CHAPTER 5
Mae
Thursday came with committee weather — bright, windless, evaluators arriving at nine. I’d been on Main Street since six thirty. Twenty minutes before the walkthrough, Henderson’s market stall betrayed me.
I was cutting through the back — the narrow gap between Henderson’s awning and the brick wall of the old hardware store — when I caught my hip on his crate-storage table. The table held. The gallon of walnut stain sitting on it did not.
It painted a diagonal stripe from my left shoulder to my right hip. Dark. Wet. Unmistakable. The good blouse — the one that said competent without trying — was already wicking it into the weave. Gone.
Paper towels from Henderson’s supply bin did exactly what walnut stain requires of paper towels — spread, darken, confirm that the universe had opinions about my morning.
“That’s not coming out.”
Theo’s voice, behind me. Of course behind me. The gap was barely four feet wide, and he filled most of it — camera bag, coffee, looking like a man who’d taken a wrong turn into my catastrophe.
“I’m aware,” I said, without turning.
He didn’t leave. I heard him set his coffee on a crate and unzip his camera bag.
“I’ve got a button-down in the bag. Clean.”
“No.”
“It’s a shirt, Mae.”
“It’s your shirt.”
“The committee’s here in —“ He checked his watch, and I hated that he checked his watch, because it meant he knew my schedule. “Seventeen minutes.”
“I’ll get to my car.”
“Through Main Street. Past Diane. Past the coffee stand.” Just geography. “In that.”
“Leave it on the crate,” I said.
Fabric — cotton, folded — landed beside Henderson’s stain cans. Then I heard him not leave.
“You’re still here.”
“You’ve got stain on your back. Below the shoulder blade. If you put the shirt on over it, it’ll bleed through.”
The alley smelled like wood stain and coffee and him — that soap-and-cedar thing I’d catalogued at the market and refused to acknowledge since.
“Fine,” I said. I turned around.
He was closer than I’d calculated. Camera at his side, lens cap on, hands empty — and somehow that was worse, because it meant he was just standing there looking at me while I wore a ruined blouse and pretended this was logistics.
He had a damp paper towel. Condensation off his coffee cup.
“Turn around,” he said.
“I can do it myself.”
“You can’t reach it. Fourteen minutes.”
I turned around.
His hand landed between my shoulder blades — paper towel first, careful, firm enough to work and light enough to make clear he was thinking about every square inch of contact. I felt his knuckles through the towel, through the blouse, through whatever professional fiction I was maintaining.
My spine did something involuntary. Not a shiver — a settling, like my body had decided to trust the proximity before my brain authorized it. I locked my shoulders and thought about vendor permits.
“Got it,” he said. His voice had dropped — not performatively, just quieter, the way people get when they’re being careful with something.
He stepped back. I felt the air where he’d been like a draft.
I picked up the shirt. Blue chambray, soft from washing. It smelled like detergent and the inside of his camera bag. I held it a second too long, and he saw me hold it, and neither of us said anything about that.
“Turn around,” I said.
He turned. Shoulders to me. Hands in his pockets. Looking at the brick wall with the focus of a man who had developed a deep interest in masonry.
I changed fast. The cotton was warm — residual heat from the camera bag, or maybe I was inventing reasons because the alternative was worse.
It fit wrong. Too broad in the shoulders, sleeves past my wrists, collar sitting open — the kind of fit that said I borrowed this from someone bigger than me.
I rolled the cuffs three times. They still looked like his cuffs on my arms.
“Okay,” I said.
He turned back. His face did something — a fast rearrangement he almost caught in time. Almost. His eyes went to the collar, the rolled sleeves, the way the shirt fell past my hips, and for one unguarded second he looked at me like he’d been hit and was still deciding where it landed.
Then he put it away. Smooth, fast, back behind the easy expression. But not fast enough.
“Works,” he said.
“It doesn’t work. I look like I raided your luggage.”
“You look like someone who solved a problem.”
“I look like someone wearing your clothes, and every person on that street is going to know it.”
“Mae.” Quiet. Not charming. “You look fine.”
I didn’t look fine. I looked like his. That was the problem — not the fit, not the color. The shirt changed the outline of me into something that included him, and I was about to walk back onto Main Street and stand in front of a committee wearing evidence.
From the street, Diane’s voice — clipped, directive. The window was closing.
