He steered us to one of the long lunch-room style tables in the corner of the cafeteria where no one else was sitting. We were still in a room full of people, but the conversations elsewhere meant whatever words we exchanged would be indecipherable from the surrounding chatter.

Duane pulled a chair out for me and claimed the seat adjacent as I sat. Or, I tried to sit. I didn’t know quite how to sit. Sitting suddenly felt weird. I was super-conscious of my limbs.

Thankfully, Duane spoke before I could become too obsessed with the mechanics of sitting.

“I’ve been thinking.” He leaned his forearm along the table to his left, (my right) and trapped me with his focused gaze.

“What have you been thinking?” I missed the feel of his hand and wondered if it would be weird for me to reach out and take hold of his fingers.

“You’re leaving, just as soon as you can. And you estimate that at being, what? Two years?”

I felt a bit dismayed by his subject choice. I was hoping he’d want to talk about Saturday, give me an opening to apologize and explain in greater detail. I tried to figure out how to steer the conversation in that direction. I tried and failed.

Instead, I answered the question he’d asked with honesty. “More like either one and a half, or two and a half at this point, depending on how much money I can save.”

His eyes narrowed and he nodded, his hand coming to his chin as he stroked his beard thoughtfully. We sat that way—him studying me while stroking his beard, me watching him study me while he stroked his beard—for several seconds.

Abruptly he asked, “What would you say if I suggested we date for the next twelve months, but only for twelve months?”

Who? What? …Date?

It took me a bit to work through his words. I liked the date part, but the only twelve months part sounded fishy.

“I…um…why twelve months?”

My question seemed to relax him and his eyes appeared to lighten a bit. “Because that way we’ll be split up well before the time you need to go. It’s a good stretch of time, long enough to have a bit of fun, get to know each other, but not so long that you have to be concerned about a lasting attachment.”

My heart was doing strange things in my chest, but not anything I might have predicted. It sank, like a stone. If I caught his meaning, and I was fairly certain I did, he wanted me to be his fuckbuddy for the next year. I’d gone from the girl he wanted to court to the girl he wanted to see on the side, one he likely no longer respected.

I shifted in my seat, not because my body was uncomfortable but because my brain was uncomfortable.

And my discomfort didn’t make sense because this is what I’d wanted…right?

No. This isn’t what you wanted, a voice answered in my head, clear as a bell.

Sometimes I truly didn’t understand myself.

“So…we’d…” I licked my lips to stall answering. When I found my voice it was croaky and I felt the beginning of frustrated tears sting my eyes. “We’d what? Hook up a few times a month?”

He shook his head, leaned a bit closer, and I was struck by how severe his expression seemed, almost like he was angry, but not quite.

“No. That’s not what I want. You would have to go all in. We would go out to dinner, see movies, call each other, text. I’d work on your car—you know, the Mustang you left at my house earlier this week—install gadgets you don’t need ’cause you’re my girl. You might come to the Winston place and hang out with us boys. This would be both of us, all in for all twelve months—or less if we find we don’t suit.”

My heart reversed positions halfway through his clarification of my misassumption and hurdled itself skyward. In fact, my entire body felt lighter, almost like I was floating.

“So, you still want to court me?”

“Yes.” He nodded.

“For twelve months?”

“Yep.”

I didn’t try to hide my smile. “And we’d be a couple, a real couple?”

A touch of softness entered his expression and his eyes drifted over my face, as though cataloging it. “Yeah, with presents on birthdays, and celebrating Valentine’s Day, and watching chick flicks, and all that other crap.”

I gathered a deep breath, my lungs filling with both air and excitement. But then a thought occurred to me. “Wait, what if, after the twelve months, one or both of us wanted to continue? Does this thing, this agreement have an option for an extension?”

At once the softness vanished, and again the lines of his face turned severe. He leaned away, just a few inches, but the distance felt much greater. I perceived a cold kind of resolve behind his eyes.

