makes men look twice.
He's not laughing, though.
The look on his face...isn’t beautiful or brooding.
It’s just...blank.
It’s the same expression he had on the phone last night. All warmth gone, replaced by a mask that reveals nothing at all.
They're getting closer to my table, and I urge myself to look away and focus on something else. There’s still the next customer in line, another cup to pour, another person to serve. So why do I keep stealing looks at our direction? Why can’t I stop torturing myself with little peeks that only make my heart hurt every time I see Kimberly touch his arm like he’s already hers?
I wish I could stop counting about this, but I can’t. That’s the seventeenth time in three minutes that she’s touched his arm.Seventeenth!
They're twenty feet away now.
Fifteen.
Kimberly is talking to someone I recognize from the bank—a woman in her fifties who's nodding with interest at whatever Kimberly is saying. And Kimberly keeps touching his arm. Keeps laughing. Keeps standing so close to him that there's no space between them at all.
No gap to measure.
No inches to count.
Just Kimberly and Santino and the word ‘we’that I can somehow hear even though she hasn't said it yet.
Ten feet away.
Kimberly sees me first, and her smile turns...
No.
Don’t think that.
Sara was pretty adamant about this in one of our Bible studies. Philippians 4:8 protects our minds from spiraling. So if it’s not noble, not right, not lovely or worthy of praise and so forth—
Just don’t think of it.
So I don’t.
I keep my thoughts blank even as I watch the other girl lean closer to Santino, her lips nearly brushing against his ear as she touches his arm for the 21st time.
He suddenly looks up at that moment, and my chest tightens when our gazes meet. There’s something in his eyes. Just something that almost makes me want to ask for an explanation. Because surely...
Surely he has one.
Right?
I force myself to look away. Refocus on the job at hand. It’s cup 55 now, but this time, my hands are shaking so bad that it takes more effort than usual to carefully pour cider into a cup.
Just don’t spill, just don’t spill, please don’t let anything spill, God.
Because I’m pretty sure Kimberly would know I’ve let her get under my skin if she sees me messing up.
I can feel him watching me even as Kimberly stares at him (I’m sure of this for some reason), and I just don’t get it. And him. I don’t get him at all. One moment, he makes me feel like I’m his world. The next moment, it’s as if I’m also invisible to his gaze.
Could it be that this is all a game to him?
That I’m so blinded by how beautiful he is that I don’t realize that maybe, just maybe...he’s not as nice as I think, and it’s exactly like Kimberly says? That he’s slumming it with me while he tries to figure out what’s the next goal for a hotshot racer like him?
