Please.
I meant what I said. I was going to kiss you.
No response. I’d watched my phone for hours, waiting for the three dots that would show he was reading them. Nothing. Just silence, stretching through the night like a confirmation of everything I’d feared.
By 6 AM, I gave up on sleep entirely. Made coffee. Tiptoed past Ryan, who had claimed my couch and was snoring softly.Navigated around Derek and Greg. Fed Tequila, who watched me with knowing eyes.
You’re going to see him.
“He won’t answer my texts. I sent four last night. Nothing.”
So you’re going in person.
“This isn’t a conversation for texting anyway.” I stared at my coffee. “I need him to see my face when I say it. Hear my voice. Know that I mean it.”
Mean what?
“That I want to try. That the interruption wasn’t me running.”
Tequila’s tail swished.And if he doesn’t believe you?
“Then at least I’ll know I tried.”
The walkto Marcus’s shop felt like walking to my own execution.
My phone buzzed the entire way—6,912 matches, 6,934, 6,958—but I barely noticed. I was too busy rehearsing what I was going to say, how I was going to make him understand that I wasn’t running this time.
I want to try. The interruption wasn’t me leaving. I was going to kiss you, and I still want to.
Simple. Direct. True.
Except nothing felt simple anymore. Not after a sleepless night. Not after watching my texts go unanswered. Not after seeing the way he’d shut down, closed off, retreated behind walls I didn’t know how to climb.
The morning was grey and cold, the kind of fall weather that made everything feel more serious than it probably was. The streets were quiet—too early for most of the shops to be open,too late for the morning rush. Just me and my buzzing phone and the growing certainty that I was about to make everything worse.
The shop came into view.
It was dark.
Not just closed-for-the-morning dark. Dark dark. Blinds drawn, no lights in the back room, the kind of dark that saidgo awaymore clearly than any sign could.
I knocked anyway.
Nothing.
I knocked again, harder. “Marcus? I know you’re in there. I can see your truck around the corner.”
Silence. Then footsteps, slow and reluctant, and the door opened a crack. Marcus stood in the gap, not stepping aside, not inviting me in. Just blocking.
“Diane.”
“Can I come in?”
“I’m not open.”
“I know. I’m not here to shop.” I tried to see past him into the dark shop. “I’m here to talk. About yesterday.”
He didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Just looked at me with those unreadable eyes, and for the first time since I’d burst into this shop fleeing my possessed phone, I felt like a stranger.
