11. Edda
Chapter eleven
Edda
I'm elbow-deep in a Raleigh frame, threading new brake cables through the housing, and I don't stop working.
Grease slicks my knuckles, black against my skin, and the familiar smell of rubber and chain oil hangs thick in the narrow shop.
It settles into the walls, into the floorboards, into me.
My father used to stand at this same bench, teaching me how to turn a wheel before I was tall enough to reach the pedals.
Bennett Thornhill fills the doorway in clothes that probably cost more than my quarterly tax payment. He's carrying nothing. No folder. No contract. No polished little threat disguised as a business proposition.
Just himself.
And whatever the hell happened in the Catskills has changed the way he looks at me.
"Shop's open," I say, eyes still on the bike. "You need a tune-up?"
“No.”
The cable slides through clean. I clip the excess, crimp the end cap, and only then let myself look at him properly.
Charcoal Henley today. No tie. One button open at the collar.
His jaw is tight in that familiar way, the one that says he’s already made a decision and hasn’t figured out how to package it yet.
“Then what do you need?”
“Lunch.”
A laugh almost slips out. Almost.
“It’s ten in the morning.”
“I’ll wait.”
He says it like it’s reasonable. Like, clearing his schedule to stand around my bike shop while I ignore him qualifies as a productive day. Like the man responsible for half the city’s skyline has nothing better to do than watch grease collect under my fingernails.
I turn back to the Raleigh. “Suit yourself.”
He doesn’t sit.
There’s a stool near the counter, the one Mrs. Petrova claims every Thursday so she can gossip about the new coffee shop on the corner while I tune her grandson’s brakes, but Bennett ignores it.
Instead, he stays near the front window where morning light cuts through drifting dust and turns the whole shop gold around the edges.
And he watches me.
Not casually. Not impatiently.
Carefully.
The same way he watched me on that ladder in the Catskills, like he still hasn’t decided what to make of me. Like I’m something complicated enough to deserve studying.
I hate that I notice. Hate that my hands remember his, the silent way we passed tools back and forth, the steady grip he kept on the ladder before I even asked.
I hate that my mouth remembers his mouth too. The pressure of it. The way he kissed me was like he was trying to figure something out while it unraveled anyway.
The Raleigh's brakes need adjusting, so I focus on that instead. Barrel adjuster, cable tension, and pad alignment. Mechanical problems have mechanical solutions.
Bennett Thornhill is not a mechanical problem.
Twenty minutes pass. He doesn't check his phone once. I know because I'm listening for it, for the soft buzz or the tap of his thumb against the screen, but it never comes.
The shop fills the silence for him. The click of tools. The squeak of the stand. Traffic is humming past outside.
At eleven, a grad student comes in with a flat tire and twenty dollars in crumpled bills.
I patch the tube while she talks through her thesis on urban planning.
Bennett stays near the window, hands loose at his sides, expensive enough to look out of place in the grease-stained shop and somehow still too solid to ignore.
She glances at him twice before deciding he isn't her business.
When the door shuts behind her, the bell gives one last chime before the quiet settles again.
"You're still here," I say.
"You said I could wait."
"I said suit yourself. That's different."
One corner of his mouth shifts. "Is it?"
I don't answer.
I finish the Raleigh and wheel it toward the pickup rack. On the way past him, my arm brushes his sleeve.
Accidental. Barely there.
My body notices anyway.
Cedar, clean cotton, and something warmer underneath, something I've been trying very hard not to recognize since the hotel suite.
"Forty minutes," I say. "Then I'm taking a break."
One corner of his mouth shifts. Not quite a smile. "I know a place."
The diner across the street has vinyl booths the color of old tomatoes and a menu that hasn't changed since Reagan.
I've eaten here three times a week for eleven years.
The coffee tastes burnt, the pie tastes worse, and everything costs less than twelve bucks.
I love it anyway. The way people love old routines and stubborn places that refuse to disappear.
We slide into a booth by the window. Bennett folds himself into the cracked vinyl carefully, as his body has never encountered furniture this unforgiving, and somehow he still doesn't complain.
He studies the menu. Then me.
"What's good here?"
"Nothing."
A pause.
"Then why do you keep coming back?"
Because it's mine almost slips out gently, but something sharper gets there first.
