Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
October had decided to stop being subtle about its intentions. Freddie's breath came in visible puffs. He wore the heavier gloves now, the ones he'd bought in September in the optimistic belief that he was being prepared rather than premature. He had not been premature.
The cart did its morning work around him.
He was present for it; made the coffees, managed the transactions, said the appropriate things to the appropriate people.
But a portion of his attention was elsewhere, had been elsewhere since he'd woken at five-fifteen with the clarity of a man who had made a decision in his sleep and was now required to live with it in his waking life.
He was going to tell her.
Not this morning. Not like this, over the counter, in the middle of the breakfast rush with Mrs. Finch's americano steaming between them and Dot watching from the bench across the way.
But before the market. Before the weekend of the market.
He was going to say the words in his own voice with his own name attached to them, and whatever happened after that would happen.
He had made this decision before. He had made it approximately nine times, in various forms, with various degrees of commitment, and on each occasion the execution had failed to materialize.
He was aware that deciding to do something was not the same as doing it, that he had a specific and well-documented failure mode in exactly this territory, and that the awareness of the failure mode was not, historically, sufficient to prevent it.
But the kissing had changed things. The kissing had moved the deception from abstract to actual.
It had given the unspoken thing a body, a weight, a specificity it had not had when he was just a man who wrote letters to a woman who didn't know they were from him.
Now he was a man who had held her in his arms in the amber lamplight of her own shop, and he wanted more. He wanted everything.
Freddie opened the notebook to a fresh page and began to write.
Wren—
He crossed it out. Not the name. The dash—the casual punctuation of it, as though this were a note rather than a reckoning.
Dear Wren,
Yes, the comma was better. Dashes usually meant an interruption. Commas meant more was coming.
Freddie wrote three more sentences. He read them back. They were good sentences; honest, specific, the kind of sentences that said the thing they meant without decoration.
And they were wrong.
They were wrong in the way that all the letters had been, in some fundamental sense, wrong: they were paper. They were him on the safe side of language, building something beautiful that kept the real distance intact.
He crossed out the three sentences. He turned to a new page.
There is something I should have told you.
He crossed this out, too.
I have been writing to you since September. I am the one who...
He stopped. Read it. Crossed it out.
The cart's steam wand needed bleeding. He put the pen down and dealt with this, which took four minutes and required no part of his brain that was currently occupied with confessions.
He came back to the notebook and looked at the three failed attempts and accepted that the problem was not the sentences.
The problem was that no sentence, however accurate, was going to do the thing required, because the thing required his voice and his face and no barrier between them.
He turned to a fourth page. He wrote one line. He did not cross it out.
Tell her in person. Before the market. No more paper.
He closed the notebook.
Oliver arrived before noon, his jacket carrying the cold of the ride from his practice. He ordered his usual and leaned against the cart counter with the ease of a man who had enough history with this cart to treat it as a familiar surface.
Freddie made the coffee.
Oliver didn't say anything immediately. He watched the street for a moment, the mid-morning movement of it: the mom group, the hardware store contingent, an elderly couple navigating the cobblestones while gazing into each other's eyes.
Oliver watched with the mild, unhurried attention of a man who liked people and was in no particular rush to do anything with this fact.
Then, without looking at Freddie, he said, "She likes you."
Freddie set the portafilter back into the machine with slightly more precision than necessary.
Oliver waited, the way Oliver waited: entirely comfortable, no time pressure, apparently prepared to stand at this counter until the information arrived or the coffee went cold.
"Like, a lot," he added, in the same conversational tone a person might note the weather or the price of milk.
Freddie looked at his machine.
"Seven weeks," Oliver said, "you've looked like a man standing on a very high ledge."
It was actually eight weeks, but Freddie did not correct him.
Oliver wrapped both hands around the cup. "I'm mentioning it because I spent yesterday evening at a farm watching a horse make decisions, and even that horse had better timing than you."
Freddie looked at him. Oliver was not looking back. He was examining the chalkboard menu with the expression of a man who found it interesting, though he had never in the history of their acquaintance ordered anything other than his regular order. Except that one time he'd added cinnamon.
"She hasn't taken her eyes off you," Oliver said, still looking at the board, "since I walked out of the shop."
The information arrived before the understanding.
Freddie looked up. He could not have said it was a decision, more a reflex.
Through the glass of the bookshop window, across the twelve feet of cobblestones, Wren was standing at the front display with a book in her hand, and she was looking directly at him.
Not the quick social glance. Not the administrative check of a woman seeing whether her eleven o'clock coffee was incoming. Bea had already ordered it and brought it in for her. This look was the other kind.
Freddie had stood behind his counter for seven weeks and been the one looking. He was not practiced at being looked at from that direction.
She smiled.
It was not the public smile, not the warm professional warmth she gave the whole street. It was the specific one, the one that had its own quality, briefer and quieter and aimed directly at him. The one he had been thinking about since approximately four-fifteen in the morning.
Freddie smiled back.
He could not have prevented the smile. It arrived without consultation, some involuntary expression of a thing that didn't have any other outlet available to it. It was genuine and uncontrolled and probably visible from a considerable distance.
Wren looked down at her book. He could see, even from twelve feet away through glass, that the smile had not entirely left her face.
Oliver made a sound beside him that was somewhere between satisfaction and amusement. He set his cup down on the counter and reached for his wallet. Oliver paid—exact change, as always, which Freddie had long suspected was a deliberate courtesy—and pocketed his wallet.
"That was two people who had been looking at each other for weeks finally doing it at the same time." He picked up his cup. "Remarkable that it's taken this long, frankly."
Freddie looked at the space where Oliver had been looking at the menu. He was aware of his own heartbeat in a way that was inconvenient and accurate.
"Tell her you feel the same way," Oliver said.
Simply. No drama. In the voice of a man stating something that was true and did not require elaboration.
Freddie said nothing.
Oliver looked back with the expression of a man who had said what he came to say and was at peace with this.
Then he clapped him once on the shoulder—the same gesture, Freddie thought, that he had deployed outside the Rusty Spur that night, the one that meant I see you, I'm not going to make you say it—and turned to go.
He walked off down the main street toward his practice, his jacket dark against the bright morning, and was gone around the corner.
Freddie stood at the cart.
The notebook was under the counter, its fourth page carrying the one line he hadn't crossed out.
The steam wand was clean. The next customer would arrive in approximately three minutes, based on the pattern of the morning, and he would make their coffee and manage the transaction and continue conducting the business of being a functional person in the world.
He looked at the bookshop window.
Wren had moved further into the shop. He could see her at the counter now, saying something to Bea, her hands doing the thing they did when she was explaining something she found interesting.
She was not looking at him. She was just—there.
In the amber warmth of Pages & Prose, being entirely and specifically herself.
He had held her in that warmth last night, and she had smiled at him through glass just now with the smile that had been only aimed at him.
Tell her in person. Before the market. No more paper.
He had written this to himself. He had meant it. He meant it still.
He was going to tell her before the market.
This was decided—not in the tentative, conditional way of his previous decisions, not I will tell her when the situation is clearer or I will tell her once I understand how to say it or any of the other versions he had offered himself as substitutes for action.
This was a decision of the non-negotiable kind, the kind he had made in other circumstances when not making it was no longer acceptable.
Before the market.
The next customer came right on time. Freddie made the coffee. He did not write anything in the notebook for the rest of the morning. The one line was sufficient. He had only to find his voice.