I knew I needed to do something about it. I needed to talk to him, to finish the argument we'd been having at the cabin. To do something to put a bow on this whole thing one way or another, but I just didn't know how to.
I didn't want to go to his place and start shouting at him because that wasn't productive, however much he might have deserved it, and I didn't know what else to do, so I did nothing.
I worked my shift, I went home. And then I did the same thing on Tuesday. And then on Wednesday.
By Thursday, I hadn't seen or heard from Killian, which was weird. Usually he came by the coffee shop or texted me to make plans for Friday by Thursday afternoon, but as the last of the after-lunch rush died down, I was left standing there, wondering if maybe he wasn't going to contact me because he didn't want to see me.
It was odd, but I didn't know how to feel about that.
Amanda, of course, picked up on it. She was nothing like the soft-spoken Laura, who would have just let me stew in my feelings without saying anything, and she came over and plunked a cup down in front of me.
"What's this?" I asked.
"Latte I fucked up," she said. "You look like you could use the caffeine."
She wasn't wrong, so I picked up the drink and sipped at it. Vanilla caramel, heavy on the syrup. Sweet, but not too bad.
"So," Amanda said, folding her arms. "Trouble in paradise?"
"I don't know what you mean," I muttered, keeping my eyes on the paper cup in my hand.
"Uh huh, sure. Right. Because you definitely don't look longingly at the door every time someone walks by it, and you haven't been obsessively checking your phone every time there's a lull."
Goddammit, she was too observant for her own good. I'd thought I was being subtle about the way I was looking to see if Killian was coming and keeping an eye on my texts just in case he contacted me.
I wanted to be ready, in my defense. If he came in, I needed the heads up to make sure I looked as nonchalant as possible so he wouldn't know how affected I was by the crap going on between us.
And if he texted me, I didn't want him to think I was ignoring him. It was a whole thing.
Amanda didn't look impressed by my attempts to deflect her attention away from the matter at hand, and I sighed finally, putting the cup down.
"There's just some tension," I said. "We're going to work it out."
"Between you and the guy with the glasses or you and the suit?" Amanda wanted to know.
"Suit," I replied. "Well... both, I guess."
She snorted. "I knew it. You talked such a big game about how they were just friends, but here you are in some kinda love triangle."
"There's no triangle," I assured her. Maybe there had been for a bit there, but it was definitely over now and she didn't have to know about the existence of it.
"Can we not do this?" I asked her, and I could hear for myself how exhausted I sounded. I was just tired of all of it, and I didn't know what I was supposed to do or why it had all fallen in my lap.
Amanda relented with a little shrug. "Okay, sorry. Do you wanna... talk about it? Like, you look like you've been dragging it out."
She wasn't wrong. "Yeah, that's fair. It's just dumb. Suit guy is all in his feelings, but he won't talk about them with me, so I don't know what I'm supposed to do about it."
"Is he jealous of glasses guy?"
I nodded, not even bothering to hide the truth. I was in it now, and maybe having an outside perspective would help shed some light on what the hell I was supposed to do to fix it.
"Figured," she said. "He seems like the type. Possessive, prone to fits of jealousy."
I kept nodding because she was right on the money. "He is. He definitely is. Only here's the thing. We're not exclusive, so it's not like he has any right to be."
She hummed and considered that. "Well, the way I see it, you've got two options." She held up one finger. "Tell him to fuck off and go off with glasses guy." Another finger went up. "Tell him to fuck off and then try to work it out."
It was a good thing there weren't many customers inside to hear her swearing, but Amanda was truly the sort of person who just didn't care about things like that. Sometimes I envied her.
"It's not going to work with glasses guy," I said, still being honest.
"So option two, then. Or option one but be alone. Your choice."
And what a choice it was. Either way, I had to address the issue with Killian because I couldn't spend the next five months ignoring him and then show up at the end of the year ready to collect my money. That wouldn't work at all.
"Okay," I said. "So, let's say I decided to try to work it out. How do I do that?"
"Hell if I know," she replied, shrugging. "I don't know him. He seems like the type to play games, though. Keep people off balance. And I guess you can either play his game or you can take matters into your own hands and make him play yours."
It was good advice. I'd been doing a lot of waiting, and it hadn't gotten me anywhere.
Luckily the door chimed and a group of people I recognized from working in the office building up the road came in for their afternoon fix, and we had to get back to work before we could dive any deeper into talking about my personal business.
But the awkwardness aside, it had been nice to get it out there and get another opinion.
I could give
