Cara
Eventually, the last paperback was in its pile, and I sat there for a moment looking at the sorted rows spread across the floor around me.
Done. I pressed my palms flat against the hardwood and pushed myself up, gathering the stacks into my arms in stages and carrying them to the counter.
Jasper unfolded himself from the arm of the chair without being asked, crossing the shop to take the last two piles from me before I had to make a second trip.
Our fingers didn’t quite touch in the handoff, but it was close enough that I was aware of it, and I turned back to the counter and started organizing the stacks by genre without commenting on that at all.
He settled against the end of the nearest bookshelf, arms loosely crossed, watching me work through the last of it. I slid behind the counter and braced my hands against the wood and looked up at him, and for a long second, neither of us moved.
He leaned against the end of the bookshelf, arms loosely crossed.
I was still standing behind the counter with my hands braced on the wood, my face hot, my heart doing something complicated against my ribs.
The shop was quiet around us. A car passed on the street outside.
Somewhere in the back of the building, the old radiator ticked once and went still.
I wanted to say something brave. Something clever. Something that would put us back on equal footing, or at least pretend to. I wanted to flirt with him and see what happened if I finally let myself go.
I opened my mouth to speak, then shut it as Eric walked in.
The warmth the morning had built drained out of me so fast it was almost physical.
Not him. Not right now. Not in this shop, in this moment, with Jasper three feet behind me and the last hour still sitting soft and unfinished between us.
I felt my shoulders go up before I’d made any conscious decision about my face, and I made them go back down, and I put the smile on—the professional one, the one I’d been putting on since I was old enough to work the register for my grandfather.
“Hey,” Eric said, looking around with the ease of a man who had never once in his life felt unwelcome anywhere. “Thought I’d actually buy something this time.”
“Sure,” I said. “I can ring you up.”
I stepped back behind the counter, and the counter helped, and I was aware in a way I was grateful for, of Jasper somewhere behind me, still and quiet near the shelf.
I hadn’t looked at him. I didn’t need to.
Just knowing he was there settled something in me, outweighing Eric’s presence, like two forces operating on opposite ends of the same room.
Eric grabbed a book off the table near the register—some thriller I didn’t particularly love but kept in stock because it sold—and set it on the counter and looked past me at Jasper. “Didn’t realize you had help today.”
“Jasper offered to help me move some boxes.” I kept my voice even, my hands moving through the transaction, not looking up.
“Generous of him.” The word landed with just enough weight that it pricked at my senses.
Jasper, behind me, didn’t say anything. But I could feel him there. Not tense. Just settled into a readiness that I recognized now, the Marine in him coming to the surface.
Eric’s eyes came back to me, and he dropped his voice just enough that it was technically private. “I thought you said you weren’t looking to date anyone right now.”
There it was. I’d been waiting for it without knowing I’d been waiting for it, some part of me having clocked the second he walked in and started doing the math.
The smile on my face was doing a lot of work.
Underneath it, my jaw was tight, and my patience was pulling thin in a way I was not going to let him see, because he would note it and file it away and use it the next time, and there was always a next time with Eric.
I kept my hands on the register and looked right at him. “I’m not,” I said. “He’s helping me unload a shipment. Like I said.”
“Right. Sure.” A pause just long enough to be pointed. “That’s exactly what it looks like.”
“That’s what it is.”
My hands were steady on the keys. My smile was still in place.
Inside, I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with the morning’s work.
It was the exhaustion of being managed by someone who was very good at making you feel like the problem was your perception, not their behavior.
Eric had been doing this since high school; I saw it clearly now.
He held my eyes longer than was comfortable, then dropped his card on the counter.
I ran it. The transaction took somewhere between ten seconds and a full geological era.
I handed him his receipt and his book, and I smiled the smile I used for difficult customers, and he took the bag and started for the door.
At the threshold, he paused. Turned back. “See you around, Cara.”
“Bye, Eric.”
The door swung shut as he left. I stood behind the counter and said nothing for a moment, looked at nothing, as I tried to relax and figure out what to say.
