She picks up the dish. “Go check on game alley.”
“In a minute,” I reply.
The corner of her mouth moves.
I help with the dishes.
Nobody asked me to, and my competence in this area is limited compared to Tristan’s, but I can wipe things and carry things. That covers about sixty percent of cleaning, and the remaining forty percent Lola covers. Together we’re actually functional.
Tristan moves around us with the serenity of someone who has noted the development and has decided to let it proceed without comment.
“You’re in my way,” Lola says, about forty minutes in.
“No, I’m not.”
“You’re on the wrong side of the counter.”
“I’m on the side with better access to the—”
“You’re on my side,” she says.
I look down. She’s right. Somehow, over the course of forty minutes of cleaning, I’ve ended up on her side of the counter, which puts us at approximately shoulder-width distance and neither of us has moved to correct it.
“Hm,” I hum.
“Hm,” she agrees.
Neither of us moves.
Tristan makes a sound from the far end of the kitchen that I choose to interpret as a cough.
“Game alley,” Lola says.
“Still in a minute.”
She looks up at me. Close, at this distance, I can see the detail of her. The dark brown of her eyes, the still-slightly-controlled jaw that is less controlled than it was this morning. She’s not tracking exits or holding herself at the distance she’s maintained since she walked into Tristan’s café and looked at us like she’d already decided what to do if we were trouble.
She’s just here. Looking at me.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi,” she replies, a little puzzled.
“How are you doing?”
“I’m standing in a kitchen cleaning.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
She stares at me for a spell. The real answer behind the deflection is visible. I can read it, the warmth of it, the feeling of someone who is, for the first time in a while, okay in the actual sense and not just the functional sense.
“Good,” she replies. “I’m doing good.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Me too.”
We go to the carnival at three.
Lola walks the alley with me during the pack up check, which she does now without being asked, and she spots two things I missed, which I note and correct. She’s going to know this stuff better than I do soon.
