The Tortoise and His Sunrise | ✓

17. Old Friend

"Hey, is Nolan really that busy?" Ashley asked, craning her neck to catch the eye of our server. "It's been a while since I've seen him."

Cody's attention was too preoccupied with perusing the menu options for him to chime in and agree.

The diner, packed with students, was filled with loud chatter that melded together into a buzzing noise. I almost couldn't hear myself think, which was a good thing because I didn't want to think. I especially didn't want to think about the question that Ashley had just posed.

"Yeah, he couldn't come today," I said. "He's rushing an assignment that's due tomorrow."

While that was technically true, it wasn't the main reason he wasn't here with us right now. Nolan always managed to make time for anything he wanted to do. Since that day in the dining room, he had been avoiding going places with me where many people could see us.

All of a sudden, he was too busy to accompany me to get dinner or meet me after any classes I had that ended in the evening. It was fine for me to drop by his dorm room to study together, though.

It seemed like it had become unspoken between us that our days of acting like a couple in public were over.

We didn't sit down and have an actual talk about it. We hadn't kissed in two weeks, not even when we were alone. While he hadn't tried to initiate since, I had also been too fearful of rejection to kiss him myself. The last thing I wanted was for him to turn his face away or pull back, wrecking the pathetic semblance of whatever relationship we had left.

If we couldn't be a couple in public, and we couldn't be one in private, what were we anymore?

I didn't want to think about this.

"That sucks," Cody said, setting down his menu. "Maybe we should get dinner again next week. You know, find a date when he doesn't have anything on."

"Yeah," Ashley chirped, her eyes practically sparkling at that suggestion, "that's a great excuse for us to hang out again."

I snorted. "Since when did we need an excuse to hang out?"

"She has a point," Cody said to Ashley. "We could meet up every day if we wanted."

"Do we have the time to all meet up every day?"

A fresh surge of anxiety made my mind prickle, tugging my focus away from the conversation to my own internal thoughts.

What would happen when we graduated?

Could I introduce Nolan to any future friends I made with him still looking like a teenager? Did I have the guts to introduce him as my boyfriend? What would going on dates with him be like in a few more years? Would it be like what we were doing now—barely touching or looking each other in the eyes? Could those even be considered dates anymore?

It felt like, whether we verbalized it or not, we were over.

If you couldn't envision your future together, wasn't your relationship basically over?

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I was such a sucker for whipped cream on French toast drizzled with maple syrup and topped with strawberries. I didn't even care that it wasn't a 'dinner' meal. The tension in my body dissolved as I dug into the almost cloying sweetness of the dessert.

It made the awkward silence hanging over us almost bearable. Across the table from me, even Nolan even appeared a bit more relaxed as he watched me scarf down a strawberry.

We had just found this café while on a lazy evening stroll outside. I had just been in the mood for something sweet, and there weren't many people inside, so it was perfect that we'd stumbled across it.