Page 17 of Change of Plans

“Don’t be,” Theo laughed and shook his head. “I’m better off without him. Before Paul, I went through a phase where I was on all the apps, and yeah, I’ll admit, I had a few hook-ups.” His face flushed with that wine-stain blush of his that I found dead sexy. “They weren’t really what I was looking for, though.”

“And what are you looking for?” I asked, reaching for my wine glass and making eyes at him over the rim before taking a drink.

Theo smiled bashfully and lowered his eyes for a moment. The man had no idea how sexy he was. “I don’t know,” he said with a shrug, reaching for his own glass. “Is it too cheesy for me to say I want the whole package? Romance, a deep connection, a monogamous relationship that may or may not include kids someday?”

“Theo Callihan, are you saying you want to get me pregnant?” I teased him.

Theo’s eyes went round, and he nearly swallowed his wine wrong. “I—I’m not saying that. I mean, I think you’d make a great dad, but I—” He paused his verbal spewing as I raised a hand to cover my laugh. His expression softened and hisshoulders loosened. “You’re teasing me, aren’t you,” he said, eyeing me with something just a bit too warm to be scolding.

“Maybe a little,” I laughed openly. “I love the way you’re so open and earnest, though.”

“Me? Open?” He genuinely looked surprised. “I’m so closed up that I’m afraid of my own shadow.”

Those words hit me straight in the heart. I really wanted to know who had hurt him in the past. I had the feeling it was someone other than Paul. More than that, I wanted to heal all those wounds.

“I think you’re a lot more open than you give yourself credit for,” I told him, reaching across the table to touch his hand. “You got up and sang in front of an entire room of people. Someone who can do that is not hopelessly closed up.”

“I guess.”

“And you were brave enough to come back to Common Grounds the next day to apologize to me.”

“I couldn’t not come back,” he said. His mouth twitched at the corner. “Not coming back would have meant breaking my routine, and you know by now that I can’t ever break my routine.”

I grinned at him, my heart feeling so light that I didn’t know how I was going to concentrate on eating. “We’ll just have to make some new routines for you, then,” I said, gazing deeply at him.

Theo smiled back, and I felt like the whole world was filled with promise.

Our server returned with supper a few minutes later. The restaurant might have had a weird name, but the food was delicious. Theo and I gushed over it, even trying a bite or two of each other’s dishes, as we talked about random things.

I loved getting to know him better with blunt questions about the things he liked. Neither of us were sporty, but we bothadmitted to being willing to play on a pick-up baseball team if we were asked. His parents had recently moved to Arizona to be closer to his oldest sister and her new, growing family, and mine were in Florida. He’d figured out he was gay because his middle school friends had played a lot of Final Fantasy and he liked the games “for the graphics”, and I’d figured things out for myself because of a love of anime.

We really did have so much more in common than I could have hoped for.

“But you were never interested in going to college?” Theo asked me after our long and lingering dinner was over, as we walked back down to the heart of Glenside, where we both lived, in the darkening twilight.

“I got an associate’s degree,” I said, just a teensy bit wary at his shock at my lack of formal education. “I don’t really need anything more than that to help run the café.”

“And that’s what you want to do?” Theo asked, swaying slightly closer to me as we passed someone coming the other direction, then staying there longer than he needed to.

“It’s absolutely what I want to do,” I said. “I love my family and I love the community we’ve built together with Common Grounds. It’s the kind of place where people meet up to have a good time, or to work all day when their office is ruined.”

Theo laughed at that. The sound was beautiful, and the evening light made him practically glow with warmth.

“I guess you don’t really need a four-year degree if you already know everything about what you’re doing with a business like that,” he said.

“I’ve been working there since I was in high school,” I told him. “I’m never going to be a millionaire, but Sam, Gilbert, and I have talked about expanding the business to another location. Gilbert, who is the most business-y of the three of us, has his eye on a property in Jenkintown. We’ve talked about shifting over toopen something there while Sam and our sister, Galadriel, who actually is getting a four-year degree in marketing at Temple, stay with the Glenside location.”

“Wait, Galadriel?” Theo asked, his smile growing. “Your sister is named Galadriel?”

“We’re all named after fictional characters,” I explained with a laugh. “Mom was a librarian. Galadriel is obviously Tolkien, and so is Sam, full name Samwise.”

“Your parents named one of their kids Samwise?” Theo laughed.

“Hey! Samwise was a good and noble character.”

“I’ll give you that,” Theo chuckled.

“And Diccon, of course, is fromThe Secret Garden,” I went on.