Page 150 of Boiling Point
“That’s extra.”
He leaned back in the booth, eyeing me. “You’re enjoying this.”
“I’m enjoyingyou. Free, unshackled. Slightly singed, but alive.” I rolled my glass between my palms, savoring the last bitter warmth of the shot. “You realize this is our first time out in town as…us.” The word surprised me with its brazen self-evidence. “No more hiding. No more cover-ups. No more…” I fumbled for the word and came up short. “Pretending.”
He tilted his head. “A bar at eleven a.m. isn’t exactly the agora of public opinion. But it’s a start.”
“It’s the principle,” I said, ignoring the faint sting of absinthe clinging to my tongue. “I like not having to look over my shoulder. I could lean across this table and kiss you right now, and nobody would care.”
He glanced around the bar. The only other patron was a grizzled man in a Vietnam veteran ball cap, nursing a beer at the far end of the counter.
“I see your point,” Cal conceded. “We’re positively blending in.”
A waitress with purple streaks in her hair ambled over. “Ready for another round?”
Cal shuddered, pure theatrics.
She laughed. “Yeah, the Reaper packs a punch.”
“Understatement of the year,” he returned. “Do you serve a proper bitter here?”
She scratched her ear with the back of her pen. “Closest I’ve got is a decent IPA.”
“That’s…not even in the same postcode.”
“It’s on tap and cold.”
He shrugged. “That’ll do then.”
“Two of those,” I said, folding my menu. “And a basket of fries.”
The waitress drifted off, her purple ponytail swinging behind her.
I nudged Cal’s foot under the table. “So, what’s next?”
“Next? As in…”
“What do we do next? Where do we go? We can reinvent everything.”
He looked around. “You want to plan out our lives in a bar?”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s a pub.”
He shot me a look from beneath his lashes. “This isnota pub.”
The waitress returned with our beers and fries, then skittered off again.
He tipped the basket, and the fries tumbled over each other like straws. “I took you to a proper pub back home. This isn’t a pub.”
I took a long sip of my beer—cool and crisp, exactly what I needed. “Do you want to go back home? We could live in the house your father left you.”
The words slipped out before I could think better of them.
Cal’s smile faded. He shook his head, more gently than I expected. “No. I don’t mind visiting Isabel now and then, but there’s nothing left for me there.” He said it like a fact, not a wound.
I picked up a fry. “So where do you want to go?”
He studied me for a long moment, as if calibrating an answer. “I’ve got a year-long cooling-off period. But I’m not particularly sorry about it.” He flicked his gaze to the window, where the summer light glanced off the hoods of parked cars. “I could use a sabbatical anyway. I might even finish my book.” He paused,laugh lines deepening. “But I’m more concerned with what suits you. Your next steps. Where do you want to go?”
