Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Freddie arrived at the committee room eight minutes early.
This was deliberate. He set out the updated booth map, the supplier confirmation sheets, and the revised music licensing documents he'd obtained after a forty-minute phone call with the county council. He aligned the papers with the edge of the table, which was not quite level.
He had been useful this week. Useful was manageable.
Useful had edges and a defined scope and did not require him to talk too much.
He had completed every task on the committee list. He had also completed three tasks that were not on the committee list, because they were obvious gaps and he was not capable of seeing an obvious gap and not filling it.
The sound equipment contact, the insurance extension, the secondary waste collection that the original plan had somehow overlooked entirely.
These were just things that needed doing. So he’d done them.
Now, with five minutes left until the meeting started, he sat down with nothing to do.
Wren arrived two minutes late. She was wearing a dark green coat over a cream blouse.
Her hair was down for once, or mostly down.
There was a clip at the back that had lost its grip on roughly half of what it was meant to be holding.
She had her folders under one arm and her phone in the other hand, and she was reading something on the phone with the focused expression of someone who had been in motion all day and had not quite stopped.
She pushed through the door, clocked Freddie, clocked the table, and then stopped completely.
She looked at the papers.
"You did the insurance extension," she said.
"It was on the list."
"It was on my list." She came further into the room, set her folder down, and picked up the insurance sheet to look at it. "How did you even—"
"You left the planning folder on the committee room table last week. I made a note of the outstanding items."
She looked at him over the top of the paper. Her expression was doing several things at once, in the way her expressions often did, like a weather system that hadn't decided on its final form. "You went through my planning folder?"
"I read the first page. It was facing up."
"And then you sorted out the insurance extension."
"And the secondary waste collection. And the sound equipment liability form. That one was going to cause a problem if it wasn't done before the end of the month."
Wren put the paper down slowly. She was still looking at him. Freddie kept his expression neutral, because neutral was the mode he had selected and he was committed to it, and waited for her to say something.
"Thank you," she said.
"It needed doing," he said.
"A lot of people would have left it to me.
" She pulled out her chair and sat, flipping her folder open, but she was still looking at him with an expression that had settled into something he didn't quite have a category for.
"Because it was technically my job. They would have waited to be asked and then mentioned later that they'd been going to get to it. "
"That's inefficient."
"Yes." A small smile appeared at the corner of her mouth. "It is."
The meeting ran an hour and twenty minutes, which was twelve minutes shorter than the previous one, which Freddie attributed to the fact that three of the six outstanding items had been resolved before it started.
The final agenda item was the volunteer briefing schedule, which Wren had drafted and which required minimal discussion because it was thorough.
Freddie began collecting papers.
"Can I help?" Wren asked.
"I've got it."
She helped anyway. She gathered the extra copies into a stack with the quick competence of someone who dealt with paper as a primary medium. He took them from her and squared them against the table edge. For a moment, they were both standing on the same side of the table in the half-cleared room.
"I just…I wanted to say that you've been very great to work with.
On this." She gestured vaguely at the room, the market, the general enterprise.
"You do what you say you're going to do.
And you do things nobody asked you to do because they needed doing, and you don't—" She stopped, started again.
"You don't make me feel like I have to justify myself for being organized or for having opinions about things.
You just—work with me. On the same level. "
Freddie looked at her. He had not prepared for this either. The committee meeting had used up his entire allocation of words, and she was now presenting a further quantity of sincerity that required response.
"I'm not sure that warrants mention," he said carefully.
"It does, though." Her expression shifted into something quieter. "More than you'd think."
He should leave it there. He understood perfectly well that he should leave it there.
"My ex-best friend, who…" Wren made a sound that was not quite a laugh.
"She and I co-ran everything. Every joint project, every plan, every decision.
And I'd make something good,, and she'd make it better, and then somehow it was hers.
I never really noticed until there was no more hers and mine.
" A brief pause, her jaw working. "And then there's my parents, who thought I was making a mistake with the shop and said so, fairly regularly, in the way people do when they love you but can't quite believe in you. "
"Dylan believes in you," Freddie said.
"Dylan. Maggie. You." Wren smiled at this, genuinely, the tension in her jaw releasing."I'm really glad we're friends, Freddie."
There was that word again. She'd made up her mind that they were friends, and Oliver was hero material. And that was that.
"Yes," he said.
Not me too. Not likewise. Just yes, which was the word available to him, the only one that didn't require him to say something more or less than the truth.
Wren nodded, as though this were the response she'd expected, and began buttoning her coat. They left together, which was not something Freddie had planned and which happened anyway. He simply fell into step beside her.
The main street was quiet; the shops sealed and dark.
Their footsteps had different rhythms—hers quicker, his more measured, even with his limp—and they had not yet found a shared pace, which meant they were slightly out of sync in a way that felt oddly comfortable.
She didn't seem to require talking. He was grateful for this.
They passed the bakery, its windows dark. Passed the point where the pavement narrowed slightly, where the old curbing jutted out an inch further than it should, and where—
"Glass," he said.
"What?"
He touched her elbow, briefly, just a direction—steered her two inches to the left. On the pavement ahead, just visible in the lamplight, a broken bottle had shed itself across the stone in a scatter of small, bright pieces.
"Oh." She looked down at it as they passed. "I wouldn't have seen that."
He had seen it because he had been looking.
They walked on. At the point where the pavement narrowed further—the stretch by the old grain merchant's building where the road curved slightly—he shifted without comment to the street side.
It was a small adjustment, a half-step, positioning himself between her and the road.
She didn't appear to notice for a moment, then she did, because Wren noticed things. He had always known she noticed things.
"If a car hops the curb," he said, in the same tone he used to discuss booth placement, "it has to go through me first."
There was a pause. Then she laughed—a surprised burst that came out of her, the sound of it rising and then softening in the cold air.
"Preston never did that." The laughter had settled, but the warmth of it remained in her voice, an afterglow.
"A man should protect his treasures."
"He didn't treasure me."
"He sounds like a fool."
The pause this time was longer. Freddie heard her breath, visible in the cold. It was a slow exhale, the kind that meant something was being considered.
"Yeah," she said quietly.
"I'm sorry, Wren."
She stopped.
He stopped too, half a step later. It was the slight delay of a man who had not expected a stop. He turned to look at her.
She was looking at him. Not the quick social glance or the analytical appraisal she used when she was working something out.
This was the other kind, the kind that had no agenda except to see.
Her hazel-green eyes were steady behind the glasses, and the lamplight from across the street caught in them and made them impossible to look away from, and she was looking at him as though she were reading something she had not fully understood before and had just reached a sentence that clarified everything prior.
He did not know what was on his face. He was aware, in an abstract and inconvenient way, that he probably should.
He had walked her home from committee meetings. He had noticed glass on the pavement and moved to the street side and said a perfectly ordinary thing about cars and curbs. He had said you deserve better in the tone of a man stating a fact and not in any other tone, and she was looking at him like—
She rose on her tiptoes.
It was the smallest movement, just the shift of her weight forward and upward, the slight unsteadiness of it, and his hand moved before he had made any decision to move it—found the curve of her waist, steadied her, because she had teetered and steadying her was simply what the situation required and his body had understood this before he had.
The warmth of her registered through the layers of wool and coat.
She was very close. She smelled of old paper and something autumnal and the particular tea she'd been drinking lately, and she was looking at him from two inches away with an expression he was not going to be able to file anywhere sensible, and then—
She pressed her lips to his.