Cara
Iwoke up on Saturday morning with my face in my pillow and Wentworth a warm, heavy weight against my hip.
The light coming through the curtains was gray and misty, and the apartment was quiet.
I had been dreaming about Jasper. The dream was already dissolving—not in images or words but as a feeling in my body, a warmth fading at the edges that I reached for before I was even fully awake.
I had been fifteen, and he had been seventeen, and I had wanted him badly enough that it embarrassed me even now to think about it.
Wordlessly, hopelessly, with nowhere to put any of it.
I hadn’t known what to do with it then—hadn’t even entirely known what it was.
It had just lived in me, large and privately held, and when he left, I had shoved it down and moved on because there was nothing else to do.
I had assumed it was a fifteen-year-old thing. The hormonal fever of that age, ungovernable and temporary, the kind that burns out on its own because it has to.
Lying in my bed now—fully grown—I understood I had been wrong about that.
It had not been a fifteen-year-old thing.
It had been a Jasper thing. The fever had just been running low all this time, banked down under the ordinary years of my life, waiting with more patience than I had given it credit for.
The difference was that at fifteen, I would have died before letting him see any of it. Now, I had stood on a landing in the cold night air and let him kiss me, and I had kissed him back, and I had meant it, and he had known I meant it, and it was—
I pressed my fingers against my mouth.
Wentworth lifted his head from my hip and looked at me. I took my hand away from my mouth. He put his head back down, satisfied I was not dying, just apparently coming to terms with something years in the making.
Get up, I told myself. You have a shop to open.
I did not get up. I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling and let myself feel each piece of the kiss settle back into my body like something returning to where it belonged.
The way he had looked at me first. The small breath he had taken before steadying himself, as if it had wrecked him too.
Eventually, I made myself get up. I made coffee and stood at the kitchen window with the mug in both hands, looking down at the alley—my car in its spot, the wooden staircase, the landing where I had been kissed last night.
The wood looked different in the early morning light.
Everything looked different. I was standing in the same kitchen I had stood in a thousand times, and it felt like new construction.
I took a sip of my coffee and went to get dressed.
My phone buzzed on the counter while I was pulling on my sweater.
JASPER: Good morning. I slept about four hours, and none of them were restful, and I am not complaining. I am telling you so you know what you’ve done to me.
I sat down on the edge of my bed. My body went soft and helpless. He had been awake too. Lying in the dark at the cabin with the river outside, not sleeping, and he wanted me to know that.
I was smiling at my phone. Smiling at it like a person in a romantic comedy, and I could not make myself stop.
Wentworth, watching from the pillow, made a small critical noise.
Me: Good morning. I slept worse than that. I am blaming you entirely
.
His reply came while I was still looking at it.
JASPER: Good. Blame me. I’ll take all of it.
I pressed the phone against my chest.
Me: I am going down to open the shop now and try to sell books like a functional person.
JASPER: You are the most functional person I know. The most beautiful too. Talk later?
Me: Absolutely.
I held the phone against my chest then sighed and got up. I had a shop to open.
The shop in the early morning was one of my favorite things in the world. The sun through the front window caught the display I had built yesterday afternoon, the warm fall colors, the dried orange leaves arranged against deep amber and cream. I stood at the counter and looked at all of it.
I turned the sign to OPEN.
Saturday unfolded in the shop at its usual pace.
A couple browsing the local authors’ shelf.
An older man was buying a birthday gift for his wife, who picked exactly the book I would have picked, and looked pleased when I told him so.
A woman wanting a book club recommendation who told me more about her book club than I had ever known about any gathering of people.
I was usually good at my job. But today I was a woman who had been kissed on a landing in the cold air and who kept losing her train of thought mid-sentence for no reason at all. I was already thinking about Jasper again—him taking the long way home, him saying I picked here on purpose.
I fumbled the change while ringing up a cookbook, three quarters scattering across the counter. The woman buying it watched me chase them down. She was in her sixties, with kind eyes and an amused expression. She took her bag and smiled. “Enjoy your Saturday, sweetheart. You look so happy.”
