Page 22 of Soft Serve

"Paloma," she says.

"Go do something."

"I'm doing something," she says. "I'm making sure my best friend doesn't talk herself out of something good because she's decided in advance that it's dangerous."

God, I hate how well she knows me, how easy she reads me.

"It is dangerous," I say quietly.

"Probably," Millie agrees, without a trace of argument. "Most good things are."

She pats my arm once and moves to the register, and I stand there with my finished strawberry base and the feeling of being known too well by someone who loves me too much to pretend otherwise.

The morning rushes, and I don't have time to think about systems or furniture or the quiet way certain people reorganize the air around them. There are orders and temperatures and a supplier call that takes fifteen minutes I don't have, and Charles works through all of it beside me with the steady competence he's developed over the last week, no longer tentative, no longer over-careful, just present and useful and infuriatingly easy to work alongside.

That's the part I didn't anticipate.

Not the attraction, which I have been managing with varying degrees of success. The ease. The comfortable rhythm of working next to someone who pays attention, who anticipates without overreaching, who asks before assuming. I have been running this kitchen alone for two years, and I didn't know until this week that it had an empty register I'd stopped hearing.

I don't examine that. I'm not examining that.

Just before noon, during a lull that Rosie and Millie have conspired to manufacture by handling every customer with suspicious efficiency, Charles comes to stand beside me at the prep counter with his phone in his hand.

"Can I show you something?" he asks.

I glance at the phone. "What is it?"

"I saw it this morning," he says. "Before I came in. I thought of you immediately."

The simplicity of that, I thought of you, said without decoration or awareness of how it lands, does something brief and inconvenient to my pulse.

I look at the phone.

It's a photograph he's taken of something in a shop window somewhere on the main street, a small jar of preserves, deep amber, with a handwritten label that reads smoked fig and black cardamom.

"For a flavor," he says. "The smokiness you were working with earlier this week, but deeper. More complex. I don't know if it translates, but the combination seemed like something you'd want to pull apart."

I look at the photograph for a moment. Then I look at him.

He's watching me with the careful attention he brings to everything, waiting for a reaction, and there's something underneath it that isn't quite uncertainty but is adjacent to it, like a man who has done something that felt right and is only now considering whether it was presumptuous.

"Smoked fig," I say slowly.

"And cardamom," he says. "The black variety is more intense than green. More resinous."

"I know what black cardamom is," I say.

"I know you do," he says. "I just wanted to show you."

I wanted to show you.

Not I thought this might be useful for the campaign. Not this could be an interesting brand angle. Just a man who saw something in a shop window in the early morning and took a photograph because it made him think of me.

I take the phone from him to look more closely, and he leans in to see what I'm seeing, and that's how it happens, the way these things always happen, through a completely ordinary sequence of movements that becomes something else before either of us has made a decision.

His shoulder is against mine. His head is angled toward the phone in my hand. When I turn slightly to say something about the label, his face is right there, closer than I registered, close enough that I stop speaking before I've started.

The counter is at my back.