Page 36 of Soft Serve

I feel Charles move to stand nearby.

I glance at him.

He holds out his phone, screen facing me, with an address already pulled up. A small producer, forty minutes outside Hearts Bend, specializing in small-batch smoked preserves.

He found it himself.

He's not interrupting the call. Not inserting himself. Just offering the information quietly, in the space I have to receive it, and waiting to see if it's useful.

I take the phone.

I finish the call with the supplier, read the address, and end both conversations with what I need.

I hand his phone back.

"Thank you," I say.

"I had time this morning," he says, and leaves it there, no elaboration, no look that asks me to notice what he did, just a man who found something useful and passed it over.

That's the second thing.

We move through the afternoon rush side by side, and the ease of it is back, not fully, not without the awareness of this morning sitting in the space between us, but present enough that I can feel what it was before and what it could be again.

The side door happens the way it always does.

Not planned.

Just during a lull in the mid-afternoon, I need air, and that's the nearest exit, and I push through it into the narrow strip of shade, and thirty seconds later I hear it open again behind me.

I don't turn around.

He comes to stand beside me, not close, leaving space, and we both look at the wall across the alley the way we have before, like it's a neutral surface we can speak toward without the full exposure of facing each other.

"I've been thinking about what you said," he says.

"Which part?" I say.

"The part about saying something private in a public place," he says. "Before I said it privately."

I wait.

"I've been trying to work out why I did it," he continues, and his voice has the careful quality of someone who has genuinely been working something out rather than constructing an argument. "And the honest answer is that I wasn't thinking about the statement as a statement. I was thinking about you. About what it felt like to drive to the shop that morning, knowing you hadn't heard it from me first and wanting to, I don't know... Stake something. Say something real in a place full of managed language."

He pauses.

"That's not an excuse," he says. "It's just the truth of what happened inside me. And the truth of what happened outside me is that I said something that belonged to you before it belonged to anyone else, and I knew your rules, and I did it anyway because I was feeling something I didn't know how to contain."

The alley holds the quiet between us.

I think about a man standing at a side door at six in the morning and then walking away without knocking.

I think about a phone screen held out during a supplier call.

I think about a little boy talking about whatever mattered to him and a man crouching down to listen like it was the most important briefing of his day.

I think about the dock, and his thumb moving across my knuckles, and the way he said my name before he kissed me like he needed to say it first.

I turn to face him.