The first Tuesday without him was louder.
Not objectively.
The same number of truckers came through.
The same coffee pots hissed.
The same sad pop songs played on the tiny radio in the back.
But without Noah’s quiet presence in the corner, everything grated more.
The bell over the door jangled and her head whipped around every time, expectation a physical thing she had to tamp down.
By 2:10, it was clear he wasn’t going to break his self-imposed rule.
“Why do you look like your dog ran away?” Jenna asked, stacking glasses at the soda fountain.
“I don’t have a dog,” Rae said.
“Exactly,” Jenna said. “Metaphors, bitch. Keep up.”
“You can’t call me a bitch and then act like you’re deep,” Rae said.
Jenna grinned.
“Watch me,” she said.
Mace slid onto his usual stool, eyes tracking Rae’s line of sight.
“You lookin’ for someone?” he asked.
“No,” she said, a little too fast.
He glanced at the empty corner booth.
“Huh,” he said.
“What,” she snapped.
“Nothing,” he said. “Just… quiet over there, is all.”
She glared.
He held up his hands.
“Hey, I’m not sayin’ you two are eloping,” he said. “I just notice patterns. Truckers do that. Keeps us alive.”
“He’s not…” She exhaled. “He’s laying low.”
Mace’s brows rose.
“Oh?” he said. “That sounds… loaded.”
“Photo on the news,” she said shortly. “People saw him at a gas station. Paparazzi, or some bored kid. Now everyone’s looking harder.”
Mace whistled low.
“I saw that,” he said. “Didn’t realize it was… your Tuesday guy.”
Her shoulders hunched.
“Don’t call him that,” she muttered.
“What, you prefer ‘the millionaire who ghosted his own life’?” Mace said.
“Stop,” she said sharply.
He studied her.
“You in deep,” he said.
Her jaw clenched.
“No,” she said. “I’m just… concerned. For… liability reasons.”
He snorted.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what we’re callin’ it now.”
She slammed a mug down a little too hard.
It clinked.
“Drop it, Mace,” she said.
He shrugged.
“Okay,” he said. “But you know… if shit hits the fan… I got your back. Even if that means helpin’ you throw some rich boy under the bus.”
A reluctant smile tugged at her mouth.
“Good to know,” she said.
He wrapped his hands around his coffee.
“Seriously though,” he said. “You okay?”
She hesitated.
Then, quietly, “I… miss him. Is that… insane?”
Mace’s eyes softened.
“Lonely shifts get less lonely,” he said. “Then they get lonely again. That’s not insane. That’s human.”
She looked down.
“I hate it,” she admitted. “How much I… feel it. Him not being here. It’s like… the jukebox blew a speaker.”
“Maybe means it was playin’ somethin’ you liked more than you let on,” Mace said.
She thought of Noah’s voice. His hands. His words on paper.
Yeah.
Maybe.
She spent the rest of the shift busying herself with anything that wasn’t thinking about him.
She cleaned the condiment caddies like they were going to be graded.
She scrubbed the floor by hand, ignoring Bob’s protests that the mop was fine.
She snapped at Jenna over a dropped fork and immediately felt bad.
She left the diner at eight with her shoulders knotted and her head throbbing.
At home, she pulled out the college materials again.
The enrollment form stared at her, blank lines waiting.
Name. Address. Social.
Course number.
She wrote:
ENG 207 – Creative Writing Workshop – Tues 7–9:40 p.m.
Her hand shook.
She filled out the rest.
She didn’t let herself overthink it.
She shoved the form into an envelope before she could second-guess anything, scrawled the address, slapped a stamp on.
The postbox at the corner swallowed it with a hollow clunk.
Too late now.
A rush of adrenaline hit her on the walk back.
She’d done it.
Signed up for something that felt purely, selfishly hers.
It felt… good.
And scary.
And a little like cheating on the life she’d carefully constructed around obligation and endurance.
Her phone buzzed.
Unknown number again.
Or… not unknown, exactly.
NOT NOAH, the contact she’d named without thinking, flashed.
Her heart bounced.
She answered.
