Chapter 13 #3
He paused mid-gesture—one hand still raised, pointing at a second-story window he'd been explaining—and looked at me. Really looked, the way he did when I'd said a thing that breached a wall he'd spent years building.
"Nobody's ever asked me to do this before," he said. "Jessica thought the architecture talk was—she called it shop talk. Boring. Self-indulgent."
"Jessica was wrong about a lot of things."
"She was."
"This isn't boring. This is you showing me how your brain works.
That's—" I struggled for the right phrasing and landed on honesty.
"It's intimate. More intimate than the gala or the dancing or even—" I gestured vaguely in the direction of his apartment, meaning all the dirty things we’d done together.
"This. Watching you love a thing. That's the most naked you've been in front of me. "
He stared.
"Over the top?" I asked.
"No." He stepped toward me, cupped my face in both hands, and kissed me on a sidewalk in a neighborhood where neither of us knew a soul.
Not a performance. Not practice. Just a man kissing a woman in front of a hundred-year-old house that he'd described with the same tenderness he was now pressing against my mouth.
When he pulled back, his forehead rested against mine.
"Thank you," he said. "For today."
"We're not done yet."
"We're not?"
"Callum. It's two in the afternoon. We have an entire day left, and I still haven't gotten dessert."
He laughed. That real laugh—the one that crinkled the corners of his eyes and made him look ten years younger. The one I was collecting, hoarding, memorizing against a future where I might need the memory of it.
Don't think about that. Not today. Today is a no-logistics zone.
We kept walking. His hand found mine and stayed.
We ended up at a bakery three blocks from the neighborhood—a hole-in-the-wall I spotted from the car, drawn in by a hand-painted sign advertising "the best cannoli in the city, fight us."
The interior was cramped, warm, and smelled of butter and powdered sugar in a way that made my knees weak. An older woman behind the counter—gray hair pinned up, apron dusted with flour—beamed at us as we walked in.
"Two?" she asked.
"Two cannoli," I said.
"Two cannoli and two espressos," Callum corrected, then glanced at me. "I want to see how they pull a shot.”
"You're not allowed to critique."
"I wouldn't dream of it."
He would absolutely dream of it. But I let it go, and we sat at a tiny table near the window, knees touching beneath the surface, and ate cannoli that lived up to the sign's aggressive promise.
"Okay," I said, licking powdered sugar from my thumb. "This is a religious experience."
"The filling is excellent. Ricotta-based, not mascarpone. Traditional."
"See, this is what I mean. You can't just eat a cannoli. You have to deconstruct it."
"I'm appreciating it on multiple levels."
"You're architecturing a pastry."
"That's not a verb."
"It is now." I stole a bite of his cannoli. He made a sound of protest that delighted me. "So. Can I ask you a question?"
“You can ask me anything.”
A warmth crept through my nerve endings that felt suspiciously like melting butter under a hot sun as I brushed sugar from my fingers. "If you weren't an architect—if the career thing had gone a different direction—what would you be?"
He considered the question with the seriousness I'd come to expect. Callum didn't do throwaway answers. Every response was load-tested before delivery.
"A musician," he said. "Piano. Or a teacher, possibly.
Music theory." He turned his espresso cup in his hands.
"I was better at piano than I was at architecture, in the beginning.
More natural. But music felt impractical and architecture felt.
.." He paused, searching. "Defensible. A career you could explain at dinner parties without people giving you the sad head-tilt. "
"The sad head-tilt?"
"'Oh, you're a musician? How brave. And what's your day job?'" He mimicked the tone with devastating accuracy. "My father was an engineer. My mother wanted me to be happy but also wanted me to be able to afford happiness. Architecture was the compromise."
"Do you regret it?"
"I regret letting the compromise become the whole identity.
The buildings, the firm, the awards—they're real.
I earned them. But at a certain point, I stopped being a person who happened to be an architect and became an architect who'd forgotten how to be a person.
" He met my gaze. "You asked me to play the piano at two in the morning and I almost couldn't do it.
I'd convinced myself I didn't deserve to enjoy a thing that wasn't productive. "
My throat tightened. "That breaks my heart."
"Don't let it. I'm learning." His foot nudged mine under the table. "I had a good teacher. She showed up at my apartment with a duffel bag and a pillow and refused to let me exist without interruption."
"Sounds awful."
"The best disruption of my adult life, actually."
We sat in a bakery that smelled of sugar and butter, our knees pressed together under a table the size of a chessboard, and I felt the full scope of what was happening between us.
This wasn't a fling. This wasn't a rebound or a phase or a midlife crisis wrapped in a fake-dating arrangement. This was a man I could build a life with—a thought so enormous and premature and real that I had to look away from his face and focus on the cannoli before I said it out loud.
Three weeks ago, I'd been a barista who couldn't afford new work shoes.
Now I was falling in love.
The two facts coexisted in my brain with the uneasy truce of things that didn't belong in the same sentence.
Falling in love. Can't afford shoes. As if the universe wanted to remind me that happiness didn't exempt me from the math of my actual life—the coffee shop on the verge of collapse, the apartment I'd be returning to, the parents who thought I was wasting my potential on foam art and bad decisions.
But today was a no-seriousness zone.
So I ate my cannoli. Drank my espresso. Let Callum's knee press against mine and his eyes hold mine and his voice, low and warm across the tiny table, tell me about buildings and music and the person he was when the walls came down.
Today was enough.
Tomorrow could take a number.