“Shane, hey!” she said. “Perfect timing. You were just who I wanted to talk to.”
For a split second, Winnie feared that she had revealed too much. She was normally reserved, but the problem with Shane was that he was way too easy to talk to. But she could hear the smile in his voice too, when he responded.
“Well, me too, obviously, since I called you,” he said with a chuckle. “But what’s up? Something specific you wanted to talk about?”
She relayed everything about her conversation with Lyle, her words skipping over themselves in the rush to get out. Shane made appreciative noises at all the right moments, and listened patiently as she ran through the details.
“That’s amazing, Winnie,” he said. “I mean, I knew the idea was amazing, obviously. But it’s super exciting that your boss sees it too. You should be proud.”
Winnie’s cheeks hurt from all the smiling. “You know, I am proud,” she said. “And I couldn’t have gotten here without you, so thank you.”
“Aw,” he said. “You didn’t need me, not really. I was just there to bounce ideas off of.”
“Agree to disagree,” Winnie teased, then paused as something occurred to her. “Wait a minute,” she said. “You called me to tell me something, and then I just blathered on about myself all this time! What’s new with you?”
He quickly filled her in on his impromptu tech work for Diana.
“And it was just fun to get my hands on a keyboard again,” he admitted. “I still don’t know if this is the answer to my career problems, but it’s… good. For right now, it’s good. And I think I might pick up a few more odd jobs around town, at least while I’m here.”
Winnie knew it was probably foolish, but she felt another little shiver of excitement at the idea that Shane would be staying longer, even just a little bit longer. She would miss him when he went back to California, but she reassured herself with the idea that this phone call had gone well. Maybe they could be long-distance friends. Winnie was, of course, not an expert, but she thought it could work. She and Shane could keep chatting. It was one of the marvels of modern technology.
“That’s amazing,” she told him sincerely. “I can’t believe we’re both having professional successes on the same day. AndI’ve actually got one more, if you can bear to add another piece of good news into this conversation.”
“Can anyone ever have enough good news?” he teased. “Give up the good news, Burnett.”
She laughed at his jokingly commanding voice.
“Well, it’s not as concrete as the other two things,” she admitted, “but I took your advice about opening up to the book club. I told them all about the carnival idea, and they had tons of thoughts! But more than the feedback, it just felt really nice to let them in.”
“Aw, Win, that’s great,” he said. “I know that it’s not easy to be vulnerable, but you’re crushing it. You have a goal, and you’re working toward it, and that’s incredible.”
For all that she had struggled making friends, Winnie had never really suffered from a lack of praise in her life. Her parents had been intensely supportive, and though she’d lost them far too soon, she’d still had academic success to bolster her, and she’d always done pretty well for herself professionally.
But Shane’s praise felt better than those other kinds, she found.
“Thank you,” she said. She didn’t know if she’d ever meant it as sincerely. “I feel like we deserve to celebrate all these accomplishments.”
Again, Shane didn’t let her frisson of nerves last for longer than a heartbeat.
“Yeah, absolutely!” he agreed. “What do you say to a celebratory dinner tomorrow night?”
Winnie had never understood what people meant when they said that their hearts skipped a beat… but now she did.
“Yeah,” she said, nodding even though he couldn’t see her. “That sounds amazing.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Oh, shoot!” Garrett muttered to himself in alarm as he hastily removed his eggs, which were starting to burn, from the stove. He’d been making scrambled eggs for, what, thirty years now? And all it took was one confounding conversation with Eleanor to make it so he no longer knew how to undertake this simple of a task.
But he simply did not understand what had happened.
Sure, maybe he could have been a little more elegant when he’d brought up the issue of a longer-term relationship between them. In hindsight, the grocery store wasn’t thebestplace to open such a discussion. He could see that now.
If nothing else, Eleanor had gotten a clean getaway when he’d paused to pay for the groceries. And now…
And now she wasn’t taking his gosh darn text messages.
He’d sent four or five of them, trying to balance seeming like a reasonable person who was giving her the space she clearly wanted and doing what he actually wanted to do, which was go sit on her front step until she talked to him.