I tucked my ruined blouse into his camera bag because I couldn’t carry it through the walkthrough. His bag. My blouse. There was no practical way to explain that anymore.
His hand flexed once at his side — open, close — and I understood it because I’d been making the same gesture.
“Walk out first,” I said. “Thirty seconds apart. We are not arriving together.”
“We’re on the same roster.”
“Thirty seconds, Theo.”
He picked up his coffee. Looked at me one more time — quick, honest, something he’d regret later.
Then he walked out toward Main Street, and I stood behind Henderson’s stall wearing a shirt that smelled like cedar and camera leather and listened to my own pulse say something I was not prepared to repeat.
I stepped out wearing Theo Hart’s shirt and pretended it was mine.
Diane found me in eleven seconds. She was standing at the corner of Main and Elm with a clipboard, a water bottle she would never open, and three evaluators in lanyards who all had the posture of people who’d seen forty small towns and expected nothing from the forty-first.
Her eyes tracked me from the waist up. Fast. Clinical.
“Different shirt,” she said.
“Wardrobe adjustment.”
“That’s chambray. You don’t own chambray.
” Her gaze moved past me to Theo, twenty yards back, adjusting his camera strap with the focus of a man pretending he hadn’t just been in a four-foot alley watching me put on his clothes.
Diane looked at him. Looked at me. Drew a conclusion at the speed of local government.
She put a checkmark on her clipboard — for no observable reason — and turned to the evaluators.
“Mae Lane, market coordinator and campaign lead. Mae, this is the regional team — Sandra Chen, Rick Whitmore, and Judy Vasquez.”
I shook hands. Sandra’s was warm. Rick’s was perfunctory. Judy held on half a beat too long and said, “Nice shirt,” like she meant it, and my stomach dropped a quarter inch.
Diane walked us south, talking — occupancy rates, the vendor program, the traffic study from April.
I let her run point because that was the deal: Diane handled the numbers, I handled the street.
Normally this would have felt like mine.
Today I was walking through it wearing a collar that kept slipping left because the shirt was cut for broader shoulders, and every time I adjusted it I smelled cedar.
Theo was behind us. Not thirty seconds behind — he’d closed the gap within the first block. I could hear the camera. He was doing his job. He was also twelve feet from my left shoulder, which was wearing his shirt, and the geometry of that was not something either of us could professionalize.
We stopped at the first cluster — produce, soap, the honey stand with hand-lettered signage I’d approved at six forty-five. Sandra asked about vendor retention. Judy photographed a display of goat-milk lotion and said, “Charming,” which was either a compliment or a diagnosis.
Earl materialized from behind the honey stand. His mouth opened.
“Don’t,” I said.
“I was just going to say —“
“Earl.”
He closed his mouth. Looked at the shirt. Looked at Theo. Looked at the shirt again. His eyebrows performed an entire conversation that I was not going to acknowledge. He retreated to the honey stand and began rearranging jars with the intensity of a man defusing ordnance.
Diane pulled me aside near the crosswalk. The evaluators were twenty feet ahead, admiring the bunting.
“You’re adjusting your collar every forty seconds.”
“It’s a new shirt.”
“It’s his shirt.”
“Diane —“
“I don’t care whose shirt it is. I care that you look like you’re thinking about whose shirt it is.
Stop touching it.” She looked at me the way she looked at spreadsheets that didn’t balance.
“You have Sandra for another ninety minutes. She’s the one who writes the narrative summary.
Impress her with substance. Stop fidgeting. ”
She walked back to the group. I stopped touching the collar. The collar did not stop touching me. It sat against my neck — soft, loose, warm from my own skin now but still shaped like someone else — and every time the breeze caught it I felt the fabric shift like a hand that wasn’t there.
Theo fell in beside me at the print-shop corner.
Not close. Not far. The exact distance of a colleague who happened to be walking the same route, which would have been convincing if he hadn’t been carrying his camera at his hip instead of shooting, and if I hadn’t been wearing his shirt, and if the air between us hadn’t been doing something that required a building permit.
“Sandra likes the vendor layout,” he said. Low. Conversational. The kind of voice you use when you’re pretending to talk about work.
“I know.”
“She asked me about the honey signage. Whether it was styled.”
“It’s not styled. It’s Linda’s handwriting. Linda’s handwriting just looks like that.”
“I told her that.”
“Good.”
