“Welcome to Willow Creek.” Chris arranged some of the baked goods into a little display under a domed glass lid and stowed the rest under the counter while I got the coffee and espresso machines up and running for the day. “News travels fast around here.” She cast a glance my way. “Is that bad? Do you not want people to know about it? Are you two keeping it secret or something?”
“No. At least, I don’t think so?” I thought about going to Faire on Saturday, seeing Simon again, and pretending this hadn’t happened. His eyes looking through me as we got ready, not acknowledging the way we’d reached for each other in the middle of the night when sleep wasn’t an option, the perfect way we fit together, the sounds he made when he was inside me. The sounds we both made. My heart trembled at the thought, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it. He was a part of me now, and all I could do was hope I was a part of him too. “No,” I said again, more definitively this time. “Hell, no. I’ll send a group email to everyone in Faire if you want me to.” Kids were on that mailing list, but what the hell.
Chris looked at me closely for a second, then smiled. “Good.” I felt like I’d passed some kind of test. I got it. Simon was a lifelong resident of this town, and Willow Creek looked after its own. For all that I’d gotten involved around here, I was still the newcomer. She wanted to make sure Simon wasn’t going to get hurt. So did I.
“Okay. New topic.” I flipped open the notebook I kept under the counter near the cash register. “Book club. It’s getting too late in the summer to do one before Labor Day. But if we decide on a book today, I can get an announcement out on social media, and hopefully get some interest, and the event itself can be sometime in late September.”
Chris nodded. “Give everyone time to order books.”
“Exactly.” I tapped my pen on the page. “This will work, believe me.”
“Oh, I do.” She headed back to the front of the store again, and I followed. “Come on. While I’m thinking about it, let me show you how special orders work. You like all that online stuff, you’ll pick it up quick.”
As the lazy summer morning turned into a lazy summer day without a lot of foot traffic, Chris stood up and stretched.
“I’ve made an executive decision. I’m going home.”
“What?” I looked at the clock. Not quite lunchtime. “It’s way too early to close.”
“I didn’t say anything about closing. I said I was going home.” She got her purse from under the front counter and rummaged for her keys. “You’ve covered the register plenty of times. You know what you’re doing.”
My instinct was to argue with her, but she was right. I did know what I was doing. Our midweek traffic was small enough that I could man both the cash register and the coffee counter with a minimum of trouble.
“Okay,” I finally said. “I can handle it.” She was probably taking advantage of having an employee while she could. I couldn’t blame her for snatching a few hours off here and there.
The bell over the front door chimed, and I caught my breath as Simon walked in. After all this time, we hadn’t interacted much outside of Faire. (Unless you counted one pretty significant interaction in his bedroom the night before last. I for one counted the hell out of it.) He looked like a strange amalgamation of his identities: the crisply ironed shirt and immaculate jeans of Simon Graham, but with the longer hair and face-framing beard of Captain Blackthorne. The juxtaposition was . . . well, I squirmed a little and fought the urge to hop the counter and wrinkle that shirt in the best possible way.
Simon stopped short inside the doorway when he saw me, and Chris nudged me with her shoulder. “Now, I know for a fact you can handle him.” While my face flamed with mortification and Simon’s eyebrows knit in confusion, she snickered at her own joke and walked out of the store with a wave. Simon held the door for her, then turned back to me.
“Hey.”
“Hey.” I dropped my head to the counter and let the cool glass soothe my forehead. “God, it’s like working for my mother.”
“What was that about?”
I shook my head as I stood back up. “She knows. Apparently, the whole town does.”
“Knows?” After a beat his expression cleared and his eyes widened. “About us?”
“Yeah.” I bit the inside of my cheek and waited for his reaction.
“Huh.” He looked over his shoulder in the direction Chris had gone, as if he could still see her. “Well, if Chris knows, that’s as good as taking an ad out in the paper.” He tilted his head, thinking. “Do people still do that?”
“Do what?”
“Take ads out in the paper. Do people still even read the paper?”
“I . . . I guess?” I was a little confused by the direction the conversation had gone, but now that he mentioned it I was curious too. “I mean, my mother does. The Sunday paper has coupons, you know.” Coupons that she still clipped and sent once a week to April and me, inside greeting cards where the coupons fell out like oversized confetti when we opened them.
He considered that. “Seems like a dying thing, though. So will the idiom change? Should we start saying things like ‘posting it online’?”
“‘Create a banner ad’?” I suggested, leaning my elbows on the counter.
“See, I like that better.” He mirrored my pose and he was close, so close to me that my heart pounded. I was no match for his smile. “Close to the original idiom, and it implies the same thing—spending money to make an announcement.”
I allowed myself a second to be lost in his smile before I laughed. “Good God. Once an English teacher, always an English teacher.”
“Guilty. I can’t help it, I love language.” He straightened up again, which brought him too far away. I missed him. “That’s why I’m here, actually.”
“Because you love language?” I gestured around. “Well, it is a bookstore.”
“Because I’m an English teacher. I wanted to check on the summer reading inventory. Make sure kids are actually doing the reading.”
“Or at least buying the books?” I tried not to let my disappointment show, since I thought he’d come to see me. Seeing him today had lit up things in me that I hadn’t even realized were dark, and all my doubt had fallen away once he walked through the door. But now the dark came creeping back, like a cloud over the summer sun, and it chilled me just as much, because he wasn’t here to see me. This was just business.
The display was relatively picked over, but there were a few copies of each book left. I straightened up the books left on the table. “Looks like you’ve got some slackers in your class this year. Unless they’re putting it off till the end of the summer. I hope they’re speed readers.”