I jolted out of my Scrooge McDuck fantasies. “I’m fine. It’s just… that’s a lot of money.”
Miller put a hand on my shoulder and I put my hand on top of his instinctively. He smiled. “It’s a decent amount, yeah.” He squeezed my shoulder. “Do you have a bowl for the raita?”
“Which one’s that?” I asked, and he pointed at a container. “Um, probably, or we can just eat it out of that.”
We carried the dishes, and a few of the containers, into the dining room and sat down to eat.
“So we have to get an arborist?” I asked. “How does that happen?”
“Oh, we’ll sort that out,” Miller said. “Well, Marty will. He apparently has Virginia’s top three arborists on speed dial. That’s what he says, anyway, and at this point I’m not sure if I’m confident enough to call him a liar. He’s just so weird it might be true.”
I laughed. “I like Marty.”
Miller raised an eyebrow at me. “Try working with him. But he does know a lot about tree law, I’ll give him that.”
I nodded, still trying to wrap my head around the part where Harlan was going to give us ten thousand dollars. It seemed too good to be true.
“And Harlan can’t weasel out of paying?” I asked. This wasn’t the conversation I thought we’d be having tonight, but at the same time I was glad we were talking about it. Let’s face it, Miller was much more likely to want to date Danny Hall, college guy, than Danny Hall, gas station attendant and part-time unwilling goose wrangler.
Miller wrinkled his nose and made a seesaw motion with his hand. “Well, that all depends. Getting a settlement isn’t the same as getting a payment, you know? He can’t weasel out of paying, but he can draw it out and be a pain in the ass about it. But that’s what your lawyers are for.”
He was right about that. I grinned. “And my guy’s the best.”
His face did something complicated, and I felt bad. The guy hadn’t come over here to talk about work. He’d come over to eat dinner and hopefully get laid. I mean I was assuming that lastpart, but based on past evidence—see? I could do lawyer talk too—it was a pretty solid assumption.
“Sorry,” I said. “I guess you didn’t come over to talk about Grandma’s tree.”
“It’s fine,” he said, piling butter chicken and rice onto his plate and adding naan.
I loaded my own plate and we ate in companionable silence for a while. I went back through to the kitchen to get us a couple of Cokes and took a moment to calm the butterflies in my stomach as I tried to figure out a casual way to say,So, this is nice. Wanna try it as boyfriends?
Now that I thought about it, there were worse opening lines. And honestly, finding out that my college dream was closer than I thought had me feeling a lot more confident about the whole thing.
When I got back to the dining room, I handed Miller the soda and said, “So, I wanted to talk to you about something. About us.”
Miller’s fork stilled. “Yeah,” he said, his gaze finding mine. “I wanted to talk to you too.”
My stomach did a weird kind of flip-flop at that, and hope sparked in my chest. Maybe he was here to tell me that he wanted this to be more too. And suddenly I didn't want to wait any longer. The words were bursting to get out.
“I like you, Miller,” I said. “I mean, I really like you. And this whole”—I gestured between us—“thing has been great. But I think that maybe I’d like to try for more?”
His eyes widened, and he stared at me.
“I know, you’re in Hopewell and I’m here,” I rushed to add, to show him that I wasn’t being stupid about this and I’d thought it through, “but we’ve made it work so far, right? And I think we have a good thing going. A really good thing. So, how would you feel about dating properly?”
I stared at him expectantly and waited for him to give me one of his big, wide smiles. When it didn’t come, I felt my own smile drop, and anxiety started to gnaw at my chest.
“It,” he began and set his fork down. “It has been a good thing.” Past tense. That was never a good sign. “And I really like you too.”
Okay. Slightly better? But the expression on his face warned me that he wasn’t done yet. And suddenly I didn’t want to let him finish. The defense got to give their whole argument before the prosecution was allowed to talk, right?
“Like, nothing would change,” I said. “Not really. We’d just keep doing what we’re already doing. But we’d be exclusive. And it’s not like I’m seeing anyone else anyway.” I ended with a small pitiful laugh that transformed into a small pitiful question. “Oh. Are you?”
He didn’t say anything. That divot above his nose was back.
“Oh,” I said, my face hot with humiliation.
“I’m not seeing anyone else,” he said, his voice low. “And if you’d asked me this a week ago, I would have said yes in a heartbeat. But there’s a good chance I’m about to be offered a job in New York, and if I am, I’m going to take it. So this wouldn’t really work.”
