Elizabeth #2
“Know what?”
“That it’s ending.” She said it the way she said everything, brisk and certain, and then ruined my entire morning by adding, “Beautifully, of course. That’s the whole trick of it.
” That was just how my grandmother talks.
Iris Starling has been making oracle pronouncements over coffee since before I was born.
“Go to work,” she said. “You’ll be late. ”
So I went to work, which meant the Stop the math just does itself when you’re standing at a register all day with a clear view of the parking lot.
A week and a half since I’d watched his cruiser roll past on Main while I was flipping the sign.
A few weeks since the wedding—since I’d confiscated his warm beer and made him dance with me, since his hand had settled at my waist like it had been issued there, since I’d asked him a question I had absolutely no business asking and watched something open up behind his eyes as he thought about it.
What does Matt Hartford want?
I’d been aiming for funny banter, but I’d hit something else. I knew the second it struck home, because I’d grown up doing the exact same thing he did in that pause—taking a question that got too close and filing it somewhere it couldn’t hurt. Game recognizes game, Officer Hartford.
And then I’d walked away and put it on his tab, because that’s what I do. I’m hilarious right up until the moment something matters, at which point I am hilarious harder.
The cruiser door opened. He got out, and the time apart had not made him less tall, dark, and handsome, which I felt was inconsiderate.
And that was before he’d even reached the door.
There is a specific unfairness to Matt Hartford in uniform that I had been choosing not to think about, and now got to think about at close range, against my will.
The uniform is just his work clothes. It should be as unremarkable as a mechanic’s coveralls.
Instead it sat across his shoulders like it had been cut for him and him alone, the dark fabric pulled taut where his chest and arms filled it out, the sleeves doing something to his forearms that no municipal dress code could possibly have intended.
He is a big man—six foot four, broad, not gym-built but solid all the way through, the kind of tall and wide that makes a doorway look framed wrong—and at five foot four I have a full foot of deficit to work with, so that when he came up to my counter I had to tip my head all the way back to keep his eyes, which is its own small indignity I have never enjoyed and could not seem to stop doing.
His hair was regulation-neat, dark and short and combed into behaving, except for the one piece at the front that never quite got the memo and fell just slightly out of line, the single imperfection on an otherwise immaculate man, and that piece of hair has been personally responsible for a great deal of my nonsense.
But it’s the eyes that get me. They always have.
Dark brown, steady, framed in lashes that were frankly wasted on a man who does nothing with them, and when he turned them on me across the counter—carefully, like I was a situation he hadn’t decided how to handle—it did the thing it always did, which was make me feel simultaneously seen straight through and completely unable to tell what he was thinking, because Matt Hartford’s face gives away exactly nothing, and I have made it a personal project to catch it giving away something anyway.
He came in with the bell jingling, nodded at his sister, and looked at me the way he’d looked at me across that dance floor.
“Elizabeth,” he smoothly greeted me.
“Officer Hartford.” I was already pouring his coffee—large, black, no discussion necessary; some relationships are built on bedrock. “Quiet morning out there?”