When Hal starts driving to his place, which is probably quite far, although I’m not really sure because I’ve never been there, and I refused to listen to Sam when he told me anything about it, I start trying to figure out the right thing to say. If there even is a right thing in a situation like this.
“Maybe we shouldn’t tell my family. Or your mom.”
“Alright.”
“Or maybe we should.”
“Alright.”
“Argh!” I curl my hand around the door handle. “Seriously? That’s all you have to say? You’re just agreeing with whatever I say. If I told you to stick a fork in your eye, you’d say alright too.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“If I told you I wanted to move a thousand salamanders into your house and start a salamander farm or whatever, you’d say alright.”
“No. Definitely not. I draw the line at salamanders. But when it comes to our families, we could wait a little while. Not to keep anything a secret, but so we can talk to them calmly, rationally, and with a clear knowledge of whatever we’ve decided for us.”
I gulp. “You don’t think I’m just a fortune hunter?”
He pegs me with a funny look as soon as we pull up to a red light. “That’s the last thing I’d ever think. I know you wouldn’t care about a single dollar if it made you unhappy.”
“You don’t wonder why I’ve had a spontaneous change of heart?”
He grins at me with an annoying, boyish grin that has been the same ever since I can remember. “I give good orgasms after all.”
“Oh, please.” I turn away, studying the window just so he can’t look me dead in the face as I lie. “It wasn’t that good.”
“Not the best you’ve ever had?”
“Not by a long shot.”
“Hmm, I’ll have to do better.”
If I weren’t buckled in, his words might send me rocketing straight up into the sky. As it is, I force myself to calm down, to still the pounding in my chest and between my legs and temples.
“Anyway, about our families…”
“Well, we don’t know that this would actually work. I mean, unless you just want to have some fun here and there.”
“I don’t know what I want as I never imagined this would happen. I was planning on getting rid of the bakery, moving to Seattle, and finding a restaurant to work at there. I haven’t even told anyone yet because I wanted to make sure you were serious about buying it first.”
“You could still move to Seattle. I wouldn’t stop you. I want what you want.” Hal flashes me his most genuine, sincere—I really do want what’s best for you—smile. I know it’s sincere because it doesn’t look like any of the other smiles I’ve ever seen him give me. I’ve never seen this kind of smile at all, even directed at someone else.
I shake my head and turn back to the window. “This is too much.”
“I get that.” Hal is being so nice that it might seriously kill me. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to rush you. I’m just trying to say that whatever you want to do, I’m good. Unless you want to do something casual because I was going to say I don’t think I could live with just having you like that. Actually, I know I couldn’t. I’ve been waiting years for you, Stella.”
“Garg!”
“Garg?”
I swivel around. “Years?” I gasp. “Years? Years are a long time.”
“I don’t think this happened in the span from last night until this morning for you, did it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I…I don’t know. It’s complicated. I might have thought some things and felt some things, but that was a long time ago. I was young, and young people often have surging hormones that make them irrational. Then, a lot of life happened, and I grew up, so I can’t say for sure that I felt that. But maybe last night did change things. Maybe it gave me a reason to believe that maybe you felt something too. Maybe it proved to me that what I felt a long time ago might be more real now.”
Hal digests that, and he’s probably more serious than I’ve ever seen him. I’ve always thought he couldn’t multitask, but he’s paying attention to both me and the road, and he’s doing it pretty flawlessly.
“How real are these feelings?”
“I should think you’d know they’re very real, given what just happened.”
He clears his throat. “Uh, yes, sorry. I should have asked, what’s the level of these feelings?”
“I don’t know! I’ve hardly had time to analyze them!”
“So, over the years, you haven’t thought about them much?”
I’m not going to justify that with an answer. First of all, it gives away too much. Secondly, it’s pretty obvious to me why there wouldn’t have been any point in giving them any kind of foothold. Third, I really don’t have an answer. Were those feelings of awareness and attraction? Yes. Okay, they probably were, and they probably still are. But I can’t say how far they go past that.