living in Germany. My baby sister, Katie, wants to move to Paris—or she used to anyway. Lately she keeps talking about Alaska, which is where her boyfriend wants to go after graduation. And I’m just … here.”
“You finished college. You have a job. It’s not like you have
to leave town to prove yourself.”
“I know.”
“Family’s important, too.”
“I know, I’m just … I don’t know who I am yet. I feel like I’m still living the wrong life.”
She reached the wall and pulled his hand forward until his fingertips touched it. “Here. We made it. Now we just have to keep moving forward, and we’ll reach the stairs in no time.”
“Thanks.” He exhaled, a ragged sound. “You want to get married, have kids, the whole nine yards?”
Yes.
The thought seemed to come from some part of her other than her brain. It leapt out from the cellular level, straight to the tip of her tongue.
Then she realized he was asking if she wanted to get married someday, to someone. Not to him, immediately.
Amber swallowed. “Sure. You?”
“I don’t know.”
“You ready to start walking?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you need to hold my hand, or …”
“No, I can just use the wall.”
“Okay. Keep up.”