CHAPTER 6
Theo
Saturday morning I gave Mae Lane the thing I was certain she wanted, and I gave it to her perfectly, and I was wrong about every inch of it.
The south end was mine by seven. I adjusted Gus's banner brackets, helped Doris stack her soap crates level, angled the vendor tables so the foot traffic would pull toward the honey stand instead of bottlenecking at the crosswalk.
Physical work, good work, the kind that made a street feel managed without anyone noticing who'd managed it.
By the time Mae arrived at seven-forty, clipboard in hand, hair pulled back in the knot that meant she'd been awake since five, I had made myself so useful to the showcase that I hadn't stood within ten feet of her.
After Thursday — the sleeve, the walk south where she'd let me stay beside her, the chambray still holding the shape of her wrist when she gave it back — careful felt like the only responsible geometry.
She had a showcase to run. The committee's final field visit before they filed.
Sandra Chen's notebook was open and waiting, and the last thing Mae needed was a man standing too close because he couldn't stop thinking about the way her pulse had kicked against his knuckles while he rolled her cuff.
So I kept the distance clean. Generous, I thought. The kind of space a man gives a woman when he wants her to know he heard what she said and won't take it as permission to want more.
Mae set her clipboard on the south tent table and scanned the layout.
Vendors, bunting, the honey stand with Linda's hand-lettered signs.
Everything placed. Her eyes moved once across the row, found me at the north crosswalk adjusting a sandwich board, and came back to the clipboard without stopping.
"Table seven's angled wrong," she said. Not to me. To the street.
Gus adjusted it.
I'd been standing right next to table seven thirty seconds ago.
That was the first one, and I missed it completely.
By nine, Sandra's group had arrived — lanyards and notebooks, the posture of people who had evaluated forty towns and expected nothing from the forty-first. Mae walked them south, narrating vendor retention and traffic patterns, and I fell in behind.
Twelve feet back. The professional distance I'd decided was correct, because deciding felt better than wanting, and wanting was all I'd been doing since Thursday.
At the honey stand, Mae paused. Left a gap beside her. Specific. The width of a person. She didn't look back to check whether I'd fill it. She just left it open the way you hold a door — briefly, without begging — and kept talking to Sandra about year-over-year stall occupancy.
I moved to the other side of the table.
The gap closed. Mae squared her shoulders, and her voice went half a register more precise. Tighter. The way a bolt turns when you've passed hand-tight and reached for a wrench.
"Retention is ninety-one percent year over year," she told Sandra. "We track by vendor, not by stall. The relationship is with the person, not the footage."
Sandra wrote it down. I told myself the angle was better from here.
At ten-fifteen, Mae needed the banner samples from Gus's truck. She was carrying the clipboard and two vendor binders, hands full, and the truck was forty feet north. I was eight feet away, hands empty, doing nothing that mattered.
She looked at me. Directly. I saw her mouth open — the beginning of my name, or a task, or something ordinary that would have put me back in her orbit.
I saw the calculation cross her face. The fast audit she ran before every request: who's available, who's close, who can I ask without it costing me something I'm not willing to spend.
She closed her mouth. Turned to a volunteer I didn't recognize.
"Sarah. Banner samples from Gus's truck. The long roll, not the cut sheets."
Sarah went. I stood there with empty hands and a clear sightline to the look on Mae's face as she turned back to her clipboard — a look that was already gone by the time it would have mattered, filed away beneath efficiency and the discipline of a woman who does not ask twice.
I felt it like a door swinging shut so quietly I only caught the draft.
Mae's posture sharpened after that. The version of her that managed a room so tightly no one could find a seam.
I'd seen her use it on Earl, on budgets, on moments that threatened to become personal.
Shoulders level. Sentences short. Every instruction delivered at the exact professional temperature that made people do their jobs without wondering whether she was angry.
She was using it on me.
I still thought I was being careful.
At eleven, I brought her a coffee. The stand near the crosswalk knew her order — black, hot, no room — and I carried it to the south tent and set it on the table beside her clipboard.
Handing it directly felt like too much. My fingers near her fingers.
The memory of Thursday. So I set the cup down.
Four inches from her hand. Close enough to be thoughtful. Far enough to be safe.
Mae looked at the cup. Looked at the four inches of table between it and her hand. Looked at me.
"Thanks," she said. The word landed like a cabinet closing.
She picked up the coffee, drank, and set it back down on the opposite side of her clipboard. Farther from where I'd placed it. I felt the adjustment in my sternum like a correction I'd earned but couldn't parse.
After that, everything leveled. She directed me to shoot the south arch the way she'd direct a vendor to move a table — correct tone, correct information, no warmth, no edge. The absence of both.
After noon, Diane herded Sandra's group north for the final loop, and for ten minutes Mae and I were alone at the south tent.
Surrounded by people — vendors packing, volunteers stacking chairs — but out of official rotation.
No committee. No clipboard performance. Just the two of us and the silence of a space that had run out of professional excuses.
She was repacking a vendor binder. I was beside the tent pole, watching her hands.
Fast, efficient, aligning pages and clipping sections because order was the one thing that still obeyed her.
A page slipped. She caught it. Her thumb pressed the binder ring shut with more force than the mechanism required, and I heard the snap across the table.
I reached for the binder to hold it steady.
She reached for it at the same time.
Our hands didn't touch. They came within an inch — my fingers reaching for the spine, hers closing on the edge — and I pulled back. The same instinct that had kept me twelve feet away all morning. Don't crowd her. Don't take Thursday as permission.
I set my hand on the table instead. Open. Empty. Safe.
Mae went still.
