Page 24 of So This Is Love

I jokingly roll my eyes at him and he chuckles. Our waitress comes up to our table, setting down two glasses of water for us and handing us each a menu as well as a specials menu.

“Hi, I’m Charlotte, I’ll be taking care of you. Would you like anything else to drink? We have coffee, tea, fresh squeezed juice and mimosas.”

My stomach churns at the mention of more alcohol, my body barely recovered from last night’s drinking.

“Can I have some orange juice, please,” I say.

Charlotte nods and turns to Bryce for his response.

“I’ll have some orange juice as well and coffee, black.”

“Great, I'll go grab those and give you some time to look over the menu.”

We quietly look over our menus and place our order when Charlotte comes back with our drinks.

Bryce picks up his mug and I can’t help it when my face scrunches at the large sip of coffee he takes.

“What? You don’t like coffee?”

“No I do, I just like my coffee to not taste like coffee.”

“Oh so you want milk and sugar with a dash of coffee,” he says.

“Precisely, why would I ever want to drink that bitter bean juice straight.”

Bryce shakes his head, amused, and sets his mug down on the table.

Without the menu to occupy my hands I don’t know what to do with them, so I just fidget with them in my lap. We sit in quiet, not talking and not looking at each other until Bryce clears his throat and I look up meeting his gaze and when our eyes lock, we both burst out laughing. I laugh hard, at just how awkward things have started out, covering my face with my hands until the laughter subsides.

“Soooo,” Bryce says. “This is awkward huh.”

“You could say that.”

“I did all the work to get you here and then ain’t got shit to say.”

I giggle again. “Why don’t you tell me about you? We talked about me when we ran into each other but not about you.”

Bryce takes another sip of his coffee. “There’s not much to tell. I finished my tour and decided not to resign with my label. Well I guess I knew before it ended that I didn’t want to sign. So I’ve just been on my own taking a break and then realized there wasn’t anything keeping me in LA anymore, so I moved back home to Chicago.”

Our waitress, Charlotte, comes back to our table with our food, setting our plates down in front of us. She asks if there’s anything else she can get for us before leaving again. We pause our conversation to take our first bites of food. I do a small happy dance when I take my first bite because the food is delicious and I was hungrier than I thought.

“Does that little dance mean I did a good job picking the restaurant?”

I hadn’t realized he was watching me.

“Nah don’t get bashful now,” Bryce says.

“That seems like a whole lot of change for you,” I say, changing the subject back to what we were talking about before.

He shoots me a look that tells me he knows what I’m doing, but he goes along with me anyway.

“In some ways it has been, but everything has just felt right. Making music will always have my heart, but I lost myself for a while.”

I nod in understanding. “I get that.”

“What about you? If that awkward silence told us anything, we really don’t know each other,” Bryce says. “You work for a beauty company right?”

“Yeah, I’ve worked there since my senior year in college. It was just an internship then, but the owner and I became really good friends so I accepted the job when she offered it after I graduated.”

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