45. Sage
FORTY-FIVE
SAGE
Thursday’s lunch rush is barely a trickle, which is odd since the local schools went on summer break just a week ago.
I expected families with their kids and teenagers heading to the beach.
But by two o’clock, the diner’s almost empty.
Just a couple of regulars nursing coffee in the back booth, a trucker working through a plate of meatloaf, and Jamie, perched on a stool at the counter with his laptop open and a half-eaten slice of cherry pie beside it.
“You seem different today,” he says, not looking up from whatever he’s typing.
“Different how?”
“I don’t know. Lighter.” He glances up. Smiles. “Like someone turned the brightness up on you.”
I duck my head to hide the flush creeping up my neck. “I’ve just been sleeping better.”
“Uh-huh.” He doesn’t push it, just goes back to his screen, but the smile stays.
Jamie has this way of noticing things without making you feel observed.
It’s the opposite of how the guys see me.
With them, being seen is a full-body experience.
With Jamie, it’s more like a warm lamp clicking on in a dark room—comforting, low stakes, and maybe sharper than I first gave him credit for.
I top off his coffee and lean against the counter across from him, grateful for the quiet. The diner hums around us—the soft clatter of dishes from the kitchen, the oldies station playing something by The Supremes, the occasional scrape of a fork on a plate.
“Can I ask you something?” I say before I can talk myself out of it.
“Always.”
“Do you ever feel like your life just . . . shifted? Like one day everything was normal and then something happened, and now you’re a completely different person, and you can’t go back to who you were before even if you wanted to?”
He closes his laptop. Gives me his full attention. “Yeah,” he says. “I do, actually.”
“Really?”
“After I came out—surprise, I’m gay, if you didn’t pick up on the flames.” He wiggles his fingers, half-hearted jazz hands.
I laugh, even though it’s obvious. “I did pick up on a little something.”
“I’d be concerned if you didn’t.” He crosses his arms. “Before that, I spent years performing the version of me everyone else wanted—how I talked, what I wore, who I was supposed to want. Cardboard-cutout Jamie. Eventually I couldn’t keep living inside the lie, so I came out.
It didn’t go well. I lost . . . a lot. Pretty much everyone, actually. ”
“Jamie. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay. I mean, it’s not. But it’s getting there.
” He gives me a crooked smile. “I found people who let me breathe now. It’s like you shed the skin you thought you needed, and the new one never quite fits the same, but once you’re out, you really don’t want to crawl back in.
” His eyes warm. “Plus, I found a place with mid coffee and great pie. And you’re easy to talk to.
So maybe the big shifts find a way of working out. ”
My throat tightens. His shift makes sense to me, but mine is so much darker and uglier and more complicated than anything I can hand him over a diner counter. Still, the need to say something is eating me alive.
“You know I’m pretty new in town, right? I thought I was doing okay. My roommate and I were becoming friends—real friends, maybe, which is not something I’ve had much practice with. But her boyfriend doesn’t like me, and lately she barely comes home except to grab clothes and leave.”
“That’s rough.”
“It is. We tried having coffee the other day and he shut that down fast. I just miss talking to someone who isn’t . . . complicated. Or intense.” I laugh, but it comes out thin. “It would be nice to have a normal friend for once. Someone who doesn’t come with a whole situation attached.”
Jamie reaches across the counter and squeezes my hand. Just once, brief and warm. “Well. You’ve got me. If you want me.”
“Yeah?”
“I mean, I’m here most days anyway. Might as well make the friendship official-ish.” He grins. “Besides, I need someone to tell me when I have pie on my face.”
The label lands fast—too fast, maybe—but it feels warm instead of trapping. I laugh a little, and something loosens in my chest. “Deal.”
“Deal.” He picks up his fork and points it at me. “And for the record, anyone who makes you feel like you don’t belong is wrong. You belong wherever you decide to plant yourself. Don’t let some insecure boyfriend convince you otherwise.”
“Thank you, Jamie.”
“Anytime.” He takes a bite of pie and chews thoughtfully. “So. Now that we’re officially besties, I feel like I should mention that you have a, um—” He gestures vaguely at his own neck.
I freeze. My hand flies to my collar. “What?”
“It’s just—” He winces sympathetically. “Your concealer’s kind of rubbed off. Right there.” He taps the side of his neck, just below the jaw.
I grab a spoon off the counter and angle it, trying to catch my reflection. And there it is—the bruise Holden left, dark purple against my skin, peeking above the neckline of my uniform where the fabric has been rubbing the makeup away all day.
“Oh my God.”
“It’s fine! It’s not that noticeable. I only saw it because I’m sitting right here and the light is—”
“Jamie.”
“Sage. Relax. It’s a hickey, not a felony.
” He’s grinning now, clearly enjoying my mortification.
“So. Is this from a certain very large, very quiet gentleman with a voice that could narrate spicy audiobooks? Because honestly, if that man read me a bedtime story, I would have the most wonderful dreams.”
I cover my face with both hands. Shake my head.
“It wasn’t?” Jamie gasps. Theatrically. Beautifully. Hands on the counter, mouth open, eyes wide. “There’s someone else?”
“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” I moan through my fingers. “I’ve never been like this. I swear. I was normal. I was boring. I owned sensible shoes.”
