"I should go," I say.
"Stay."
"Ethan."
"Stay. One more day. Let me take you to dinner. Let me have this before everything gets complicated."
I want to. Want to stay in this bubble where it's just us. Where Luke doesn't exist and the shop doesn't exist and nothing matters except this.
"One more day," I hear myself say.
"One more day."
He pulls me back to bed. Kisses me until the guilt fades and all I can think about is his hands on my skin and his mouth on mine and the way he makes me forget everything except this moment.
But the guilt doesn't really fade.
It just waits.
And I know that when we finally tell Luke, when we stop hiding and face reality, everything I'm worried about is going to come true.
The question is whether what we have is strong enough to survive it.
I don't have an answer.
But I'm here anyway.
And for now, that's enough.
8
ETHAN
She stays.
We spend the day in Denver like normal people. I take her to breakfast at a diner near the hotel. We walk downtown, looking in shop windows we don't care about. She drinks coffee from a place that isn't as good as hers. I hold her hand on the street and don't worry about who might see.
It feels like freedom.
It also feels like borrowed time.
"You're thinking too much," Callie says as we sit on a bench in a small park. "I can see it on your face."
"Just thinking about when we tell Luke."
"We said a few days."
"I know. But I don't want to wait. I don't want to keep lying to him."
She's quiet for a moment. "He gave you his blessing. This shouldn't be that hard."
"It's not about the blessing. It's about the fact that we didn't trust it. That we snuck around anyway."
"We didn't sneak around. We just... delayed telling him."
"Callie. You drove here in the middle of the night. We slept together. And he doesn't know any of it. That's sneaking around."
She pulls her hand from mine. "So what? You want to call him right now? Tell him over the phone?"