I watched her walk out and blew a breath up into my hair. I was going to need to do something about my face; it was giving me away.
The shop emptied out around lunchtime, and I went to the back to refill my tea and sit in the armchair in the reading nook for a few minutes before the afternoon crowd.
I was restocking the bookmark display when the bell over the front door chimed.
Eric stood just inside the door. I scurried behind the counter so there would be something between us when he came inside.
Something dropped in my chest—cold and sudden, the bottom giving way. I had not seen him in so long that I had started to relax, started to believe he had gotten the message or moved on or run out of whatever patience he had been running on when it came to me.
His eyes were already on my face—not browsing the things on the counter, not drifting to the shelves, just fixed on me with a steadiness that made the back of my neck prickle.
He crossed the shop toward me slowly and stopped in front of me.
Close enough that I had to tilt my chin up to hold his eyes.
“Long time.” He said it with a faint smile, like we were something. Like long time was a phrase he had the right to use with me.
I set the bookmark I had been holding down on the counter, because I needed my hands free. It had been a long time since our date. Each time I spoke with him, I had thought it was over, but it had continued. And here he was. Again. Nothing I did seemed to deter him.
“Can I help you find something?”
“I’m not really looking for anything in particular today.
” The smile on his face was the shape of a smile—the right geometry laid over something else entirely.
He set one hand on the counter between us, easy and proprietorial, and looked around the shop as if he were taking stock of it. “Been busy?”
“The shop stays busy.” I kept my hands where they were, flat on the shelf behind me, and stayed where I was. “So yes.”
“Mm.” He nodded slowly. “I heard you had a nice dinner last night.”
I went very still.
The shelf was solid under my hands, and I pressed into it and kept my face as neutral as I could. “Who told you that?”
“It’s a small town. People talk.”
“Who?”
“Does it really matter?”
It mattered. I had not told anyone outside my family, and my family did not talk to Eric.
The only way he could have known was if someone had seen us or if he had been watching.
A brief hit of panic shot through me, and I filed it away to think about later and kept my expression steady.
“My personal life isn’t something I discuss in the shop, Eric. ”
His face changed. Not anger—something more controlled than that. He tilted his head slightly. “I heard you went to The Hearthstone.”
“Who I have dinner with and where is my own business,” I said it clearly, no softening around it. “That’s not something I’m going to discuss with you.”
“That was our place.” He said it flat, like an accusation he had prepared in advance, and then paused just long enough to let it sit. “We had dinner there together, Cara.” His voice was quiet, almost reasonable. “Or did you forget?”
His hand landed between us on the counter, and the floor went sideways under my feet, because he was rewriting that evening.
He was standing in my shop rewriting what that dinner had been—rewriting it into something mutual, something shared, something that gave him a claim on where I went and who I went with—and he was doing it so smoothly and with such complete conviction that for one disorienting second I almost felt guilty, which was exactly what he intended.
I took one breath and kept my hands where they were.
“Eric.” My voice came out steady. “That was one dinner. It wasn’t our place.
It wasn’t our anything.” I held his eyes.
“Who I spend my time with is not your business. It has never been your business. I’ve been kind about that because I didn’t want to make things uncomfortable, but I’m telling you directly now because being kind isn’t working.
” I kept my voice even. “My personal life is not a conversation we’re going to have.
Not today, not the next time you come in, not ever. ”
The easy pleasantness he wore like a second skin tightened at the edges, and for just a second, I saw what was underneath it—not wounded, not embarrassed. Something harder and predatorial.
His gaze dropped—just for a count of one—to my mouth.
Unease ran down my spine.
His eyes came back up to mine. “You look different today,” he said. Like I hadn’t spoken. Like none of it had registered, or he had simply decided it hadn’t.
I felt my hands curl against the shelf behind me. “Is there a book I can help you find?”
“No.” He straightened up slowly, unhurried, and picked up his hand from the counter. “I just wanted to see how you were doing.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Have a good day, Eric.”