Cara #2
He didn’t answer right away. It wasn’t the pause of someone scrambling for a polite lie—it was the kind where someone was taking the question seriously enough to choose the right words. I waited, my thumb still resting against the spine of the book.
“I thought the guy waited too long,” he said finally. “To say anything.” He held my gaze, calm and direct. “He had eight years to write her a letter. Eight years. And he waited until the last possible second.”
The sentence landed somewhere between my ribs and my throat. “Wentworth,” I said, and my voice came out quieter than I’d meant it to.
“Yeah. Idiot.”
I set the book down on the counter between us—not in any of the sorted stacks, just there, in the space between us—and cleared my throat.
“That book is partly why I named my cats what I did,” I said, because I needed to say something, and that was the first thing that came to mind that didn’t require me to look directly at what had just happened.
One of his eyebrows lifted. “Your cats.”
“I have three. All named after Austen heroes.” I picked up another book from the box and set it in the hardcover stack, giving my hands something to do. “Darcy, Knightley, and Wentworth.”
He made a sound that was almost a laugh—quiet, just an exhale—and shook his head slightly. “Which one’s your favorite?”
“I love them all equally,” I said, with great dignity.
He looked at me then—steady, patient, already not believing it—and held my gaze until I felt the composure start to go.
I held out for approximately four seconds before I sighed.
“Okay. Wentworth is my baby. Darcy and Knightley have very serious inner lives. Very important places to be. Very little time for me unless food is involved.” I set down another book.
“Wentworth still lets me hold him like when he was a kitten. Purrs the second I pick him up.” I smoothed the cover of the next book unnecessarily.
“Not my favorite. Just my baby, he needs me the most. Those are different categories of love.”
“Sure,” he said, in a tone that suggested he didn’t believe me and was choosing to be charitable about it.
I pointed at him. “You’re doing that thing.”
“What thing?” His expression was perfectly neutral, which was somehow worse.
“You used to do it all the time. Where you agree with everything I say in a way that makes it clear you don’t believe a word of it.
” I set the book down with more purpose than it required.
His mouth curved into something warmer then, softer at the edges, and it landed on me before I’d had time to brace for it.
“I’d like to meet them,” he said. “I love cats.”
My stomach did something I chose not to examine. “Fair warning,” I said, keeping my voice even. “Darcy and Knightley will ignore you for the first twenty minutes and then act as if you’ve always lived there. Wentworth will decide within thirty seconds whether you’re allowed to exist.”
“I can handle judgment.”
“He’s very thorough about it.” I looked back down at the box. “So are the other two, eventually. They’re just more subtle about it.”
“So are you,” he said, quiet enough that I almost missed it.
I looked up. He was already reaching for the next stack of books, his expression easy, like he hadn’t said anything worth commenting on. I watched him go and turned back to the box and told myself very firmly to keep moving.
The copy of Persuasion stayed on the counter between us.
We got through most of the second box without talking much after that, and it was a comfortable not-talking—the kind I wasn’t used to. With most people, silence was a gap I felt obligated to fill. With Jasper, it was just the space between one thing and the next, easy to exist inside.
I worked my way to the bottom of the box and frowned at what was left.
The backlist hardcovers I’d ordered, the pretty ones, needed to go on the top shelf of the fiction wall, which meant clearing space up there first, which meant the step stool.
I wiped my palms on my jeans and went to get it from the back room.
“What are you doing?” Jasper asked when I came back, dragging it.
“Making space on the top shelf.”
He straightened from the display he’d been arranging. “I can do that.”
“Nope.” I positioned the stool and tested it with one foot. “I got it.”
“It’s a tall shelf.”
I stepped up onto the first rung and reached for the crowded top row. “I’ve done this roughly eight hundred times. I’m fine.”
He didn’t argue. He just came and stood at the base of the stool, one hand resting loose on the metal frame, present and not making anything of it. I chose not to comment and reached for the first book.
