Page 23 of Soft Serve

He's in front of me, not touching, not boxing me in deliberately, but the geometry of it has arrived without either of us engineering it, and there's nowhere to go that doesn't require one of us to make it obvious that we're choosing to move.

Neither of us moves.

His eyes drop to my mouth for a fraction of a second and then come back up, and I feel it move through me like something I swallowed, warm and immediate.

"The label," I say. My voice comes out steady, which is more than I deserve.

"What about it?" he says. His voice is lower than usual. Controlled, but only just.

"It's handwritten," I say. "Which means it's local. Which means I can probably find the source."

"Probably," he agrees. We're talking about jam. We are absolutely not talking about jam.

His hand rests on the counter beside me, not touching me, his fingers loosely curled, and I'm aware of it with a specificity that is becoming a problem. The inch of space between his hand and my hip feels charged in a way that makes it hard to remember what I was saying.

"I'd have to adjust the base," I say.

"Of course," he says.

"The smoke can't overpower. It needs to be underneath everything else. Present but not announced."

Something moves through his expression at that, warm and aware.

"I remember," he says quietly.

Suggest rather than announce.

The words from earlier in the week sit between us, and I watch him remember saying them, watch the recognition move through his eyes.

I should step back. I know I should step back. I'm building a very thorough and well-reasoned case for stepping back when the bell above the door announces Millie returning from her break, and she stops just inside the entrance, takes one look at the two of us, and says at full volume, "Oh, I can come back."

Charles straightens. I turn to the counter.

"Get your apron on," I tell her, without turning around, and I hear the grin in her silence as she moves past us to the back.

I busy myself with the prep surface, moving things that don't need moving, and I feel Charles step back into his own space beside me, the distance arriving between us like something neither of us requested.

"I'll track down the jam," I say.

"Let me know what you find," he says.

We work through the afternoon without referring to it, both of us fluent by now in the language of carrying something without naming it, and the hours pass with the quality of a day that is building toward something neither of us has agreed to yet.

The bonfire invitation arrives at half past four.

Millie delivers it.

"Town council thing tonight," she says, appearing between us with the innocent expression of someone who has definitely been planning this since morning. "Lake setup for the pre-holiday. Mrs. Calder says volunteers are needed." She looks at me. "You're going." She looks at Charles. "You should go."

"Millie," I say.

"It's a community event," she says, with spectacular shamelessness. "Very important for business relationships."

Charles makes a sound that is almost a laugh, quickly contained.

"I'll go if Paloma's going," he says.

"Paloma's going," Millie confirms, before I've said anything.