He said I wasn’t ever serious about anyone before.
All I can think about is what that means. Does it mean, he’s never been serious about anyone in the past, and that’s all?
Or does it mean, he’s never been serious before – but he is now?
I can’t figure it out, and I’m too afraid to ask. Because if he says it’s the first and not the latter and that he isn’t serious about this, then it’s going to hurt. It will make everything between us awkward – and it will also shatter my dream.
I don’t want that to happen yet. I’m not ready for it. I want to hang on, still, to the thought that this could be something real.
“Are you getting up?” Oz asks, his voice a lot less sleepy than I expected. I twist in the sheets and look up at him, finding his eyes open and fully awake. “It’s not long until we have to get going.”
I look at the clock beside his bed and sigh. He’s right. I have another tour to go to.
Wait.
“We?” I ask. “You’re coming with me again today?”
He shrugs lazily. “Why not? I already arranged the time off work. I had a feeling I was going to be too busy this week to make it to the office.”
I raise an eyebrow. “When did you get that feeling?”
“Oh. Tuesday morning,” he says, with a grin.
Right before we met up for the first tour together. That figures. I give him a second raised eyebrow to join the first. “So confident?”
He laughs. “Well, if you turned me down, I could always have spent the time drowning my sorrows. Now, come on. Shower?”
“Shower,” I nod, suppressing a yawn. For all his talk of being an old man, he definitely seems to be coping better than I am with spending half the night awake – and engaged in some serious physical activity.
We head to the shower, and it feels so strange and yet so right yet again to be showering in front of someone else like this. But it’s not just ‘someone else’. It’s Oz. That’s why it’s right. He pours expensive shampoo into my hair and lathers it up, given that all my things are back at my hotel, and I lean back into his touch. It almost makes me want to fall asleep again.
It’s strangely intimate. Showering together and yet not getting up to anything more than cleaning one another. I know we’re under a time limit, so even a quickie probably wouldn’t be a good idea if we want to make it to the tour on time. But, still.
It’s almost a little uncomfortable to feel so close to him, not knowing if this will last at all. Jarring. But I take a breath and push that aside, and focus on the moment.
And when we get out of the shower and I dry my hair and then realize that I smell like him now, I decide I like it a lot, either way.
I dress in the new clothes that Oz picked out for me – the least dressy ones of the whole selection, a pair of fashionable, designer jeans, a plain blouse, and a blazer. I would have thought, before, that it would be a waste to buy these kinds of staple items at such a high price. But now… I see. I see how the quality makes a difference. How it makes me more comfortable, changes the way I feel and think about myself.
I could get used to this. Which is a bad thing, and I should probably stop trying to.
“Ready?” Oz asks, and I nod. I forget to ask about how we’re going to get there until we step outside the elevator and I realize we’re not in the lobby from yesterday, but instead an underground garage. Oz leads me to a sleek sports car and tells me to get in, and I shake my head to myself in wonder.
Looks like I’m going to be arriving in style.
I find it hard to concentrate the whole day. On our way to the college, all I can think about is whether I’ll ever ride in this car with him again, or if today is the only time it will ever happen. When we start the tour and wander around after the guide, I keep thinking about whether or not I could stay here and keep him, if I just chose the right college.
And I can’t also help wondering if we’re going to find another convenient closet, but we never do.
“What about the student bar here?” Oz asks as we start to reach the end of the tour. “You said it’s undergoing refurbishment right now – do you know when it’s going to open? Are they going to be able to use it as soon as the semester starts?”