Page 123 of Safe With You

The second it was out, I wished I’d phrased it differently. Luna looked at me, and I shook my head before she could answer.

“You don’t have to tell me that.”

A small smile touched her mouth. “Look at you correcting yourself.”

“I can mind my business occasionally.”

“I’m proud of you.”

“I appreciate that.”

For a few seconds, she focused on what was left of her food, and I figured she’d decided to leave the conversation there. I would’ve let her. Then she rested her fork against the edge of the plate and said, “We wanted different things.”

The answer sounded practiced. Not fake, exactly. More like something she’d said enough times to know which parts of the truth fit comfortably in a sentence.

“Different things?”

Her eyes lifted to mine. “You’re not very good at minding your business.”

“I said occasionally.”

That got a laugh out of her, but it faded as she looked down again. “He was comfortable. I wasn’t anymore.”

“With him?”

“With...” She paused, searching for the rest of the answer. “Everything, I guess. I spent a long time thinking my life was going to look a certain way. We were together five years. Everybody knew us together. Our families knew each other. There were conversations about what came next.”

“Marriage?”

She nodded. “But it never happened.”

There was something in the way she said it that told me the obvious follow-up wasn’t one I needed to ask.

“And then I started realizing I wasn’t happy,” she continued. “Or maybe I’d known for a while and finally stopped finding reasons not to know.”

“So you left.”

“Eventually.”

The woman sitting across from me didn’t seem like someone who had trouble making decisions. I’d watched her run a bookstore, manage people, organize an event with a hundred moving parts, and tell me exactly what she did and didn’t want every time I pointed a camera at her. Whatever had made eventually take five years mattered.

I didn’t ask.

Luna noticed anyway. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“That was definitely something.”

“I was thinking.”

“About?”

I considered giving her the same answer she’d been giving me all morning, but there didn’t seem to be much point. “Whether I should ask another question.”

“And?”

“I decided against it.”