from now on, you’re the candle lady to me. Far as I’m concerned, making candles is the only thing you’ve ever done.”
“Only, I haven’t even made one candle. Ever,” I corrected him, information he met with a frown.
“I watched you get a whole shipment of shit last week, and you were looking around at it all like a kid in a candy store.”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “I was excited to get it, but now that it’s all here, I… I dunno. It’s kinda intimidating.”
Immediately, Tristan frowned, brushing off my words. “Man, whatever.”
“What?”
“I don’t believe for a second that you’re intimidated by… anything, honestly,” he said, stopping with me at an intersection. I met his gaze, thinking he had to be joking, because… seriously?
Every element of this whole reinvention thing was intimidating as fuck.
There was no way with as much as I felt it, he couldn’t see how confused and awkward I was. Especially with him.
“I’m glad you think so highly of me,” I told him as we crossed the street. “But I’m really feeling my way through the dark. I’m really not used to being able to make my own decisions, and just… living exactly how I want. Yes, I’ve lived, and all that, but now that it’s all just up to me… it’s so different. Everything is brand new, all over.”
“Damn,” Tristan nodded. “That’s… intense. I get it though. Well, kinda. I was deployed, you know? Kept getting sent back. And when you’re out in all these foreign places, enmeshed in real fucking combat, conflicts that “regular” people don’t even know about… it’s like, you come back to a whole different world. And it’s not that you can’t function, because you can, but it’s so damn… different.”
I thought he would say more – wanted him to say more – but instead, he trailed off. He was talking about his own, very separate experience, but everything he’d said, I’d absolutely been feeling.
He was right.
It wasn’t that you couldn’t function, it was so damn… different.
“It sounds like you’ve seen a lot,” I said, prompting him to break away from whatever was happening in his head that had him staring off in the distance, to nod.
“Yeah. Too much for my years.” He took a sip from his cup, then smirked at me. “I swear I’m not trying to pry about your last job that didn’t exist, but… I feel like you probably can relate to that.”
“To what? Having seen too much?”
He nodded.
“Oh,” I laughed. “You have no idea.”
“Yeah I thought so,” he replied. “Hey, how old are you?”
My eyes went wide. “How old am I?”
“Yes. As in, when is your birthday?”
“Oh. I… uh—”
I was saved from that question – one I had no real answer for – by a sudden blaring of music, which I quickly realized was coming from the pocket of Tristan’s basketball shorts.
“Boyz II Men?” I asked, wrinkling my nose. “Seriously?”
He offered an embarrassed grin as he shrugged, retrieving his phone. “It’s my mother. She picked it,” he explained, his thumb hovering over the screen. “Hold on,” he said to me, then tapped the screen and lifted it to his here. “Good morning beautiful,” he greeted, which made me have to bite back a smile. “I’m a little occupied right now, can I call you back? I – no, I do not think you’re one of the regular women out here,” he said, putting a hand to his face. “No, I never doubted you, I said I didn’t believe – I… okay. Okay. Okay. I’m sorry. I love you.”
“Well… that was a really interesting conversation, from this end at least,” I said, watching as, instead of putting his phone away, he tapped a few more times on the screen.
“Because my mother is a complete mess,” he explained, holding up his phone to show me a picture on the screen, of a beautiful older black woman holding a large bouquet of flowers. She was wearing a tee shirt with “Unfuckwittable” printed across the front, and a facial expression that said… the same thing, honestly.
“I feel like this requires an explanation,” I said, meeting his gaze, which was brimming with amusement.
He chuckled as he slipped it back in his pocket. “Well, you know Mother’s Day was a couple weeks ago, right? Well, she loves getting flowers, so that’s what I did. I made a comment to her about not being sad when they wilted or whatever, since that’s what always happens to cut flowers, but she was like… nah, I’ma keep my