I want to tell him.

I don’t know why.

I do know why. It’s because whenever I’m in his arms, I feel like nothing could ever happen to me again. I feel like I could pick up a camera and go about my life and it wouldn’t be attracting a disaster.

Never mind that he is a disaster—for Medium Roast, anyway. But his face is open and kind, and for God’s sake, he’s gone back to stirring the pan of spaghetti sauce right now. All because I said I was hungry.

I’m fucking starving. For the spaghetti...and for him.

“I went to school for photography.” I start there because I don’t know where else to start. It’s all so hazy. If I go too far back, it’ll take all night, so I can’t start with the time I picked up my dad’s old film camera from his office and loved the weight of it in my hands. Or the four years I spent in photography club. The award I won for the portrait of Honey. Honey, the wild adventuress who’s off in Europe somewhere at this very moment.

Dash nods. “You said something about that at the sandwich place.”

“I didn’t say much.”

“No.” He frowns at the spaghetti sauce.

“This is why.” I take another deep breath in. “My last semester at college I got an internship for one of the smaller papers. The pay was for shit, but I thought, I’ll get a few credits, I’ll get some experience. Work my way up.” 

“That’s a good plan,” says Dash.

“It was a great plan.” I loved working for that little paper. I got a summer at that paper before things fell apart. I don’t want to go back to that day, but it’s already happening in my mind. “Then I got this one assignment.”

My editor had called me into his office, which was a larger version of a regular corporate cube, and told me that he wanted an event covered. It was a local event, but anything with more than one person was a step up from what I’d been doing. I was so fucking excited. I didn’t care that he had coffee breath.

“What kind of assignment?”

“A festival they were holding in one of the neighborhoods. It had the dumbest name: Summer Slam Jam Fest. They had all kinds of local bands. They sucked.” Dash laughs. I can still feel the sun on my shoulders. I can still see the frozen daiquiri Sol had in a plastic cup, the ice melting away in the heat while I stood at the corner of the stage and tried to get the perfect shot of every band. I had frame after frame of the people in the crowd. “I was in the zone that day. I had so many good photos. One of them was going to end up on the front page. I knew it.”

Dash puts the spoon down again and turns the heat down to a simmer. “This doesn’t sound like—”

“It wasn’t until afterward,” I tell him. I can’t linger in this memory for much longer. It makes my heart beat fast. It makes my palms sweat. I hate it. I hate it. “We were walking back from the festival. The neighborhood was a little rough, but I was taking some last shots. The light…” The light had been incredible, that strange time between afternoon and evening, and everything looked like magic on the screen of my digital camera. “My boyfriend was walking next to me on the sidewalk. I had the camera up to my face to take a photo.” I mimic the motion with my hands. “That’s when the woman came out onto the street.” My breath comes out shallow like there’s not enough air in the room. It is not pleasant. “She was screaming for help.”

“Jesus,” Dash says under his breath.

“It all happened fast. Too fast. My body went on autopilot. I took another photo. That’s what we were supposed to do, you know? I wanted to do this as a career. I saw what happened on the viewfinder. Her boyfriend—it must have been her boyfriend, or her husband—ran out behind her.” I swallow the panic rising in my throat. “He shot her in the back.”

Dash steps up to me and puts his hands on the side of my face. “Tell me he didn’t hurt you,” he says, and his voice is rough, tense.

“I don’t know if he ever saw me.” I feel myself sink into his touch. “He ran away and left her on the sidewalk. My boyfriend ran in the opposite direction. I stayed. I called 9-1-1. I think someone else did too because it didn’t take very long for the ambulance to get there.”

“What a fucking coward,” Dash spits.

“Maybe he’s not,” I say, a knot in the pit of my gut releasing. “At least, he’s not more of a coward than me. I quit my job after that. I was going to be a big-time photojournalist and go where the real stories were. I thought I could handle it.”

“Ellie.” Dash moves his thumb over my cheek, and when he pulls it back, it’s wet with tears. My tears.

“I couldn’t handle it,” I say. “I finished up my degree, but I hated being in the city after that. Aunt Lisa and Uncle Fred asked me to come run the shop in the spring. I took the easy way out.”

“That’s not the easy way out. Jesus, Ellie, anybody would be shaken by that—”

“I threw all of it away.” I force the words out. “They paid for me to go to college, Dash. They bailed me out. My dad—god, this is so stupid. He quit his job to buy a farm and work on that, and it blew my college fund. I owe them so much. I only got to go because they wanted me to follow my stupid dream.” I wipe furiously at the tears on my cheeks. I don’t want to be crying over this. Not now. Not here. “I want to forget about all of it and go back. I miss taking photos. It’s the one thing I’m good at.”

“False,” Dash says, his face inches from mine. Hot damn, he is intoxicating, even in the midst of this emotional outburst. “There’s another thing.”

“What?”

“This.”

He leans in and kisses me. It’s long. It’s deep.

It doesn’t end there.