"Because I've been coming here since I was twenty-two. The owner knows my order, the coffee's always hot, and nobody asks questions I don't want to answer."
His gaze stays on me a second longer than necessary before he sets the menu aside.
"What do you order?"
"Turkey club. Extra pickles. Coffee that could strip paint."
"I'll take the same."
The waitress appears at our table. She's worked here longer than I've been alive, and she gives Bennett the same look she gives anyone who walks in wearing a watch worth more than the building: mild suspicion wrapped in complete indifference.
She takes our order without writing anything down and disappears behind the counter.
Bennett rests his hands on the table between us.
Still.
No tapping fingers. No checking his phone. No restless movement at all.
I look before I can stop myself.
They're capable hands. Clean nails, rougher knuckles than I expected. The kind of hands built for contracts and control.
And apparently, for steadying ladders while pretending not to notice when my knees go weak halfway up.
"You waited forty minutes," I say.
"Yes."
"Why?"
His gaze holds mine, steady in a way that used to make me bristle. It still does, just differently now. "Because you let me."
The coffee arrives. I wrap my hands around the mug, letting the heat bleed into my palms. The rim is chipped, a thin crack I’ve been tracking for three years, like it’s part of the shop itself.
"That’s not an answer."
"It’s the only one I have." He still doesn’t touch his coffee. "You told me to stop having all the answers. I’m trying to listen."
Something tightens low in my chest. I take a sip of the awful coffee anyway, letting it burn just enough to ground me.
"The summer I was twenty," I say, not sure why I’m telling him this now, except that he hasn’t looked away once, and he didn’t check his phone a single time in forty minutes.
"My father had a gambling problem. You probably already know that. It’s buried in whatever background check your people ran. "
A flicker shifts behind his expression, subtle enough that most people would miss it.
"I didn’t read it," he says.
A short laugh slips out before I can stop it. "Liar."
"I read the first page." His tone stays even, but it’s quieter now. "Financials. The heritage designation paperwork." A pause. "I stopped before the personal section."
That lands harder than it should.
I don’t believe him. I should call him on it. Instead, I keep talking, because the words are already in motion and stopping them feels harder than letting them land.
“He gambled away the equity on the building. All of it. The bank gave us ninety days to cover the gap, or they’d foreclose. I was twenty years old, I had just taken over the shop, and I had nothing. No savings. No credit. No one left to call.”
I set the coffee down. Ceramic meets Formica with a soft, final click.
“So I slept behind the counter for three months. Eighteen-hour days, sometimes more. I took every repair job I could get, bikes, motors, anything people would pay me for. I ate ramen and peanut butter sandwiches and didn’t turn on the heat until November because I couldn’t afford the gas bill.”
Bennett’s jaw tightens. His hand shifts under the table, like it’s reaching for something he refuses to actually take out.
“The landlord tried to change the locks twice,” I say. “Both times, I was already there. Sleeping bag behind the register, wrench in my hand. He called the cops on me once. They checked my paperwork, checked his, told him to come back with a court order.”
A laugh slips out before I can stop it, sharp and empty.
“I saved the shop. Paid off the debt in eighteen months.” My throat tightens, but I push through it anyway. “My father died two weeks after I made the last payment. Heart attack. He never knew.”
The silence changes after that. It stops being space between words and turns into something heavier, more exact. Like it has weight now.
“Edda.” Bennett’s voice comes out low, rough at the edges.
“I’ve never told anyone that.” I look at him across the table, over the terrible coffee, the cracked vinyl, the distance that still sits between us as it belongs there. “Not Lina. Not Mrs. Petrova. Not even the landlord’s widow, and she still sends me a Christmas card like that, fixes anything.”
I swallow. The truth tastes strange coming out.
“I don’t know why I’m telling you.”
His hand moves again. This time, I catch it. Fingers slipping into his jacket pocket, curling around something small and worn. The medal. He showed it to me in the Catskills like it was something he wasn’t sure he was allowed to keep.
“Because I waited,” he says.
“That’s not enough.”
“I know.” He pulls his hand back out and sets it on the table between us, open. Nothing in it now. Just skin against Formica, unguarded. “But it’s what I have.”
The sandwiches arrive then. Turkey clubs stacked too high, pickles sliding out, mayonnaise threatening to give up on gravity entirely.
I take one of the pickles and bite into it just to give my mouth something safer to do.