“No. Absolutely not. The term is for a year. After that year is up, and as long as you’re in Green Valley, our relationship would be over.”

“But, what if I’m in town for two and a half years? What if—”

“No. Twelve months. That’s it. Take it or leave it.” His tone was unyielding. As though to drive home the fact that he wasn’t willing to bend on this point, he set his jaw and glowered at me. His glower reminded me of the Duane Winston I used to know, the kid who used to pick apart my arguments and challenge me to think about perspectives other than my own. That Duane had been irritating. That Duane had also been right nine times out of ten.

I felt a spasm of some sort in my chest, like a spike or surge of panic, making breathing a bit more difficult. Absentmindedly, I pressed a palm to the center of my ribcage as I studied him and his stony features.

I opened my mouth, determined to try one more time, because his granite resolve on the issue didn’t make much sense, but he cut me off before I could speak.

“And, if we do this, you’re not to bring up the possibility of an extension again. You don’t even ask about it. It’s just understood. One year from today we’d be over and done and that’s it.”

I studied him for a long stretch, saw he was completely serious, and seeing this made me feel out of sorts.

Therefore I asked the first question my panicked heart wanted to know. “Would I still see you?”

He shrugged. “You’d see me around I guess. This isn’t a big town.”

“Would we still be friends?”

“I don’t know.”

“Would you talk to me? If you saw me after? Or would you ignore me?”

“I’d be polite.”

“But not more than polite?”

“I don’t rightly know, Jess,” he whispered, and his whisper sounded a bit sad.

Meanwhile, my voice lifted as I challenged, “Well, you need to know, Duane. Because I don’t think I could just date you for a year and then turn my feelings off.”

“But you could leave me for Timbuktu and that would be no problem?”

I huffed, my defensive hackles rising. “I don’t like being made to feel guilty for having dreams and goals. I already get enough sass about this from my family.”

I saw his chest rise and fall with an impressively large and silent breath. His eyes moved between mine for a few seconds before he glanced to his right, shaking his head.

“This. Right here. This is the reason for the twelve-month limit.” When he brought his gaze back to mine it was clear and sober, determined. “If we limit things to the twelve months, then we both know what’s up. We avoid having this conversation ever again—because you leaving doesn’t make any difference. We’ll already be done. You can go and not feel like you’ve left anything behind.”

I considered him, his words, for nearly a full minute, seeing the sincerity painted all over his features.

“You’ve given this some thought.” This came out sounding like an accusation and I didn’t know why.

“Yeah, I have.”

I felt…irritable. But then I realized his proposed plan meant he’d been thinking about me over the last week. He’d been thinking about us and what to do. And that realization made me feel gooey and sentimental.

Therefore, inspired and touched by his consideration of the matter, I blurted before thinking about what I was going to say, “What if we—” then stopped when I realized I was about to say, What if we just do this for real, no time constraints, and I put my travel plans on hold indefinitely?

And that was the moment I realized how much I liked—really liked—Duane Winston. I mean, I knew I liked him before. But my reflexive panic at the thought of a time limit with him, one set in stone, made me feel trapped by my dreams of world travel.

Oh, my dear friend, Irony. How I have not missed you…

I licked my lips then chewed on the bottom one, again as a way to stall speaking my thoughts. My daddy liked to say You can’t have fried pie and not get fat. It was a distorted and much cruder version of the popular You can’t have your cake and eat it too, but the sentiment was the same.

“What if we…?” he prompted when I took a bit too long to continue.

Looking at him, knowing he was serious about this time limit business, I decided to take a different approach: negotiation.

“What if we did a trial period first? Before the twelve months started?”

His eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Why would we do that?”

I had no choice but to wing it, make stuff up. “Because…because it would…be weird and…depressing to pick a year from today, November fourteenth, as the day things end. Right before Thanksgiving and Christmas? No. We should do a six-week trial period and start the twelve month countdown on January first.”