Then I heard Jasper move away from the shelf. He came to stand at the end of the counter, not close enough to crowd me. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. He just waited, quiet and steady, until I was ready to pick up where we’d left off.
I let out a slow breath and pressed my fingertips against the counter. “I really did tell him I wasn’t dating anyone,” I said. I don’t know why it felt important to say. It just did. I turned to face him. “I’m not, you know. Dating anyone.”
He held my gaze. “Maybe you should.”
Something in the way he said it made the warmth climb up my neck all over again. “He’s not going to let this go,” I said quietly.
“No.” He was quiet, his thumb moving slowly along the edge of the counter. “I don’t know him. Not really.” He paused. “But I know how he looks at you. I’ve seen it every time he’s been in this shop, and I don’t like it.”
I looked down at the counter. “I keep thinking if I’m clear enough, eventually I will get through.”
“You’ve been clear.” His voice was even. “That’s not the problem. The problem is he’s decided what he wants, and he’s not interested in hearing anything that gets in the way of it.” He shifted against the shelf, his eyes finding mine again. “That’s not on you, Cara.”
I didn’t answer right away. I’d heard variations of that before—from Lucy, from my grandmother—but something about the way he said it, plain and certain and without any softness layered over the top of it, made it feel different. Like a fact rather than a comfort.
“Okay,” I said finally. “I need to be firm, I guess.”
We stood there for a moment, the shop quiet around us, the morning light warm through the front window.
I could feel the weight of everything that had happened in the last few hours—the boxes, the tea, the step stool, and underneath all of it, the low, persistent hum of Jasper simply being here, having shown up this morning because he’d wanted to see for himself that I was okay.
He checked his phone, and his expression changed. “I’ve got to head to work,” he said.
“I figured.” I straightened up and came out from behind the register, not because he needed to be seen out, but because I wasn’t quite ready for him to go yet, and walking with him bought me a few more seconds.
We moved toward the door together, and I had the distinct sense that he wasn’t in a tremendous hurry.
At the door, he stopped. Turned back. “I can come by tomorrow,” he said. “If you want help with anything else.” A pause, the corner of his mouth lifting slightly. “Or even if you don’t.”
“Or if I don’t?”
He looked at me steadily, no deflection, no softening it into something easier. “Cara. I like spending time with you.” A beat, quiet and deliberate. “We can spend more, if you’d like.”
The words landed somewhere in the center of my chest and stayed there.
I liked spending time with you. From someone else, it might have been nothing—casual, throwaway, the kind of thing people said without meaning much by it.
From Jasper, who chose his words the way he did everything else, carefully and without waste, it was not nothing.
It was him deciding to say a true thing plainly instead of wrapping it in something safer.
I was aware of warmth moving through my chest in a way I couldn’t have hidden if I’d tried.
I was aware that my face was doing something I had no control over.
I was aware that this man had sat across from me in a school library when I was fifteen years old and made me feel like the most important person in the room.
Apparently, fourteen years and considerable life experience had done nothing to change what that did to me.
I took a breath.
“Okay,” I said, and my voice came out softer than I’d intended, warm around the edges in a way that probably told him everything. “Come by tomorrow.”
He nodded once. “Tomorrow,” he said.
Then, because the morning had already been so full of small brave things I hadn’t planned on saying, I kept going before I could stop myself. “I’ll make you lunch. At my place. You can—” my voice caught for half a second, “—you can meet the cats.”
He went very still. Then, slowly, the corner of his mouth lifted into the most openly amused expression I’d seen from him all morning. “Is this a date? Because I accept.”
“No.” I felt the heat immediately singe my cheeks. “It’s a—a thank-you lunch. For labor. It’s a labor lunch.”
“A labor lunch.” He said it with great seriousness. “At your house. That you’re cooking.”
“Yes.”
“With the cats.”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” He nodded, very serious, except his eyes weren’t serious at all. “I accept.”
“You accept the labor lunch.”
“I accept the date.”
“Jasper.”
“I’m teasing you.” A pause, warm and unhurried. “Mostly.”