Chapter 28
28
C ame in for a simple coffee, and walked out thinking that Coffee Loft is my new favorite hangout. Their merch is so cute, too. Definitely worth a trip to check out . ~ Mia
T he mid-afternoon lull gave Ginger a small break. Cal was long gone. He hadn’t asked to see her after all, and that weighed on her heart like an anchor was tethered to it and tossed overboard. She didn’t blame him. The problem was her own doing—the storming out, the silent treatment. If she couldn’t at least start a conversation, maybe she wasn’t ready for a relationship with anyone.
She’d planned to give Cal the proceeds from the shelter donation box a week ago, but with his absence last week, and well… now, she needed to get the money off her hands pronto . It wasn’t doing anyone any good sitting in the bank bag in her desk drawer. She’d just make a quick run over to Hearts Fur Love. There was something else she wanted to run by Charleen anyway.
“Oh, don’t trouble yourself,” Charleen said on the phone when Ginger called to see if she was in. “Coming over there is the least I can do. I could use a cold brew fix anyway.”
Charleen showed up half an hour later and greeted Ginger with two outstretched hands. Ginger had her drink waiting for her at an empty table, and Charleen invited Ginger to sit with her.
“Cal told me what a wonderful thing you did for us last week,” Charleen said, punctuating her double handshake with a squeeze every few words. “I’m sorry I didn’t get to thank you at the gala the other night. It was a whirlwind.”
“I can’t imagine. I’m sure you’ve had your mind on more important things, between that and the overall status of the shelter.”
“Oh, boy. Tell me about it,” she said with a shaky laugh. “Fingers crossed that something comes through. We have a couple of leads we’re pursuing at the moment.”
“I hope it works out.” She handed Charleen the envelope of donations. “I wish it were more.”
“You’re a dear,” she said before her eyes popped at the total written on the front of the envelope. “This was all collected at the Fall Days Festival?”
“I kept it at the counter for a few days afterward.” She knew people who wanted to donate but weren’t around the night of the festival.
Charleen shook her head, staring at the envelope. “Amazing.”
“I doubt we would have collected so much if it wasn’t for Cal coming here every week. He’s like a walking advertisement for Hearts Fur Love.”
“Everyone adores him, don’t they?” Charleen gushed. “And you, that was so sweet of you to take Peaches overnight. I hear she was the perfect guest.”
Cal had talked about her to Charleen. Her heart flipped at the thought, wondering what else Cal shared. “I was almost tempted?”
Charleen gasped. “You were tempted to adopt her?”
“I was going to say foster . But no, that’s probably not a good idea after all.”
“Oh, but she’s such a sweetheart. I can’t believe she hasn’t found her forever family yet.” Charleen leaned forward and patted Ginger’s hand. “He wrote the cutest description about her for the website. He really has a talent for that.”
“He does?”
Charleen nodded. “Sometimes I read his profiles and I’m like, ‘I want this dog.’ As if five dogs isn’t enough.” She threw her head back with a hearty laugh.
“Does he write all of them?” Her pulse leapt with a little offbeat stutter.
“Most of them. I’ve tried, but I’m about as creative as a math book. He says that working on them is a palette cleanser for the technical writing he does all day.”
“Right,” she murmured as her heart sank.
He writes profiles… for the shelter dogs ? Her mind whirled. Cal’s calls had stopped today. His voicemail messages spoke of a misunderstanding. It was better to talk in person, he’d said. To clear this up . Now she understood what misunderstanding he referred to, and she was to blame .
But she was afraid. What if her fear of losing herself in this relationship came true? It’d happened once with Marco. She didn’t want a repeat.
Cal wasn’t Marco, though. She’d known that up until she read that profile, then all the doubts came rushing back, and it’d pushed her back to the starting line.
She could solve it with a simple phone call or a face-to-face conversation, yet the outcome terrified her. Still, if she let this fester any longer, Cal might truly end up writing a dating profile for himself.
He might think she wasn’t worth the drama.
Too much trouble.
For a long time, she would have agreed with him. Insecurity can be exhausting, for her and for poor Cal.
It’s not too late to fix things .
Oh, but maybe it was. At least until she heard his version of what she’d imagined. She prayed for a discerning heart, and that he’d be patient with her even if that was asking too much.
Like him, she took words to heart. And spoken cruelly, they could cut her to the core. It might be easy to forgive, but those words became a part of her fabric, permanently woven into her being.
And she’d hurt him. Silently accusing him of not being genuine when all he’d ever been to her was kind and generous and so delightfully charming. He made her heart sing after it had been silent for too long. She might not have accused him outright, but her indifference had wounded him.
Kind, generous, funny Cal.
But now her thoughtlessness was a part of him, too.