"I'm appreciating it on multiple levels."
"You're architecturing a pastry."
"That's not a verb."
"It is now." I stole a bite of his cannoli. He made a sound of protest that delighted me. "So. Can I ask you a question?"
“You can ask me anything.”
A warmth crept through my nerve endings that felt suspiciously like melting butter under a hot sun as I brushed sugar from my fingers. "If you weren't an architect—if the career thing had gone a different direction—what would you be?"
He considered the question with the seriousness I'd come to expect. Callum didn't do throwaway answers. Every response was load-tested before delivery.
"A musician," he said. "Piano. Or a teacher, possibly. Music theory." He turned his espresso cup in his hands. "I was better at piano than I was at architecture, in the beginning. More natural. But music felt impractical and architecture felt..." He paused, searching. "Defensible. A career you could explain at dinner parties without people giving you the sad head-tilt."
"The sad head-tilt?"
"'Oh, you're a musician? How brave. And what's your day job?'" He mimicked the tone with devastating accuracy. "My father was an engineer. My motherwanted me to be happy but also wanted me to be able to afford happiness. Architecture was the compromise."
"Do you regret it?"
"I regret letting the compromise become the whole identity. The buildings, the firm, the awards—they're real. I earned them. But at a certain point, I stopped being a person who happened to be an architect and became an architect who'd forgotten how to be a person." He met my gaze. "You asked me to play the piano at two in the morning and I almost couldn't do it. I'd convinced myself I didn't deserve to enjoy a thing that wasn't productive."
My throat tightened. "That breaks my heart."
"Don't let it. I'm learning." His foot nudged mine under the table. "I had a good teacher. She showed up at my apartment with a duffel bag and a pillow and refused to let me exist without interruption."
"Sounds awful."
"The best disruption of my adult life, actually."
We sat in a bakery that smelled of sugar and butter, our knees pressed together under a table the size of a chessboard, and I felt the full scope of what was happening between us.
This wasn't a fling. This wasn't a rebound or a phase or a midlife crisis wrapped in a fake-dating arrangement. This was a man I could build a life with—a thought so enormous and premature and real that Ihad to look away from his face and focus on the cannoli before I said it out loud.
Three weeks ago, I'd been a barista who couldn't afford new work shoes.
Now I was falling in love.
The two facts coexisted in my brain with the uneasy truce of things that didn't belong in the same sentence. Falling in love. Can't afford shoes. As if the universe wanted to remind me that happiness didn't exempt me from the math of my actual life—the coffee shop on the verge of collapse, the apartment I'd be returning to, the parents who thought I was wasting my potential on foam art and bad decisions.
But today was a no-seriousness zone.
So I ate my cannoli. Drank my espresso. Let Callum's knee press against mine and his eyes hold mine and his voice, low and warm across the tiny table, tell me about buildings and music and the person he was when the walls came down.
Today was enough.
Tomorrow could take a number.
fourteen
CALLUM
I was rearranging the bookshelf when Willow caught me.
Not casually rearranging. Not making a minor adjustment to a volume that had drifted out of alignment. I was on my knees in the living room, every architecture text and novel pulled from the shelves and organized into stacks on the floor, sorting by category and then by author and then by spine height, which was the point at which I realized I'd lost the plot.
"You rearranged those two days ago," Willow said from the kitchen doorway, coffee in hand, wearing an old t-shirt I’d forgotten about and a pair of her own shorts that were doing criminal things to her legs. "And the day before that. At what point does reorganizing a bookshelf qualify as a cry for help?"
