Page 50 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

He has never once watched me leave like that.

My foot is off the curb before I've voted on it. Because that's what you do, isn't it. You walk over there, you smile, you say introduce me, and he does, and there's a name and a story and it's all nothing, and tonight you laugh about how your stomach dropped over nothing.

Or he does the other thing.

He smiles that warm smooth smile and hands me words. And words are testimony, and testimony can be anything. True, false, rehearsed. You cannot tell from the outside. I stood in a kitchen in another town once and asked, and got an answer, and believed it for a year while everybody watched me believe it.

My foot comes back to the curb.

There it is. There's the old machinery, coming online with a clunk, and God help me, the relief of it. The method doesn't hurt. The method never hurts. Eyes gather, gut sorts, nothing bleeds.

Across the lot, James turns and goes into the Mug. June's voice carries out the propped door, something about pie before nine. He laughs. His regular laugh. Nothing under it.

I file that too.

Then I straighten my blazer, tell my hands to quit it, and walk to the town hall like a woman who saw nothing but a nice morning.

***

The council room smells like burnt coffee and floor wax. I'm laying out my printouts when the door opens behind me and I know his footsteps before I turn.

James. Packet under one arm, pie box balanced on top, glasses already sliding.

My stomach does one slow roll. I put out my hand before he's three steps in.

"Councilman Parker. Good morning."

"Miss Hawthorne." He shakes it, grinning, playing along like always. "Heard there's money on the agenda."

"There's money in the agenda. Page four."

"My favorite page." He sets the pie box in the middle of the table. "June sent this for the room. She says, and I quote, don't let Dobbs sit next to it."

He takes his seat. Squares his packet. Uncaps his pen and lays it parallel to the paper, the same fussy ritual as every meeting, and gives me a small private smile over the top of his glasses before he goes formal.

He didn't blink at the handshake. Of course he didn't. It's meeting mode. I invented meeting mode. He's watched me shake Millie's hand at a ribbon cutting.

Mayor Dobbs gavels us in. I present the engine numbers at nine sharp.

"You're a wonder, Rue Hawthorne," Dobbs says, beaming over the printout, one hand already drifting toward the pie box.

"I'm aware," I say, and everybody laughs, James loudest, and I smile at every last one of them and hear nothing anyone says for the next forty minutes.

***

He comes for dinner that night, same as every Wednesday.

He's early. He's always early. He brings a loaf of Mabel's sourdough because I mentioned once, months ago, that I liked it, and that man has never let go of a single thing I've mentioned once.

"They only had the one loaf left." He sets it on my counter like it's breakable. "I may have implied it was for a sick relative."

"You lied to a bakery."

"I misled a bakery. There's a legal distinction."

"Spoken like a lawyer."

"Spoken like a minister," he says. "Lawyers charge for it."