The top shelf was crowded with things I’d been meaning to rotate for months—a hardcover biography nobody had touched in a year, a coffee table book about lighthouses I’d genuinely forgotten I owned, a battered copy of something I’d been holding for a customer who’d never come back.
I started passing them down one at a time.
“Shelf under the register,” I said. “We’ll sort them later. ”
He took each one as I handed it down, carrying them over without comment, returning each time with that same unhurried ease. The third or fourth exchange, my fingers brushed his on the spine of a book—brief, barely anything—and I lost my focus for exactly half a second.
That was all it took.
My weight shifted wrong. My foot slid on the edge of the step, and my stomach dropped, and my hand shot out for the shelf, and I knew that I was not going to catch myself in time.
Jasper’s hands were at my waist before I’d finished the thought, firm and certain, his palms warm through my shirt. He lowered me the last foot to the floor, and the world stopped.
Neither of us moved.
His hands were still at my waist. I could feel the warmth of each palm through the fabric of my shirt, every finger distinct and deliberate, and I was looking up at him from a distance that wasn’t very much distance at all—close enough to see the small change in his expression, close enough that the details of his face were suddenly very precise and my thoughts were not precise at all.
They had scattered completely. My heart was slamming in a way I was fairly certain he could feel through his palms.
My hands were on the front of his shirt. I didn’t know when that had happened. Just lightly, just enough, my fingers curled into the fabric without any instruction from me, and I didn’t move them because moving them would require a level of functioning I didn’t currently have access to.
He was looking down at me with an expression that was careful and contemplative, with something underneath that pulled at something deep in my chest, and the room was absolutely silent, and I was aware of him in a way that went past physical awareness into something more like gravity—like the simple fact of him being this close was rearranging something in me that I wasn’t going to be able to put back the way it had been.
His hands were warm. And steady. And he still held me with that quiet certainty he brought to everything, his grip careful and sure, and I was looking up at him, my breath had gone shallow and uneven, and the distance between us was very small and getting harder to think around.
He let go slowly. One hand, then the other, trailing the barest second of contact before they dropped away, and the absence of them registered immediately and completely.
“Careful,” he said. Voice low and rumbly.
“I had it,” I said, because I needed to say something, and that was what came out. My hands were no longer on his shirt. I still couldn’t account for when I’d let go.
“You didn’t.” Easy. Not a judgment, just a fact, delivered from a distance that was still not far enough away from me for me to think clearly.
“I would have caught myself.” I smoothed the front of my shirt, looked at the shelf, and tried to locate the part of my brain that normally ran things.
“Probably not.”
“Probably not is different from definitely not.”
He looked at me for a moment with something at the corner of his mouth that wasn’t quite a smile, and I looked back at him, and something between us had morphed into something I didn’t have a name for yet, but I could feel the edges of with absolute clarity.
A small, dry smile. “Sure.”
My face was on fire. I knew it was on fire. I could feel the heat climbing up my neck, and there was nothing I could do about it except continue facing the shelf with great professional interest. “Thank you,” I said to a copy of Middlemarch that had nothing to do with any of this.
“Anytime,” he said, behind me. The way he said it made me very glad I wasn’t looking at him.
I called a tea break ten minutes later on the grounds that I needed one—which was true—and that he probably needed one too, which was debatable. I filled the small electric kettle in the back and pulled two mugs off the shelf.
“Any preference?” I asked, opening the cabinet.
“Whatever you’re having.” He leaned against the doorframe of the back room, arms loosely crossed.
“Oolong,” I said, reaching for the tin I kept behind everything else. “I hide it so customers don’t ask. It needs a very specific steeping time, and most people lose interest halfway through.”
“I’ll manage,” he said.
I smiled at the cabinet and reached for the tin.
I made us both a strong cup with a little honey and handed his over without ceremony.
No negotiation, no complaint about preferring coffee—he just took it, said thank you, and drank it like he’d meant to have tea all along. I found this unreasonably pleasing.
We ended up on the two stools behind the counter, angled toward each other, the shop quiet around us in the mid-morning lull. The light through the front window had gone gold and warm, falling across the display table and the books still waiting to be shelved.