Silence. We walked. His sleeve brushed the chambray at my elbow — his sleeve against his own shirt, technically, except I was inside it — and my arm went warm in a way that had nothing to do with weather.
“You’re not shooting,” I said.
“Taking a break.”
“You don’t take breaks.”
“I’m taking one now.”
I looked at him. He was watching the street — the vendors, the bunting, the evaluators ahead — but he wasn’t seeing any of it the way he usually did, through angles and composition and the constant quiet calculation of where the light was best. He was just walking beside me.
Present in a way that felt deliberate and costly, like he’d put the camera down on purpose and didn’t know what to do with his hands without it.
His thumb was turning the lens cap over in his pocket. I could see the shape of it moving through the fabric. The same nervous gesture from the market — the one that meant I’d said something that had landed somewhere he didn’t show people.
I hadn’t said anything this time. I was just wearing his shirt.
The evaluators stopped at the print-shop corner. Sandra wanted to see the community board — the one where Earl had pinned the apple-crate photo with a Sharpied heart two days ago. I’d taken it down. The board was clean. Professional.
Gus came out with banner samples. Sandra admired the vinyl. Judy photographed the storefront. The machinery of evaluation ground forward, competent and impersonal, and I stood in the middle of it wearing a shirt that smelled like a man who was standing six feet to my left trying not to look at me.
The wind picked up. The chambray billowed — just once, just enough to pull the fabric taut against my waist and then release it.
A nothing moment. A shirt in a breeze. Except Theo’s eyes tracked the movement like it was the only frame on the street, and I caught him doing it, and he caught me catching him, and for two full seconds we stood on a public sidewalk in front of a federal evaluation committee and had a conversation that consisted entirely of not looking away fast enough.
He looked away first. That was new. At the market, at the banner pole, in the alley — I’d always been the one to break.
This time Theo turned his head toward the storefronts and exhaled once, controlled, through his nose, and I watched his jaw set in a way that said he was having to work at this.
At standing beside me. At not reaching for the camera.
At being a man with empty hands next to a woman wearing his clothes in public.
Good, I thought, and then immediately hated myself for it, because good was not a professional response to your colleague’s visible discomfort. Good was the response of someone who wanted to be wanted and had just watched it happen in real time on a man’s face.
Diane appeared at my elbow. “Sandra wants to see the south-end setup for Saturday’s showcase. Walk her down. Take Theo — she’ll want documentation.”
“I can walk her myself.”
“She’ll want documentation,” Diane repeated, in the voice that meant this is not a discussion. “Saturday’s the final showcase before the committee files. If you want the narrative summary to feature Laurel Creek’s street-level energy, Sandra needs to see you and the campaign together. Both of you.”
She left. Diane delivered instructions like weather and expected you to dress accordingly.
Saturday. Both of us.
I turned to Theo. He was already looking at me — not at the camera, not at the street, at me — and his expression was careful in the way things are careful when someone is holding them too tight.
“Saturday,” I said.
“I heard.”
“So you know this keeps happening.”
“I know.”
The town moved around us — slowly, publicly, no privacy available at any price. I was standing on a sidewalk in chambray that wasn’t mine, and he was standing beside me without the camera between us, and every single thing about this was more than either of us had agreed to.
My cuff had come unrolled. The left one — it had loosened during the walk and slipped down past my wrist, past my hand, the sleeve hanging over my fingers the way it would never hang on his. I hadn’t noticed. Theo had.
He reached over. Slow. Watching my face the whole time for the word that would stop him.
He took the cuff between two fingers, folded it once, twice, three times, and set it back at my wrist. His fingertips grazed the inside of my forearm on the last fold — the thin skin, the pulse point — and my whole body went still in a way that I could not explain to a committee or to Diane or to myself.
“There,” he said. His voice was rough. Not the charm. Not the easy deflection. Something underneath it that sounded like it had cost him.
I didn’t pull my arm back. I should have. The evaluators were thirty feet ahead and one of them would turn around eventually and see — what? A man fixing a woman’s sleeve. Nothing. Everything.
“Saturday,” I said. Not a question this time.
“Saturday,” he said.
I started walking south. Toward Sandra, toward the showcase site, toward two more days of this.
Theo walked with me. Not thirty seconds behind. Not twelve feet to the left. Beside me, close enough that his arm almost touched the chambray, and the sleeve he’d just rolled stayed exactly where he’d put it.
I let it.