JP:I’m in a training right now. Can I call you in twenty?
Me: Yes
I wait on bated breath for him to call, nervously sipping my coffee and letting the caffeine heighten each of my nerves. By the time my phone rings I’m so nervous and jittery, I go to answer my phone and knock it on the floor along with the remnants of my coffee.
“Shit!” I scramble to pick up, offering a breathless “Hello.”
“Are you exercising?”
“Yes—I mean, no. I mean, sorry. I dropped the phone and spilled my coffee. I guess I was too excited to talk to you, and—”
“You miss me?” There’s a playful hint in his tone.
Yes,I want to say, but instead, I follow with, “How are you?”
“Busy, but life is good,” he responds. I can hear the sounds of life and city beyond his words.
“I heard you wrote another book,” I say, slopping up the coffee and ice off the tiled floors with brown paper napkins.
He chuckles. “Yeah, who would have thought this one would sell more than two hundred copies?”
“It’s excellent, JP. You should be proud of yourself.”
“Thank you,” he says. There’s something off about his voice—it’s too polite and guarded. It makes me want to see him, look in his bright green eyes, and ask him how he truly is.
“Where are you?”
“Near Garfield. About to grab a coffee before I have to head back into my training.”
I pause from cleaning and look up at the door to the coffee shop as it chimes open. I smile at him and shrug. A flash ofdisbelief morphs into amusement as he sees me with a pile of coffee-soaked napkins, kneeling on the floor. He hangs up his phone and comes to me, reaching down to pull me up.
My hands are sticky from the coffee and my knees are wet from kneeling. I’m the poster child of a mess.
“I’ll take care of it,” he says, discarding the soaked napkins and retrieving a mop from one of the baristas.
Once the mess is cleaned and my hands are washed, we sit face-to-face at a table for the first time in nearly a year.
The awkward guard in his tone has translated directly into his posture and I find myself self-conscious with a dry mouth and a pounding heart.
He clears his throat to break the silence. “How was the wedding?”
“I didn’t get married.”
He nods, jaw tight. “Is that why you called?”
I hesitate. “Not exactly. It’s just taken me this long to get the guts to call you.”
The right side of his mouth quirks up into a smile. My gaze lands on the freckle on his lip then follows the lines of his face until I’m staring at his perfect green eyes, counting each fleck of gold.
“You were right,” I say, and he nods. “I just needed to figure it out on my own, you know?”
He sort of smiles but it’s more of a wince as he massages the back of his neck. “Yeah, I guess.”
“Why are you being so cold?”
He shrugs. “I’m just processing seeing you.”
“You’ve never been like this before.”