Bennett eats his sandwich like a man who has never stepped foot in a diner before, which he probably has not.
No complaints about the stale bread or dry turkey or coffee that tastes like it was brewed in another decade.
He just eats. Quiet. Focused. Still looking at me between bites like whatever I said earlier is still sitting here with us, taking up space.
"Why did you come here today?" I ask.
"I told you. Lunch."
"No." I set my sandwich down, my attention locking on him. "Why did you really come?"
He does not answer right away. His gaze drifts to the window where the street keeps moving, people brushing past each other like they are all late for something they cannot name. Then he looks back at me.
"Because I spent the drive back from the Catskills trying to figure out what to say to you." His voice stays even, factual, the same tone he uses when he is talking numbers or deals. But there is a strain under it now, something less polished. "I could not find it. So I came instead."
"That is not a plan."
"No."
"You always have a plan."
"Not for this." He picks up his coffee, takes a sip, and sets it down again as it has personally offended him. "You told me to stop trying to have answers. This is what that looks like."
I should be annoyed. I should tell him that showing up at my shop, sitting here like this, buying me a sandwich, and calling it lunch is not a strategy.
It is not anything I can trust. I should remind him that the contract is over, the arrangement is done, and there is nothing left for him to hold onto here.
Instead, I reach across the table and take his hand.
His fingers are warm. Steady. He does not hesitate, not even for a second, before his hand closes around mine.
And just like that, the space between us shifts, quiet but unmistakable, like something neither of us is ready to name has decided to stay anyway.
"You poured my wine first," I say. "At every dinner, every event. You always poured mine first."
"Yes."
"Why?"
His thumb drifts across my knuckles, unhurried. "Because you were the only person in the room who didn't expect anything from me."
The waitress returns with the check. Her gaze drops to our joined hands, one brow lifting, but she says nothing. Forty years in this place have taught her not to.
Bennett pays in cash. That surprises me more than it should. I never pictured him carrying it. He leaves a tip that makes the receipt feel irrelevant. The waitress’s eyebrow lifts again, but she slips it away without comment.
We step out into the November air. It bites at my cheeks, sharp and clean, but his hand stays in mine as it belongs there. Like it always has.
The street notices. It always does. Mrs. Petrova pauses behind the dry cleaner's glass. The guy at the bodega slows mid-step. The grad student from earlier is still at the bike rack outside the library, glancing up just long enough to see us before looking away.
Let them.
Let them build whatever story they want from it.
At the shop door, I stop. Our hands are still linked, neither of us letting go first.
"This isn't the arrangement anymore," I say.
"No," he says.
“I don’t know what it is.”
His free hand lifts, unhurried, like he’s testing whether I’ll flinch away. Fingers brush a strand of hair from my face, tucking it behind my ear. The touch is brief, careful, but it shifts the air between us anyway.
“Neither do I,” he says. “Is that a problem?”
My mind drifts, uninvited, to the summer I was twenty. The sleeping bag behind the shop counter. The wrench in my grip. A landlord knocking like he already owned what I was still trying to save. The bank balance that never stretched far enough, no matter how hard I worked for it.
Everything I built with my hands. Everything I refused to owe anyone.
Alone stopped feeling like a choice a long time ago. It just became how I survived.
I look back at him.
“No,” I say. “It’s not a problem.”
His phone buzzes again. Sharp, insistent.
“That could be important,” I say.
“Everything’s important,” he replies without looking away from me. “Not everything matters.”
Something in that lands closer than I want to admit.
I hook a finger into the edge of his collar and pull him through the shop door, between the rows of bike frames and the scent of chain oil and years of stubborn independence. Before I can overthink it, I kiss him.
His reaction is immediate. One hand settles at my waist, the other drawing me in like there’s no space left to negotiate.
This time it’s not the urgency of the Catskills or the blur of the hotel.
It’s steadier. Controlled in a way that still manages to undo me.
Like we’ve stopped translating and started speaking the same language without permission.
And for a moment, everything else goes quiet.
When we separate, his forehead stays pressed to mine for a beat longer than necessary, like neither of us is willing to fully let go.
"I need to finish the Schwinn in the back," I say.
"I know."
"You could stay."
His mouth curves, not quite a smile, something quieter that lingers in the space between us. "I thought you'd never ask."