“Hi,” she said, breathless.
“Hi,” he said.
There was a quality to his voice she recognized now—booth-voice. The one he used when he was talking only to her, the rest of the world a low hum around them.
“You said you were gonna text,” she accused lightly. “This is not a text.”
“I upgraded,” he said. “Hope that’s okay.”
“It’s… fine,” she said.
“You sound… different,” he said. “Good different. Did something… happen?”
Annoying, that he could hear that through a phone line.
“I… mailed something,” she said.
“That sounds… ominous,” he said. “A letter bomb? Anthrax? Fan mail to my dad telling him to shove it?”
She laughed.
“Close,” she said. “I enrolled.”
Silence.
Then:
“In the class?” he asked, voice hopeful and disbelieving all at once.
“Yeah,” she said, a smile tugging at her lips. “Creative writing. Tuesdays. Starting… in a few weeks.”
He made a sound.
Half groan.
Half laugh.
All emotion.
“Rae,” he said. “That’s… huge.”
“Stop,” she said quickly. “Don’t make it… bigger than it is.”
“It *is* big,” he insisted. “You did something… for you. That’s… monumentally big.”
Her throat tightened.
“You gonna take credit?” she asked, trying to deflect.
“Absolutely,” he said promptly. “I’m putting it on my LinkedIn. ‘Successfully nagged one (1) brilliant waitress into pursuing her talent.’”
“Gross,” she said. “You don’t even have a LinkedIn anymore.”
“True,” he said. “My personal brand is ‘John Doe.’”
She lay back on her bed, spreading her arm across her eyes.
“Feels… weird,” she admitted. “Exciting and… like I’m cheating on my responsibilities.”
“Your responsibilities can survive Tuesday nights without you,” he said. “Bob will not spontaneously combust. The grill will not grow a conscience.”
“He might,” she said. “If Jenna’s in charge.”
“Then you’ll have an even better story to write,” he said.
She exhaled a laugh.
“Whatever you say, Coach,” she murmured.
He was quiet for a moment.
When he spoke again, his voice was softer.
“Thank you for telling me,” he said.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because…” He paused, searching. “Because you didn’t have to. You don’t… owe me that… window. Into… your life. It means… something.”
Her chest did that annoying ache thing again.
“I wanted to,” she said, before she could stop herself.
Silence hummed.
“That… means something too,” he said.
She swallowed.
“How’s… nowhere?” she asked, needing to shift.
“Lonely,” he said. “Weirdly noisy. The motel last night had a couple fighting in the next room about laundry. I now know more about their sex life than about my own.”
She snorted.
“Gross,” she said.
“Tell me about it,” he said. “You ever try to sleep through shouted accusations about sock-folding technique?”
“Every Thanksgiving,” she said. “My aunt and uncle nearly divorced over a fitted sheet.”
He laughed, fuller this time.
She drank it in.
They stayed on the phone longer than made sense.
She told him about Nia, about the fake ficus, about the way her hands had stopped shaking once she’d actually filled out the line with the course number.
He told her about a small town he’d stopped in where the diner’s coffee was objectively terrible but the waitress had given him extra fries because she’d liked his “sad eyes.”
“I’m being out-charmed by other waitresses now?” Rae said. “Rude.”
“No one out-charms you,” he said. “She was nice. She didn’t make me feel like an idiot for not leaving a phone number.”
“You left me yours,” she reminded him. “That’s worth at least three orders of fries.”
He went quiet.
“Yeah,” he said, softer. “I did.”
Eventually, their conversation wandered into lighter territory—bad TV, Kelsey’s latest date disaster, the way Mace hated any song that came out after 1998.
When they finally hung up, Rae lay there in the semi-dark, phone pressed to her chest again.
Her life had split into strange, overlapping tracks.
Diner.
Class.
Him.
They ran parallel now.
For the first time, she could see the faint outline of a future that wasn’t just… more of the same.
It terrified her.
It thrilled her.
She had no idea how long any of it would last.
But for once, the not-knowing felt less like a void and more like blank pages waiting.
And she’d just signed up to learn how to write on them.
***