“Ugh.” Winnie let out a watery laugh. “Don’t be so nice! Try to be terrible, so that I can be less sad that you’re leaving!”
“I don’t think I can do that,” he said, chuckling a little, although the sadness was evident in his voice too. “I’m just going to stick with being nice, I think.”
“Ugh, you’re the worst,” she faux-complained, using the moment of levity, thin though it was, to gather her emotional resources.
“Well,youare a superstar,” he said, reaching up to tuck a tendril of hair behind her ear with gentle fingers. “Do you know how many people have been talking about your festival in the bookstore these past couple of days? It’s all of them, Win. Literally all of them.”
She tried to smile, but the expression felt wobbly on her face. She couldn’t even focus on the good things in her life. This sadness felt too big.
“I’m sorry,” she said when the moment for her response came and went. “I just can’t stop being so sad about you leaving.”
This was precisely the kind of thing she had not wanted to say over this dinner, but once the words started coming out, she found that she couldn’t quite make them stop.
“I know this might sound like a bit much, since we haven’t really known one another that long. But our friendship has come to meansomuch to me in these past few weeks, and that’s even before we get into anything about what seemed like it could be, you know, maybe more than friendship.” She knew she was blushing, but some instinct told her that she needed to get this out of her system. “It’s honestly kind of devastating, to think that I’m not going to see you around town, getting coffee or whatever. I liked that we kept running into one another. And I know you always turn this kind of thing back on me, butyouwere the one who inspired me to open up more.Youpushed me to be better. And it really, really, really stinks to feel like I’m losing that.”
Shane didn’t answer right away, but the way his hand held tightly onto Winnie’s kept at bay any fear that she might have said too much.
“You really mean that?” he asked after a long pause, the tone of his voice… almost hopeful?
“Yeah,” Winnie said, shaking her head at him, at herself, at their whole situation. “I really do. Honestly, I almost didn’t come tonight… not because I didn’t want to see you,” she added hastilywhen a flicker of uncertainty crossed his features. “But because I was pretty sure I’d turn into an emotional train wreck if I had to face saying goodbye.” She gestured at her own face. “Which… yeah. Pretty much exactly what happened.” She let out a small, watery laugh. “But I just couldn’t let you go without saying goodbye.”
There was another long pause. Winnie watched as Shane’s eyes darted from side to side, as though he was doing some sort of complicated mathematical calculation in his head.
“You know,” he said slowly, clearly still thinking through the words as he spoke, “yesterday morning, really early, I caught Garrett trying to leave a love note in my sister’s window.”
Winnie blinked in surprise at this abrupt conversational turn, but decided to follow Shane on this journey, wherever it led.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding absently. “He had a ladder, was scaling the house—it was a whole thing. But he said something that has been sticking with me.”
“What’s that?” Winnie asked.
Now, when Shane looked up at her, he didn’t look uncertain or hesitant at all. Instead, his eyes were bright and his smile was big.
“He said that men do crazy things when they are falling for a woman. And I was amazed by how much that resonated with me, because it made me realize how muchIwant to be the one playing the fool, how muchIwant to do a crazy thing.”
He might have been using the wordcrazy,but he didn’t look as though he thought whatever he was planning was actually a bad idea at all.
“What’s your idea?” Winnie asked, because she wasn’t quite brave enough to ask,You’re falling for me?
“I’m so glad you asked,” he said, practically glowing with excitement at this point. “Because I was thinking that maybe I should set up a tech business right here in town. I keep running into people who need tech assistance, so clearly there’s a need for it. And I like the work a whole heck of a lot.”
Winnie scarcely dared to breathe, worried that she would wake up from whatever dream she’d found herself in. Because it had to be a dream, right? She couldn’t possibly be hearing that, instead of bidding her farewell forever, Shane was planning to remain in town on a more permanent basis.
“You’re… thinking about staying?” she managed, feeling giddy.
“I am,” he said. “Some people might think it’s foolish to leave behind a tech career in San Francisco to set up shop in a little town. But I thought about it some more, and I decided that it was far, far more foolish to give up on something that made me feel good for the first time in a long time. And that it would be the most foolish thing I’ve ever done in my life to let the chance to get to knowyoubetter slip through my fingers.”
Winnie didn’t remember putting them there, but she found that her fingers were pressed over her lips. It was a silly ‘Regency heroine facing down the duke’ sort of pose. Winnie wondered, at that thought, if she wasn’t spending too much time with Miriam, but quickly both her worries about looking sillyandabout her reading habits faded in the face of her happiness over Shane’s news.
“You’re really staying,” she said.
“I really am. That is… if you think you can put up with my presence in town a little bit longer.”
There were no words to express how much Winnie would like such a thing, so she gave her answer by way of throwing her arms around him and squeezing him with all her might.
“I take it that’s a yes?” he asked with a laugh as his own arms came around her.
