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Since then, another two weeks had passed with no in-person contact other than our regular video calls which were nice, but no substitute for real life intimacy.

“You haven’t seen him since that weekend in early January, right?” my friend Renee clarified.

“Right. It’s almost March. I have to tell you that right now dating Nathan long distance feels a lot like being single.”

“It’s not really long-distance, right? Isn’t it only like a forty-five minute drive?”

“Yeah when the roads are good. But the road up the mountain gets a bit treacherous at this time of the year. It can take much longer if the roads are even clear enough to come. It’s been averaging ninety minutes or more every time Nathan comes up here.”

“So, the real problem isn’t distance so much as your schedules don’t match, and the drive doesn’t work very well in bad weather?” she clarified.

“Yeah,” I answered again, this time with a big sigh.

“Well, it seems to me you have three options,” Renee said. “First, pull back from the café and solve the schedule issue.”

“I’d never do that, Renee,” I gasped. “You know this is a lifelong dream. The weekends are my busiest times, and besides, I’m not making enough money to hire a full-time manager yet.”

“Just checking,” my best friend responded. “It would be okay if you realized that the café wasn’t what you wanted. You should only do it if it makes you happy.”

“I love the café. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”

“Good, I’m glad,” Renee’s voice was pleased. “You’ve talked about that forever, and now your dream is a reality. I can’t wait to come to Pine Bluff and see it.”

“You said there were three options,” I reminded her.

“Option two is you eliminate the distance problem,” she said. “It would be much easier to see each other if you two lived in the same town.”

“We don’t have any county offices close by, so that won’t work. And it’s not like I can move the café into the city. Even if I wanted to leave Pine Bluff, I could never afford a location down in Denver.”

“Well, then option three is to break up.”

I couldn’t say why exactly, but the thought of breaking up with Nathan made me feel nauseous.

Well, I could say why. I was in love with him.

I’d realized over Christmas that I was in love with Nathan, but it was too soon, and I’d felt like an idiot mentioning it to him or Renee. But after getting to know him better and spending time with him, even if it was mostly virtual, I knew for sure. I was head over heels for my fussy bureaucrat.

The feelings I had for him had just grown over the past two months. Despite the distance between us and not being able to see each other, we still texted and called daily, and had a couple of “video dates” each week. Without the distraction of physical intimacy, we’d been able to get to know each other on a deeper level. We’d become friends. Good friends. Nathan had opened up to me about his difficult childhood, and I’d shared more about my marriage and my own life.

I felt incredibly close to him now, closer than anyone else but Renee, but that didn’t mean that I was satisfied only talking to him virtually. I wanted to be with him in person. I missed waking up with him. I missed him making me breakfast. And I really missed sex. I mean, I’d gone my whole life with mediocre sex, and now that I had an option for good sex, I was pretty resentful when it wasn’t available.

“I don’t want to break up with him Renee,” I protested.

“Why not?”

“I’m in love with him, and I think he feels the same.”

“I knew it,” Renee crowed. “I knew you were in love with him. From the beginning too, if I had to guess.”

My best friend knew me too well.

“Regardless of when and how it happened, I just want to figure out a way we can actually spend time together and be in the same place periodically.”

“Well, do that then.” My friend was nothing if not pragmatic.

“Great, thanks for that help,” I said sarcastically.

“Sometimes you just need to look at all your options to figure out what you really want,” she said cryptically.