"With the reporters? I wish you had let me handle it," I said.
"I wasn't going to stand there and let them bully you."
"But what if they come after you now?" I asked. He shrugged.
"I have practice. All news becomes old news eventually. They can't talk about me forever." I sighed, running my hands down his chest.
"Thank you for doing it," I said.
"They wer
en't getting away with that," he said, hugging me tight to his chest.
"I came to get you," I said.
"Why? Where are we going?"
"I want to take you out to eat. My treat."
"You don't have to do that, babe. It was nothing. Really."
"You still have to eat," I said, smiling up at him. I let him go and got dressed before we left. We walked down the beach past my house, getting to the restaurant through the beach. It was a small place, and we had to wait to get a table, but it served fantastic seafood, and I just wanted to say thank you to him somehow.
There was still something that was nagging at me that I needed to know the answer to. I knew how I felt about him, and at this point, it was safe to think that he might have felt a little similar, but even as I was trying to get over the shock of seeing the reporters, I couldn't stop thinking about what he had said he wanted to do.
"I'm gonna miss these places when I go back to LA," he said. I glanced up at him from my plate.
"When you go back?" I asked.
He shrugged. "Not a lot of nice mom and pop places left."
"If you stayed here, you wouldn't have to miss them," I said, looking down at my dinner.
"Yeah. You could take me to every last one of your cool spots here on the island," he said.
"Did you mean what you said earlier today?" I asked quickly.
"When? What about?"
"About moving to Lanai. Did you mean it?"
"I don't know," he said shrugging. "I knew that I had to say something that would get their attention, and that did it."
"Have you thought about moving here permanently?"
"I've thought about not going back, but it wouldn't be as easy as just refusing to leave, you know?" he said.
I nodded. Of course, I thought. There was a lot more to consider here than what I was feeling because I wasn't the one who would be making a huge life-changing decision if he decided to stay here. My mind just kept going back to what he had said that morning about me moving back with him and for this to come up as a possibility the same day just made me feel conflicted.
He had come here with the intention of eventually going home. He had people in LA, a home, a life, possibly a new job doing what he really wanted to do. I had those things, too, but here. We had our homes, and they weren't in the same place. We didn't really speak that explicitly about the time we would have to part, but everything that had happened today had just bubbled it up to the surface for me, and I didn't know what to do.
"Well, it worked," I said offhandedly, trying not to give away too much of what I was feeling.
"Nate Stone's still a hot news item even after being AWOL for the whole summer," he joked.
"Are they going to be back?"
"Maybe," he sighed.