Miles closed his computer instantly upon seeing it and buried his head in his pillow, muffling a scream. Why was his brain like this? It wasn’t like hewantedto be this way. If he had it his way, he would have texted Jun right then and there and come out with the truth at the same time. But life wasn’t so easy, and he wasn’t nearly so brave.
He didn’t have the courage he needed to do it.
Not that night.
Or the next.
Or for several nights after that.
Jun’s message had hit his inbox on Tuesday. Now it was Saturday and all Miles had to show for it was a graveyard of abandoned texting attempts. What. Was. Wrong. With. Him?
At work, during the morning rush, his phone burned a hole in his pocket. When they’d been communicating through Twitch, replying to Jun had felt like an “at home” activity, but there was no such barrier now. There was no reason why he couldn’t text Jun a quick “hi!” while at work, and as the rush wound down and all the necessary prep work had been done to make sure they’d have enough goods on hand for the church crowd the next day, Miles found himself lacking an excuse.
It was time.
He was finally going to do it.
He didn’t have to come completely clean, but he did have to take the first step.
Miles braced himself for what he was about to do while out at the front counter with Astrid, needing some cooler air after standing near the hot ovens for so long. Phone in hand, a blank text with Jun’s number at the top pulled up on the screen, he shed each new anxious thought as it arose.
He wouldnotback down.
He was going to text this man, dammit, and he was going to do itright now.
“You’ve been doing that all week,” Astrid said, not bothering to look up from her own phone, where she was scrolling through TikTok videos with the sound on mute. She was leaning with her elbow against the checkout counter, her head lazily propped up in her hand while they waited for another customer to show.
Startled out of his own little world, Miles jumped, then shot her a narrow-eyed glance. “Been doing what all week?”
“Pulling out your phone and then just standing there staring at it like your entire memory has been erased and you don’t know how you got here,” she said easily. She snorted at some video.
“Yeah, well,” Miles said, trying not to let his face reveal anything damning, even though Astrid didn’t seem remotely interested in looking at him. “Why don’t you do your work instead of being nosy?”
“Miriam hasn’t made you a co-owner yet,” she said, the corner of her lip twitching into a smirk. “That means you’re not my boss.”
“Mm,” he hummed, unimpressed.
All at once, Astrid pushed herself up from the counter and faced him with a hand on her hip and a stern expression on her face.
“You should just text him,” she said authoritatively.
“Text who?” he asked, caught off guard.
“Whoever it is you keep chickening out on texting.”
“Who says that’s what I’m doing?”
“You’re not saying you’re not.”
They stared at one another, unblinking, until Miles finally looked away with a muttered, “Damn!”
Astrid laughed in triumph.
“You’ll feel better if you just do it,” she said, with all the wisdom a nineteen-year-old could possess. “And if you’re worried about him being mad that you took so long, just tell him, I dunno, thata falcon swooped down and stole your phone out of your hand and you just now were able to replace it.”
“A falcon, huh? Sounds foolproof.”
The bell above the front door rang as a heavily pregnant man pushing a toddler in a stroller entered the bakery, his gravid belly turning his walk into a waddle as he approached the counter. Miles was torn between wanting to stare and wanting to get far, far away, so he settled on just giving the man a tight nod and heading back into the sweltering kitchen to finish off the last of the cleaning so he could go home for the day.
