It didn't break. It rolled. Moose stood at the windowsill with the deeply offended innocence of a dog who'd just saved his owner from herself and was prepared to be thanked at any moment.
We both jumped.
I stepped back, cleared my throat, and pretended my hands hadn't just been on his face. He cleared his throat and pretended he hadn't just been letting me decide whether to kiss him.
I picked the herb jar up off the floor and set it back on the windowsill. I came back to the counter. I finished the hairline scrape in eight seconds.
"You're done."
"Thanks, Astrid."
"Don't thank me. Keep the deep one on your hand dry tonight. If it gets red, you call me. If it gets red and hot, you go to the clinic in town."
"Alright."
He sat on my counter for another beat with his hands on his thighs and a small smile, trying not to be a smile, working at one corner of his mouth.
"Astrid."
"Yeah."
"Have dinner with me."
I looked up from packing the gauze back into the kit.
I'd heard him. I'd heard the word he hadn't said.Out.My hands kept packing gauze, methodical, the same motion they made at the end of every house call I'd ever done.
"What?"
It was the worst stalling I'd done in my adult life. He knew it. I knew he knew it.
"Saturday. Have dinner with me."
"Easton, we have dinner. You're at my counter twice a week."
The deflection came out of my mouth before my brain cleared it. A joke I'd been making at twenty-nine after six years of making jokes instead of saying things.
The smile he'd been losing the fight against won at one corner of his mouth.
"Out, Astrid. I'm asking you out. A table neither of us cooked at."
"Oh."
There it was.
He'd handed it to me twice now—the Saturday and the out—and there was nowhere left to put it but in my own two hands. He was on my counter in a uniform, bleeding, with his knees on either side of mine. He was asking me, in plain words, to be his date in public.
I had thenoall the way up to my teeth. The carefulnoI'd been carrying since I drove out of Boston in the spring. The no about being no one's. The no about a six-year marriage and a man's mother in my kitchen with a glass of wine.
I opened my mouth around it.
"Okay."
He let out the breath he'd been holding.
"Yeah?"
"Yes."
