“I really would love to talk with you more. I mean that.” Lila made sure her eye contact lingered. “I don’t find many other people I can talk to about this.”
“Neither do I.” Heidi sighed, the weight falling off her shoulders. “It’s a bit lonely sometimes, honestly.”
“Your partner—”
Heidi shook her head. “I try not to share too much. I don’t want to traumatize her with my trauma. It’d all be a mess then.”
“Sure, but you have to have open communication.” Lila curled her hands into fists, wanting to reach out but also wanting to give Heidi space.
Heidi didn’t really answer, she just found something else to focus on and grabbed some milk from the shelf.
“Heidi, I don’t mean to pry, but she does know, right?”
“She knows.” Heidi settled the milk in the top part of her cart. “We just don’t talk about it much.”
“It’s not easy to talk about.” Lila knew she was pushing the boundaries of any relationship they had, which was not much. She should probably just drop it.
“It’s not. How do you do it?”
“Oh. Um…I try to be as honest as I can, when I can.”
Heidi nodded. “I supposed that’s the best advice for any relationship.”
“True.” Lila picked up a few more items she needed for the week and set them in the cart. “If you ever want to talk about this and relationships, I’m always up for it.”
“Thanks.” Heidi looked genuinely relaxed for the first time since they’d met the other day.
Lila loved it. This was the true Heidi, the real person underneath all the filters, the walls, the barriers she put up to protect herself. Lila had done that at one point too, for years, and it was no way to live, and no way to be in a relationship. Her heart broke for Heidi’s partner. Hopefully they’d found a way to work around all that.
They walked together to the front of the store and the checkout lanes. Lila let Heidi put her things on the belt first. She did it methodically, first the vegetables, then the fruit, then the cold items. Lila was impressed. She usually just tossed everything up and didn’t pay so much as one lick of attention to the order.
“I’m betting I could really learn some things from you,” Lila commented, pointing to the conveyer belt.
Heidi whipped her head around, her gaze dropping from Lila’s eyes to her chest, to her crotch before slowly sliding back up. “I’m pretty sure I could learn a few things from you, too.”
Interesting.Lila was far more intrigued now than she had been before. Maybe her first evaluation had been wrong. Leaning on the handle of the cart, Lila danced her gaze over Heidi’s lean face.God, she was a tiny woman.“I suppose we’ll have to meet up again at some point.”
“I suppose we will. I imagine you can’t be that hard to find.”
“Never know.” The cashier had all of Heidi’s items rung up.
Lila straightened her shoulders and started to put her own things on the belt. By the time she looked back up, Heidi was gone. “Where did she go?”
“She left, ma’am.”
Lila flipped around to the young, pimply cashier who couldn’t be older than seventeen. “She’s fast.”
“Do you know her?”
“Kind of,” Lila muttered. She hadn’t even gotten a chance to get Heidi’s phone number or give Heidi hers.Damn it.She was going to have to find a way to figure out where Heidi was. Showing up at her work would likely not be taken to kindly.
“Seventy-three-eighty-one.”
“What?” Lila twisted to the young cashier. “Oh, right.”
She whipped out her debit card and slid it through the machine. She paid for her food and took the cart and bags out to her car. Lila looked around for any sign of Heidi—maybe she was still putting groceries in her car or bringing the cart back in—but there was absolutely no sign of her ever having been there.
Cursing under her breath, Lila shoved the bags in her car and put the cart in the corral. When she got back to her car, she took out her phone and heaved a sigh. She really wanted to see Heidi again, if anything just to talk about the unspeakable. She hadn’t realized until that moment how important that was, and she missed it. It had been years since she’d had someone she could talk to about that part of her past, someone who didn’t know all the details.