She stood with her fingers on the binder and looked at my hand on the table — the hand that had been on her wrist two days ago, that had rolled her sleeve three careful turns and grazed the skin underneath — and I watched her face do something I wasn't prepared for.
Recognition. Then hurt. Then the door coming down so fast I almost missed what was behind it.
She closed the binder. Put it in the crate. Straightened.
"You should get the afternoon shots before Sandra comes back," she said. Flat. Professional. The voice of a woman who had left a door open four times and watched me choose the other side of the room each time, and had just finished deciding what that meant.
And I heard it.
Finally. Too late and all at once. The space underneath her words hit harder than the words themselves: the honey-stand gap, Sarah with the banner samples, the coffee moved to the far side of the clipboard, her hand going still above the binder.
Mae didn't ask twice. She closed doors, tightened seams, and moved things out of reach.
"Mae."
"The afternoon shots —"
"I'm not going to get the afternoon shots."
She stopped. Eyes on mine. Guarded, dark, her jaw set the way it set when she was holding something she would not put down gently. She was not going to ask again. I understood that completely, the way you understand a locked door — after you've already heard the bolt.
I stepped forward. Into the space I'd been keeping empty all day.
Her chin lifted. Not softening — bracing. Her fingers tightened on the crate edge, and the air between us was the width of every wrong choice I'd made since seven o'clock.
I reached for the binder in the crate. Something to hand her. Something to close the distance with an excuse still attached, because I didn't trust myself to close it without one.
She took it from my hand. Fingers on the spine. Deliberate.
And then the binder was on the table, and her hand was on my shirt — fistful of cotton, five fingers, her knuckles pressing my sternum — and she pulled me forward the last six inches because I had made her wait all day and she was done waiting.
Her mouth hit mine and my brain went white.
Not a brush. Not hesitant. Her grip twisted the fabric and her other hand came up to my jaw — thumb on my cheekbone, fingers behind my ear, holding me exactly where she wanted me — and she kissed me like she was settling an argument she'd been having with herself since the market.
Thorough. Specific. Angry in a way that tasted like want, that tasted like every gap I'd left and she'd swallowed, and I felt it in my spine before I felt it in my chest.
My hands found her waist. Both of them. The useless, cautious hands that had been choosing the wrong side of every table since dawn. I pulled her in hard enough that the crate scraped the table leg, wood on metal, loud enough to cut through the blood in my ears.
She made a sound against my mouth. Lower than a word.
My hand slid up her back — spread wide, pressing the space between her shoulder blades — and she arched forward into the pressure.
Her teeth caught my bottom lip. Brief. Deliberate.
I stopped breathing. My fingers curled into the fabric at her hip and her pulse was hammering where her wrist pressed against my neck, and I could feel every heartbeat like a second conversation underneath the first.
She pulled back two inches. Hand still fisted in my shirt. My hand still on her back. Both of us breathing like we'd been underwater and had just remembered what air was for.
Her cheeks were flushed. Her eyes dark and furious and certain — certain in a way that made my stomach drop, because certainty on Mae Lane looked like trouble when I was this close to it.
From the north end, a volunteer's voice: "Mae? Sandra's group is turning around."
Mae's fingers uncurled from my shirt. Slowly. She smoothed the wrinkle she'd made — hand flat against my chest, pressing once, one second longer than repair required. I felt her palm through the cotton. She was not apologizing. She was confirming.
I didn't step back. I tried. Somewhere between my brain and my feet the old geometry refused to load, and I stood there with my hand still on her hip while Mae's eyes tracked the distance I wasn't making.
She picked up the binder. Looked at me. The flush was still on her cheeks, and she didn't hide it, and she didn't explain it, and she didn't give me a clean sentence about what this meant.
"Walk with me," she said. Low. Not a request.
We came out of the south tent and I walked beside her.
Shoulder to shoulder. The distance I'd been rationing all day was gone, and I couldn't rebuild it, and my hand at my side kept drifting toward hers — close enough to feel the warmth coming off her skin without touching it.
Pulling it back required a decision I wasn't making anymore.
Sandra's group rounded the corner. Diane first, clipboard moving, then Rick and Judy with their notebooks, then Sandra with the look of a woman forming a final impression.
Mae's voice came online. Steady. Competent.
The version that made committees trust entire towns.
She walked Sandra through the afternoon layout without notes — vendor counts, Saturday foot traffic, the south-end expansion plan she'd been building since April.
Every sentence precise. Every answer three seconds faster than the question deserved.
I stood beside her. I didn't step back.
Her arm brushed mine. Sleeve against sleeve. A small collision that happened because neither of us had corrected the gap.
She didn't adjust.
I didn't either.
Sandra asked about signage consistency. Mae answered. Diane glanced at me — one look, fast and clinical, filing information without processing it aloud. I met her eyes. She looked away first.
Mae's hand brushed mine. Not the arm this time — her fingers, grazing my knuckles as she gestured toward the vendor row. Her hand came back to her side and stayed close, and I felt the warmth on my skin like a question neither of us was going to mention in front of a federal evaluation committee.
The showcase moved north. Mae led. I walked beside her. My mouth still felt like hers — the pressure, the certainty, the sound she'd made that I was going to hear every time I closed my eyes for the foreseeable future.
The distance stayed closed. Not because we'd agreed.
Not because either of us had said a word about it since the tent.
Because neither of us moved away. Every step north proved it again.
Sandra kept asking questions. Mae kept answering.
I kept feeling the ghost of her fist in my shirt every time her sleeve touched mine.
Mae's sleeve touched mine again.
She kept walking.
I kept walking beside her.