Chapter 17 #2
Not the glancing contact of the prep table or the incidental overlaps of shared workspace.
This is her hand on the jar and mine on the jar and neither of us moving, because the table is small and the lighting is low and we’ve been walking and talking in the quiet for an hour and her guard is somewhere behind us on the river path.
I feel her hand under mine. Warm. Soft. I don’t move my hand.
She still doesn’t move hers.
I look up and she’s already looking at me.
We are closer than I’ve let myself get until this moment.
I’ve been careful, because careful is the correct approach, and close is…
close is her face in the low carnival light, the detail of her, the vulnerability underneath all the armor that I’ve been watching come closer to the surface all week and is right here now, unhidden, looking at me.
Her eyes drop. To my mouth. One second. Maybe less.
They come back up. I have not moved and she has not moved and the honey jar is warm between our hands. The space between us has become charged with crackles of lightning.
“Tristan,” she says quietly
“I know.”
But I don’t move back.
And neither does she.
The honey jar stays between our hands and I make a decision.
Not impulsively, I don’t do anything impulsively, everything I do is considered.
I make a considered decision that this moment deserves more than careful handling.
That she deserves more than someone who is always, always waiting at the correct distance.
I lift the jar.
She watches me open it. The wildflower honey catches the carnival lights like something amber and warm. I dip a finger. One finger, slowly, and I hold it out toward her.
“Taste it properly,” I say. “Not on pastry. Just the honey.”
She looks at my finger. She looks at me. She leans forward and takes my finger into her mouth.
I go completely still.
She takes her time. She’s not putting on a show, not teasing, just genuinely tasting, the way she does everything with her full attention.
Her tongue moves against the pad of my finger and the honey is there, the wildflower complexity of it, and her eyes close for a moment and then open. My pants get very tight.
“It’s layered,” she says. Her voice has changed register. Lowered.
“Yes,” I say. My finger is still warm from her mouth.
“The clover first. Then something darker.”
“Late-season wildflowers. The bees range further in fall.” I am having this conversation while my entire nervous system has relocated to the hand she just had her mouth on. “It finishes differently every year.”
“This year’s is…”
“Yes?” I prompt.
She looks at me. And then I close the remaining distance between us and kiss her.
Slowly.
That’s the only word for it. Not cautiously, there’s no hesitation in it, no tentativeness.
Slowly in the way of something that has been given space and time and is now arriving at its destination without rushing the arrival.
My hand finds her jaw, the angle of it, and she makes a sound that is very quiet and very real and opens toward me like something that has been waiting.
She tastes of the honey. Complex and warm, exactly as described.
I kiss her the way I make things. With full attention, with care for every element, with the understanding that this particular combination of ingredients will not occur in exactly this way again and deserves to be treated accordingly.
Her hand comes to my arm. Not pushing. Placed. I feel her feeling it.
We stay there with the small prep table between us, the honey jar open, the low carnival lights shining through the stall canvas. The kiss deepens, not with urgency but with the slow accumulation of rightness, each moment finding the next one naturally.
When we separate it’s gradual. Her forehead drops to mine. We breathe the same air for a moment, her hand still on my arm, mine still at her jaw.
“Tristan,” she sighs.
“I know,” I reply.
“That was…”
“Yes.”
She pulls back slightly. Separating, which is different from retreating. She looks at me in the low light and her expression is open. The one that comes out in the stall when she stops monitoring herself. It’s here now, unhidden, and what’s in it is something I’m going to hold very carefully.
“The honey,” she says, after a moment.
“Mm.”
“You were right about the application.” Her voice is mostly steady. “It’s better like this.”
I look at her. “Yes. It is.”
She wraps both hands around the water glass.
I put the lid back on the honey jar. I do this slowly, because my hands need something deliberate to do. Because she is sitting across from me with color in her face and the ghost of the honey still in the air between us.
I don’t make it a moment. I top up her water. I sit back down. But the honey jar stays between us on the table, lid closed, amber and warm in the low light, and neither of us moves it to the shelf.
We eat the rest of the food and she tells me about her latest interaction with the fortuneteller.
I listen with my whole attention, and she talks more than she usually talks, the words coming like something that has been held under pressure and found a small release. I let it run for as long as she wants.
When we finally walk to Doris Harrow’s gate and she says goodnight, she pauses beside the fence and looks at me.
“Thank you,” she says.
“For the food?”
“For—” She stops. Looks at the gate latch. “Yes. For the food.”
“Goodnight, Lola.”
“Night, Tristan.”
I walk back to the pack house through the quiet town and I think about her hand on the jar and her eyes dropping and the breath in the small space between us.
I think about what I know. She sat at the prep table and ate and talked for an hour without once checking the exits.
She said thank you and meant something larger than the food.
She trusts me in a way she hasn’t admitted to trusting anyone in… I don’t know how long. I can see it in the way she’s stopped monitoring herself around me, the way the distance has come down, the way she takes the food and the water and the open door of conversation without reluctance.
She doesn’t know she’s done it. That’s the part that stays with me on the walk home, in the still carnival lights and the quiet street, the thing that sits in my chest warm and careful:
She trusts me.
Not because she decided to. Not because she assessed the risk and made a rational choice. Because she couldn’t stop herself.
And she doesn’t know it yet.
But I do.
I know it for both of us.
I’ll hold it until she catches up.