It was only after they’d gotten their food (tacos from next door) and parked themselves at an open table that he worked up the nerve to ask one of the many questions that had been rattling around in his brain since last night.
“Is it a secret? You living here?”
Merritt dipped a tortilla chip into a tiny cup of guacamole, wrinkling her nose in thought. “No? I mean, I don’t think anybody cares.”
“What about your fans?”
She cocked her head and gave him a searching look. Was she really going to ignore the fact that less than ten minutes ago, he’d seen someone beg her to sign their arm permanently?
He met her gaze without flinching and felt a jolt of electricity travel down his spine. He swore he saw her shiver, too, before she looked away.
“The person they care about doesn’t exist anymore. Or, at least, I hope she doesn’t.” She paused, then ran her fingers through her hair, laughing humorlessly. “Sorry, that was more melodramatic than I meant it. I just…I don’t really want to talk about it. Is that okay? Sorry.”
He expected her to look tense, shoulders set, soft mouth in a firm line. But her face was slack and expressionless. Something about her body language reminded him of his favorite pair of sweatpants, the way the elastic had slowly loosened over the years until he couldn’t put them on without them immediately slipping back down over his hips.
His first at bat, and he’d struck out. She didn’t want to talk.
Niko drenched his tacos in multicolored hot sauce, relieved to have something to do to occupy himself amid the awkward silence. He was startled when she spoke again.
“What about you? How did you end up out here?”
Her question came on the heels of his taking an overly ambitious bite of carnitas. He forced himself to chew as slowly as possible, so as not to choke to death while attempting to answer five seconds faster.
“Followed a girl out here. My college girlfriend. The plan was to come out for a year or so, do the ski bum thing, then go back home and start our real lives.”
She dabbed her mouth with a napkin. “Where’s home?”
“Florida. Tallahassee. That’s where we went to school.”
“And things didn’t go according to plan?”
He took a long drink of water before responding. “Not exactly. She didn’t like it as much as she thought she would. The whole lifestyle. I think she’d maybe…what’s the word. Romanticized it. She got tired of roughing it pretty quickly.”
“Makes sense.”
“She was ready to leave after a month, and I wasn’t. So we said, okay, she’ll go home, and I’ll meet her there when the year’s up.” He shrugged. “We broke up pretty soon after that. That kind of distance is tough, especially when you’re that age.”
The edges of her lips quirked up in a knowing smile, but she said nothing, popping the last bite of her taco into her mouth.
“I know what you’re thinking.Shemet someone else first.”
She raised her hand defensively, but her smile turned mischievous. “I wasn’t assuming anything.” She gathered up her second taco out of its foil shell. “So what made you stay? After the year was over.”
Niko did the same, picking the slices of radish off the top first. “I didn’t really have anywhere else to go. Or, anywhere Iwantedto go. I never liked Florida much. None of my family lived there anymore, by that point. And I was happy here. Still am.”
“Do you think you’ll stay forever?”
He felt pinned by her stare, unsettled by the intensity in her dark eyes, even though the question itself was fairly tame. He shifted in his seat. “I don’t know. I guess I always assumed I’d settle down somewhere else once I was ready to move into the next phase of my life. Start a family and all that. It’s kind of hard to do that here unless you’re…” He hesitated.
“Rich?” she supplied, punctuating it with the crunch of a chip.
“Yeah,” he said. “No offense.”
Her lips pursed like she was trying to suppress a smile. “None taken.”
“I got lucky with my situation, but it’s crazy how expensive things have gotten just in the last few years.”
When Niko had moved to Crested Peak eight years ago, he’d spent his first three months sleeping in a barely converted closet in an unheated, uninsulated house with more people than he could count. He’d eventually graduated to the floor of a shared bedroom, then, at last, to a bed. He hadn’t minded. Cheap housing was hard to come by, and besides, it was just a place to crash. Nobody came to Crested Peak to spend time indoors. That house had been torn down a few years back, replaced by a sprawling vacation home that sat empty most of the year.
