Page 26 of Soft Serve

Everything I have been holding back for a week finds the shape of this moment, and I let it, not recklessly, not without awareness of exactly where we are and who we are and what this means in the morning, but completely.

Restraint, I have learned this week, is not the same as control.

Control is understanding what you're choosing.

I am choosing this.

Her fingers curl into my shirt, and I pull her slightly closer, and the kiss deepens in the way of something that has been waiting long enough to know its own mind, and the lake is dark around us and the town glows warm in the distance, and for a moment there is nothing else.

Then voices.

Footsteps on the path, slow and familiar.

We break apart.

Not scrambling. Not guilty. Just separately, her hands releasing my shirt, my thumb brushing her jaw once before I drop my hand, both of us turning toward the sound with the composure of people who have had about four seconds to locate it.

Theo appears at the end of the dock.

Mrs. Calder beside him.

Theo looks at us with the expression of a man who has not just engineered this moment but is also not surprised by what he's found.

Mrs. Calder looks at us with the expression of a woman who has seen everything Hearts Bend has ever produced and is filing this away with professional satisfaction.

The silence lasts approximately three seconds.

"Lights need checking on the east side," Theo says, to no one in particular. "Thought you might want to know."

"Thank you, Theo," Paloma says. Her voice is perfectly even.

"Sure," he says. He glances at me, a look that contains an entire conversation, and then turns and walks back up the path with his hands in his pockets.

Mrs. Calder doesn't move immediately.

She looks at Paloma with the quality of attention that I'm learning means she's saying something without saying it.

Paloma looks back.

Something passes between them, quick and private, the language of people who have known each other long enough to communicate in the spaces between words.

Mrs. Calder nods once.

Then she turns and follows Theo back toward the fire.

The dock settles into quiet again.

Paloma exhales beside me, not shakily, just slowly, like she's letting something out that she's been holding.

"Well," she says.

She looks at the water for a moment, then at me, and what I find in her expression isn't regret or recalibration or the armor going back up. It's something quieter and more complicated, something that looks like a person standing at the edge of a decision they've already made and are only now catching up to.

"We should go back," she says.

"Yes," I say.

Neither of us moves for another moment.