run the shop without you. You’re good at everything I hate. Decorating. Coming up with new ideas. Being friendly to the customers. Picking out music that doesn’t make people want to cry.”
“Thank you for admitting that last one,” I whisper.
“And all the business stuff—finances, bookkeeping, making sure we actually make money. That stuff’s such a pain in the ass for me, but you’re good at it.”
I exhale slowly. “I am pretty great, aren’t I?”
“What’s the name of the bakery?”
I snort. “I haven’t named my hypothetical bakery.”
“Come on,” Nick says in a low voice. “I didn’t just meet you. You named your succulents. You definitely named your not-yet-existent bakery.”
“Fine, but—”
“For the last time, I’m not going to laugh.”
I bite the inside of my cheek. “Okay. It’s . . . the Butterfly.”
Nick doesn’t say anything.
“Do you think it’s bad?” I ask quietly. “Is it too cheesy? Or girly?”
“No.” I can hear the crinkle of Nick’s smile. “It’s perfectly you.”
I frown. “What does that mean? Because ‘perfectly you’ can mean ‘perfectly terrible.’’’
“It means it’s perfect.”
“Oh.” And all of a sudden, it feels like my heart is beating somewhere in the vicinity of my throat, threatening to leap out and say a bunch of stuff I don’t really mean. So I decide to keep talking.
“What about you?” I ask. “What do you want to do when you grow up? I mean, you’re practically at retirement age already, right?”
“Can it,” Nick growls.
Neither of us says anything for a moment, and then I say, “So?”
“I guess . . . I don’t really know. I opened a coffee shop with one of my friends because I needed something to do, and I liked coffee, and I liked food, and he had the money to do it, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. And then he moved away and I decided to keep it going myself and . . . here we are, years later, and I still haven’t thought about what I really want to do.”
“Wait.”
“What?”
“If you opened the shop with a friend . . . then why is it named after only you?”
Another pause. “His name . . . was also Nick.”
I sit up in bed. “Are you telling me, this entire time, the shop has been called Nick’s when really, it should’ve been called Nicks’? As in, ‘belonging to multiple Nicks’?”
“We called it Nick’s because it was a lot less confusing. People have enough trouble with apostrophes as it is.”
I settle back down on the bed. “Wow. I feel more confused, because I’ve been lied to for years.”
“You haven’t been lied to. Don’t be so dramatic.”
“You’re too mysterious, Nick. You’re like a crossword puzzle, but one that’s specifically about, like, Victorian literature or golf or something else I know nothing about. And unlike crossword puzzles, I can’t look up Nick Velez answers by flipping to the back of the book.”
I hear the mini fridge click on as neither of us says anything. “Hey,” I say, rolling on my side again.
In the dark, I can see the outline of his face on its side. His ear, his hair slightly puffed out, the roughness of his cheek visible even in the darkness.
“Yeah?” he asks.
“I’m sorry I talked to that gossip website. That was maybe not my best decision.”
He exhales. “It’s okay. I just don’t like anything about my personal life being available online . . .”
“You would be terrible at Instagram.”
“Social media is for children. But with the movie coming out . . . well, it’s out there anyway. I can ignore it, and eventually, another movie will be out and people will forget all about this.”
“Except for the shippers,” I say. “They’re gonna keep writing some extremely steamy fic.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“It’s—”
“Nope. Don’t explain it.”
I snort. “You’re the one with the Google Alert, dude. Even I don’t have a Google Alert.”
He sighs. “I want to make sure no one’s saying anything bad about you.”
“There’s nothing bad to say,” I try to joke, but my voice cracks. It’s kind of touching to know that Nick is looking out for me online, even if he doesn’t fully understand social media.
“I know this is weird for you, too,” he continues. “And you’re allowed to tell the truth about how you feel. I shouldn’t have gotten mad about it.”
I lick my lips. “But . . . but what if I wasn’t telling the truth?”
Nick doesn’t say anything.
I scoot closer to him, moving my body across the soft sheets of the king-size bed.