21. Salem
SALEM
The chair felt too firm beneath me, which was appropriate given that I was supposed to be paying attention and was currently doing the opposite.
I should have been laser-focused. This was the bank meeting. There were numbers on the table. Interest rates. Timelines. The woman across from me had reading glasses and an organized folder; she clearly had her life together in ways I was still working toward.
Instead, I was thinking about a kiss.
Multiple kisses, technically.
Ethan had kissed me again when walking me to my car, which had been — a lot.
The kind of ‘a lot’ that had absolutely no business showing up in a bank on a business day, and yet here it was, making itself at home while I sat across from a loan officer and tried to look like a responsible adult with a realistic financial plan.
I was doing okay at it. Probably.
I glanced down at the folder in front of me and pretended I hadn’t already read the same line four times without absorbing a single word of it.
Numbers. Terms. Projections.
All the things I cared about deeply.
All the things I had been building toward for years.
This was my future sitting on this desk. It was the thing I had been saving for, dreaming about, and secretly reshaping my entire life around, and my brain had decided that right now, what it really wanted to think about was the way his hand had felt in mine.
Cool. Very helpful.
I cleared my throat and forced myself back into the room.
“…and based on what you’ve provided, everything looks very promising,” the loan officer said, glancing up with a polished, reassuring smile.
“The additional income you mentioned brings you comfortably above the threshold—we’ll just need to finalize a few details, but you’re in a really good position here. ”
A really good position.
Right.
Because I was sitting in a bank discussing buying an auto shop like it was a thing people just did, and I had mentioned—aloud, to a real person—that I would have an additional twenty thousand dollars coming in soon, like that was a normal sentence.
All because of a PR arrangement that had somehow produced both a viral video, local popularity, and a man who kissed me like I was the last tether to earth.
The only part of any of it that had felt like actual work?
Lucy.
And really, someone should have been paying me an extra twenty thousand just for that.
My phone buzzed softly against the table, and I glanced down without thinking.
Ethan:
Still thinking about Sunday. A lot. Just so you know.
Oh.
The heat moved up my neck, blooming fast and inconvenient in the middle of a bank, in front of a loan officer, while I was supposed to be thinking about fixed versus variable interest rates.
I angled the phone slightly toward myself, like that made any difference, and stared at the screen.
A lot was doing considerable work in that sentence, and I was going to need a moment with it.
I typed back before I could overthink.
Me:
Funny. Me too.
I hope you are more productive than I am trying to be today.
I pressed my lips together to keep from smiling in the middle of a bank, which was a level of undignified I had not anticipated.
I slipped the phone face down on the table before I could respond again, because I was a person with a financial future to attend to and not someone who was going to flirt through a loan meeting, no matter how much I wanted to.
I glanced back at the folder.
Right. The shop.
I was so close, I really only had one thing left to do: tell Rowan.
My stomach tightened.
She was out there right now, in her apartment, probably looking at Madison neighborhoods online. Rowan was probably saving me links to coffee shops near campus, and I was sitting in a bank in Gray Harbor, one meeting away from making my dream real, and icing her out of hers.
Every day that I didn’t tell her it was another day, she was making plans that included me while I quietly dismantled my half of it and said nothing. I kept waiting for the right moment, but the right moment was a myth I had been chasing for months now, and it was never going to arrive on its own.
It wasn’t just that I was buying a shop.
It was that I was choosing my dream over hers, and every single day that I waited, that gap between us got wider.
I had been telling myself I was protecting her from something that wasn’t certain yet.
But the loan officer across from me had just told me I was in a really good position.
The money was almost there. Chuck was waiting. The window was open.
This was certain, and Rowan still didn’t know, which made me, quite possibly, the world’s worst best friend.
“Well, Ms. Turner, thank you for coming in,” the loan officer said, pulling me back. “We’ll be in touch soon.”
I stood, shook her hand, gathered my papers, and walked out through the glass doors.
No more waiting.
I had my phone out before I made it to the car, with Rowan’s name already pulled up. No more right moments. No more saved dinners and good days I didn’t want to ruin. The right moment was when you finally stopped finding reasons to delay it, and I was done delaying.
I hit call.
It rang once.
Twice.
And then—
“Salem?” Her voice broke on the second syllable.
She was crying. Everything inside me dropped.
“Oh my God—Rowan, what’s wrong?”
Just like that, the nerve I had built up slipped right through my fingers like it had never been there at all.