Page 167 of You've Got Hate Mail
“Things have been…tense most of her life. Reading to her helped her calm down. Escape the world. So yeah. We’ve read a lot of books.”
“But things aren’t as tense now?”
He shakes his head. “Things are good. Things are finally good.”
Two turns later, he pulls us into the parking lot. We’re across the street from a residential area, with an art gallery in a stucco building on one side of the parking lot, and on the other, a two-story building with brown wood siding and a small neon sign with one letter out that makes it look like this is the Foxwood Pubic House.
I giggle.
He grins, sexy as hell with the way he flashes his teeth at me.
“This seems fitting,” I quip.
“Shit. I didn’t think about that.”
“No, no, really. Someday I’ll tell my grandkids about how I flashed my beaver, went into hiding, and then made my public re-debut at a Pubic House.”
He barks out a laugh, then leans over the console to press a hard kiss to my mouth. “You’re one of a kind, Cricket.”
It’s notI love you, and it’s notI want you to be my girlfriend, but I’ll take it.
He’s basically kissing me in public.
Where anyone could see.
And that makes my heart glow.
Inside, the young man at the host stand doesn’t do a double-take at the sight of me or at the sight of me here with Heath.
We’re two anonymous people out for dinner on a random Thursday night.
Anonymous.
I like this. I could get used to being a nobody again.
Being a nobody sounds amazing.
The young man grabs two menus and leads us to a high-backed booth with dark cushioned benches and a print of rolling vineyards hung over dark wood paneling.
The lights are dim, giving an extra feel of privacy. After my eyes have adjusted, I glance around.
Identical high-backed booths line two walls, and a smattering of tables takes up the space between the booths and the polished bar along a third wall. Stained glass lamps hang from iron rods in the plank wood ceiling, and a staircase is visible across the room. Maybe six or seven other tables are occupied right now, plus two people are at the bar.
No one’s staring at us.
Or even looking our way.
I gradually relax into the booth, feeling weirdly normal.
Like my viral moment never happened at all.
Heath and I talk about everything under the sun. He makes me laugh, and he teases me about inconsequential little things, and I make him laugh with tales about some of the stories I covered over the years.
We don’t talk about the winery’s financial struggles or the fact that this isn’t a date or about Mabel’s latest unfortunate non-update from GrippaBeav’s legal team or the latest Cheeky Beaver video or how I could technically move out of Heath’s basement and into the mother-in-law house next week after Caro and Mike have come and gone.
None of the things that keep lingering in the back of my brain as reasons that this might not last.
“You’ve lived a fascinating life,” he says to me as our food arrives.
