“Kind of like the gardening?”
“Well, yes, actually, like that. Taking ingredients and turning them into something. Watching it come together.”
“Well, you’re good at it.”
“I would say I’m adequate.”
“You’re good at a lot of things, Eleanor. You should let yourself acknowledge that.”
The sincerity in his voice catches me off guard. I look down at my plate, feeling very self-conscious.
“I’m working on it. The acknowledging, I mean. That’s hard. My whole life, anything I did well was expected. Anything I didn’t do well was a failure. There was no middle ground.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It was. I didn’t realize how exhausting until I stopped.”
After dinner, we do the dishes together. I wash, he dries. And there’s something so domestic about it that makes my chest ache. This is what it could be like, I think. Not just tonight, but always. This easy rhythm.
When the last dish is dry and put away, Wyatt leans against the counter.
“I should probably go,” he says.
“Probably.”
Neither of us moves.
“Eleanor, I know we said we’d wait. I want to wait, I do. I just…” He runs his hands through his hair. “Being here with you in this space, it’s hard to remember why we made that rule.”
“Because I need to be sure, because you’ve been hurt before, because we don’t want to complicate things before we’re ready.”
“All good reasons. All very logical reasons.”
“I hate logic.” I laugh, and it breaks the tension just enough.
“Me too, right now anyway.”
He pushes off the counter and crosses to me, stopping close enough that I can feel the warmth of him.
“A couple more months,” he says, “until October.”
“A couple of months, and then?”
“And then we’ll figure it out.”
He reaches up and again tucks stray hair behind my ear. He’s done it over and over, and each time it feels like electricity is running through my temple.
“Good night, Eleanor.”
“Good night, Wyatt.”
He leaves, and I stand in my kitchen, listening to the footsteps on the stairs and his truck pulling away. A couple more months, sixty-ish days until I have to decide about the bar, about my future, about us.
I clean up the rest of the kitchen, blow out the candle on the table, and get ready for bed. But sleep is a long time coming because my head is full of Wyatt’s blue eyes and the smell of his cologne. A couple of months feels like an eternity, and it also doesn’t feel like nearly enough time.
CHAPTER 18
Three weeks pass.