“And now?”
“And now I don’t even know who I am anymore.”
Jamie leans back on his stool and crosses his arms, looking at me with the expression of someone who’s just been handed the most interesting puzzle of their life. “Sage. Look at me.”
I drop my hands.
“There is nothing wrong with you,” he says. “You’ve got a visible hickey, suspiciously improved lighting in your face, and at least one very large man who looks at you like you’re the moon and he’s just waiting for permission to howl.”
“You don’t even know them.”
“I know audiobook-voice-guy has excellent taste, and I know you look more alive than you did last week. Playing the field isn’t a crime. You get to have fun and figure out what you want without branding it with a permanent label immediately.”
“You think?”
He tilts his head to the side. “I know.”
I’m about to say something more when movement outside the window catches my eye. A van has pulled up—plain white, no markings—and someone is wrestling something out of the back. Something large. Something . . . floral.
“What the—”
It’s a wreath. A funeral wreath. The kind that sits on a stand at memorial services, with a big satin ribbon across the front. Except instead of REST IN PEACE, the ribbon reads: I’M SORRY I’M AN IDIOT in gold block letters.
And the person carrying it is Milo.
What the hell?
I’d texted him on my way into work: come by on my break, we can talk.
It was the first I’d reached out since I told him—through his own camera, no less—to give me space until I was ready.
And to his credit, he didn’t push for more.
Two days. No calls, no ambushes, no Tupperware of pasta left on my doorstep like an offering to an angry god. He waited for me to reach out.
So yes. I invited him.
Technically.
But I didn’t invite this.
He’s struggling. The wreath is enormous, easily four feet across, and the stand keeps catching on the sidewalk. He tries to muscle it through the front door—the bells jangle, the stand catches, and the whole thing tilts sideways, nearly decapitating an elderly woman on her way out.
She ducks, swears, and gives Milo the finger as he stumbles aside. The stand wedges in the doorframe long enough for the entire diner to turn and watch.
Jamie chokes on his coffee. “Oh my God,” he says, voice sticky with glee. “Do you know that guy?”
I want to die.
Milo finally gives up on the door and sets the wreath up on the sidewalk, angling it so it faces the diner window.
He adjusts the ribbon, drops to his knees on the pavement, presses his hands together in prayer position, and screams, “Saaaaage!” like he’s in a production of A Streetcar Named Desire.
Every head in the diner turns toward me.
“Oh my fucking God,” I mutter.
Jamie stares. “Is that . . . a funeral wreath?”
“Yes.”
“And that man is on his knees—is that where the hickey came from?”
“No,” I say distractedly, already untying my apron. “He’s a different beast altogether.”
Jamie’s mouth falls open. “A different—Wow. I want to be you when I grow up.”
I’m already heading for the door, calling out to Rosa that I’m taking my break.
Milo sees me coming and somehow manages to look both pathetic and delighted. He’s still on his knees, hands clasped, his face arranged into the most exaggerated expression of remorse I’ve ever seen. The wreath towers behind him like a floral headstone for his dignity.
“A funeral wreath?” I stop in front of him.
“It seemed appropriate,” he says, still on his knees. “Given that our trust died a premature death due to my own stupidity.”
“Where did you even get a funeral wreath?”
“A friend of Eli’s knows a guy.” He lowers his voice. “Professional mourning-adjacent services. Very discreet. Great reviews.”
“Of course.”
“Anyway, he knows a florist and she’s very nice. Gave me a discount when I told her I’d ruined the most important relationship of my life through invasive surveillance technology.”
“You told the florist about the cameras?”
“Not the cameras-cameras.” His eyes widen like he realizes, one second too late, that this is not helping. “I said I was a tech-savvy idiot who violated someone’s privacy out of misguided love and needed a grand gesture of repentance. No names. No felonies. Just vibes and lilies.”
“Milo.”
“I know. Discretion is one of the things I’m actively learning.”
A laugh escapes before I can stop it, and I hate myself for it, because I’m supposed to be angry.
I am angry. The laugh doesn’t cancel that out.
It just punches through because he’s on his knees on a public sidewalk next to a funeral wreath with a ribbon that says I’M SORRY I’M AN IDIOT, and there’s a couple across the street taking a photo of him, and his eyes are so wide and earnest that he looks like a golden retriever who’s just eaten the Christmas turkey and knows he’s in trouble but also kind of hopes you’ll still love him.
“Get up,” I say.
“I can stay down here if public humiliation helps.”
“It doesn’t. The concrete is filthy, and forgiveness isn’t a hostage exchange.”
His face crumples a little.
I crouch down so we’re eye level. “Get up so I can talk to you.”
“I fucked up,” he says, expression finally stripped of the performance.
“Yeah,” I say. “You did.”
He nods. Swallows. “Can I explain? Not to make excuses. I know there isn’t one. I just want you to know what was going through my head when I did it.”
I stand and hold out my hand. He takes it, and I pull him to his feet.
“Let’s take a walk,” I say, eyeing the giant wreath. “But that thing stays here.”
“What about the ribbon? Can I bring the ribbon?”
“No. No wreath. No ribbon. No props. Just you, Milo. I only want you.”
He eyes the wreath longingly, then sighs. “Okay. Just me.”