I laugh and sniff away the tears. I don’t want to cry, not now, when the future is finally starting to look bright. “I would kiss you, but I didn’t brush my teeth before I came down.”
“I don’t give a shit,” he says, leaning in to kiss me, softly, but not so sweetly, across the plates of food covering the table. “I can’t wait to be alone with you tonight.”
I shiver but refuse to get nervous.
Tonight will take care of tonight. From now on, I’m all about living in the moment.
I smile as Danny sits back in his seat. We spend the next hour guzzling coffee and eating until we feel like we’re going to explode.
And then I slide into the booth beside him and we spend another hour drinking more coffee while paging through my guidebook, marking all the places we want to visit and watching the morning sun fill the diner with warm, hopeful light.
Chapter Ten
Danny
“All who joy would win.
Must share it—Happiness was born a twin.”
-Lord Byron
* * *
New Zealand is insanely beautiful, Sam is back to her old self again, and other than the fact that her family is threatening to disown her for dropping out of school, all is right with the world.
We head out of Auckland a little after ten o’clock, and by eleven, we’re in the middle of the most amazing fall color I’ve ever seen. Explosions of orange and red line the road by the highway, while in the distance snow-capped mountains warn that winter is on its way in and all this wild color will only be here for a little longer. But looking out the window at the crystal clear river winding beside the road, I can imagine how beautiful the north island is going to be with bare branches haunting the landscape.
I start thinking maybe I can make an extended trip, like Sam was talking about at breakfast, work after all.
“I think we should stay until December,” I say when Sam and I pull off at a roadside fruit stand to grab lunch halfway to Lake Taupo.
“You do?” She turns to me, grinning like she got her birthday presents early. “Really?”
“Really.” That smile makes me determined to find a way to make this work. It’s been too long since I’ve seen her smile like that. “I’d already planned on running the business in Croatia long distance, and I can call Gus and tell him I need to put off starting the location in Maui for six months or so. He’s been hedging anyway, wondering if he could afford to put up his half of the money. This will give him more time to save and I can add some of the cash I was going to invest to our travel budget.”
“Or we can get jobs so you don’t have to,” Sam says. “There are tons of beaches here. Come spring, we can teach surfing, and in the meantime I bet we can find work at a campground or something. I had a friend who came here last winter and got a camper to rent for free in exchange for doing odd jobs around the campground and cleaning up after the guests.”
“Sounds amazing,” I say, wrapping my arms around her waist and pressing a kiss to her neck before murmuring into her hair, “I can’t wait to shack up in a camper with you.”
Sam laughs as she spins away from me and wanders farther down the row of apples, plucking a juicy looking pink one from a tiny basket and checking it for bruises. “And you’re okay with missing the first six months of your new niece’s life?”
I shrug. “Babies are mostly sleeping machines for the first few months anyway. As long as we make sure to get back to Croatia for Christmas, I won’t feel like I missed out. And Caitlin won’t care. She knows how long we’ve waited to be together. I’m sure she’ll be—”
“Does that say seventeen dollars?” Sam asks, brow furrowing as she lifts the basket from the table.
I lean down to take a closer look at the handwritten card tucked between two apples. “Jesus Christ. For five apples? Are they made of gold?”
Sam places the pink apple carefully back into the basket and sets the basket back on the table. “My food budget won’t last long if that’s the going rate for apples.”
“The breakfast this morning was insane, too,” I say. “But I thought that was because we were in the city. You’d think a roadside stand would have better prices.”
Sam turns to me, worry in her big eyes for the first time all day. “Is this crazy? Are we going to starve to death in a foreign country?”
I laugh as I wrap my arms around her again, pulling her close as a cool breeze whips through the stand, making her curls bob around her face. “No, we’re not going to starve to death. We just might need to start looking for those jobs sooner rather than later. Maybe I can talk to the people at the cave expedition. That sounds a lot like the tours I’ve been doing already. They might have a guide position open I’d qualify for.”