What Happened After

Chapter 23

Chapter 23.

          Classes started on Monday, and so did work.

          When I opened the doors of the sandwich shop, I was greeted with a huge, dramatic gasp, followed by Taryn swiftly breaking out into song.

          “Guess who’s back…back…back…back again…gain…gain…Rayn is back…back…back…tell a friend…”

          “Good to see you too, Taryn,” I laughed out loud. My friends were too much.

          “Moon of my life!” he screeched. “Sunshine of my love! House of my rising sun!”

          “What that last one necessary?”

          “I’ve been waiting weeks for you to get back—it sucks so hard working here with just the old man around.” He gestured toward the back, where Antoine’s office was. I knew for a fact, however, that Antoine was not in there. He never was. “How was vacation?”

          I sighed and put my bag down on the counter. “I would hardly call it vacation,” I said. “I just went to my house. Visited my parents, you know, the usual.”

          “That’s it? Damn, girl, you’re boring.”

          “It’s a burden on my family.”

          “Sure, I’ll bet.”

          I laughed again. “So what about you? What have you been up to?”

          “Not much,” he said, returning to the position he was in when I first walked in, perched atop the counter, not working. "I worked, a lot, since my only other employee left me for a million weeks. But no, we weren’t really that busy. I visited my family as well—we had a really good Christmas. You?”

          “Yeah, me too. Really good.”

          “Good.”

          Taryn and I got to work pretty soon after I arrived, baking bread and slicing it up. Since classes had just started again, we had a pretty steady flow of customers throughout the day, both professors and students. Anna came by to visit for a few minutes between her art classes, and we all expressed yet again how excited we were to be back together. The only person I was secretly hoping would walk through the door, however, was Ruesso, and even though I knew he was in another town, working on his own coursework, some part of me expected him to come see me, though we had just spent all day together the previous day.

          He didn’t come.

          When my shift ended at five, I packed up my bag and turned to head back to my dorm. “Wait a sec,” Taryn called from the cash register where he was totaling our sales for the day. “If you hang tight for like a minute and a half, I’ll give you a ride. It’s freezing out there.”

          “Okay, thanks.”

          Taryn smiled. “No problem.”

          He was right; it was freezing. I swore I could see my breath before we even got outside. “Jesus,” he said once we got to the car, unraveling his scarf from around his own neck and wrapping it around mine. “put this on so you can stay warm, we don’t need you dying of hypothermia while I’m sitting in the car nice and toasty warm.”

          “Thanks, Tare,” I smiled, gratefully.

          “Once again, no problem, Rayn. I have a zillion scarves. You can keep this one, it’s one of my uglier ones if I’m being honest.”