"Then I look forward to it."
“I’ll let her know.”
“Please do.”
You know how some memories will always make you want to kill yourself? Well, that’s exactly how I feel every time I remember my first day of meeting him.
Anyway...I wish I could say it ended there, but I remember how it just got worse, with how I found myself increasingly infatuated with him as I walked back to the kitchen and put in his order.
I remember doing my best not to look at the corner booth. But failing so spectacularly that it had Jolie accidentally choking on her coffee when she caught me doing so for, like, thenthtime.
I mean, I know Jolie notices everything. It’s, like, a part of who she is, and it’s why she’s the only friend I’ve made in this town (Sarah doesn’t count, since she’s, like, part-guardian-angel, part-mob-boss). I’m not sure if it has to do with what she’s studying in grad school (honestly, I still have a hard time remembering what exactly it is she’s studying; I just know it’s something obscure and psychological), but Jolie has always had a way of seeing a person with, well...
Most people won’t understand this, but Jolie sees people with the eyes of Jesus. The first time we met, she didn’t even care to ask questions about what a 19-year-old Kansas girl was doing in Jackson Hole all alone, working full-time while taking online classes and with the most crippling sense of shyness.
Honestly, I’ve come a long way since then, and it’s mostly because of how patient Jolie and Sarah were in drawing me out of my shell.
But...I digress.
The thing is, as compassionately intuitive Jolie is when it comes to seeing people, I don’t think she even needed any kind ofspecial talent that day to realize just how, well, hard I was crushing on our never-saw-him-until-now customer.
“28,” Jolie said as I refilled her coffee.
“Huh?”
“I caught you staring at him 28 times in the past hour.”
I couldn’t even make myself deny it since that would be a lie, and so I simply ended up sputtering. "W-Why are you counting?"
"Because you taught me to count things." She turned a page, even though I was reasonably sure she wasn't actually reading. "Also because it's deeply entertaining."
"I'm not—"
"Thea." She looked up, and her expression softened in that way it does when she's about to say something true that I don't want to hear. "It's okay, you know. To look at someone. To be interested. You're allowed to be a twenty-one-year-old human person with hormones and
feelings."
"I have to work," I said, and I grabbed a coffee pot that didn't need grabbing and went to refill cups that were already full, and I did not—absolutely did not—glance at the corner booth.
Except I did.
And he was looking at me.
Not in an aggressive way, or a creepy way, or any of the ways that sometimes happen when men look at women in diners.Just...looking. Like he was trying to figure something out and I was the equation.
I looked away so fast I almost tripped over my own feet.
The rest of his meal passed in a blur of me aggressively not staring while also being hyper-aware of every single movement at that table. He ate slowly, precisely, fork in his left hand in European style. He checked his phone twice. He looked out the window at the elk
refuge for a long moment, his expression going distant in a way that made me wonder what he was thinking about, which was dangerous, because wondering about customers is how you end up like those people in rom-coms who fall for the mysterious stranger and then it turns out he's a serial killer or a prince or some other complication.
When he was done, I brought the check, and he paid in cash, tipping exactly twenty percent.
And then he left, and I stood there with the twenty-dollar bill in my hand, and Jolie looked at me knowingly.
“What?”
She gestured to the twenty-dollar bill in my hand. “Are you going to frame that?”
