I should say no. I should take the plate and manage this myself. I should put a counter between his hands and my mouth.
“Yes,” I reply traitorously.
He feeds me the second piece the same way. More deliberately this time. He knows what he’s doing now, knows I’m not stopping him, and the brush of his fingers at my lips is less incidental and more intentional. The honey-salt taste of it blooms across my tongue and I breathe through my nose. I focus very hard on the caramelized filling.
“Good?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, which is about the pastry and also not entirely about the pastry, and we both know it. Neither of us says so.
“Come around,” Tristan says, lifting the end panel. “You’re staff.”
“I’m not on until Saturday.”
“You’re here and you look like you want to see how it runs.” It’s not a manipulation, I’m pretty sure. He can see what I want before I’ve negotiated with myself about whether to want it, which should be alarming but warms me on the inside instead. “Come in.”
I go around. I go in.
The stall from the inside is compact and organized. He has obviously done this enough times to knowexactly what he needs and where, no excess, no gaps. I lean against the side wall and watch him run the first rush. He’s calm under pressure, not fast exactly but without wasted motion. He talks to customers in that way he has and people leave the stall looking slightly better than they arrived, which I have noticed is consistently the effect Tristan has on his environment.
I start helping without being asked.
I can’t watch an operation run and not help. It’s a character flaw.
He doesn’t comment on it. He just adjusts. He moves slightly to give me the space I need, passes things before I have to ask, and within ten minutes we are running the stall together like we’ve done it a hundred times before.
It’sgood. I don’t let myself think about why it’s good. I just run the stall.
Jack arrives at seven-thirty like a natural disaster with better hair. “She’s actually here,” he says, appearing at the serving window with the energy of a person who has been elsewhere being chaotic and has come to share it.
“I’m staff,” I say. “Tristan needed—”
“Tristan didn’t need anything, Tristan is an extremely competent one-man operation and you know it.” He grins at me through the window. “You wanted to be here.”
“I wanted to see how it works before Saturday.”
“Those are the same thing in this context.”
“They’re really not.”
“Lola.” He leans on the counter. “It’s opening night.You’re at a carnival. You’re allowed to justbeat a carnival.”
The thing about Jack is that he’s not wrong in a way that I can dismantle, he’s just wrong in ways that I can’t explain without giving him information I’m not giving him. I’m not allowed to justbeat a carnival. I’m allowed to be at a carnival for strategic reasons, and the fact that those reasons feel increasingly weak… that’s my problem.
“Go away, Jack,” I say.
“Come do the games with me when your shift ends.”
“I’m not—”
“One game. Ring toss. I fixed the spacing.”
I glare at him. “I know. I watched you do it.”
“Then you know it’s fair now, and you know you can probably beat it, and I know you want to try.” He says this with complete confidence that is also, unfortunately, completely accurate. “Thirty minutes. Tristan can spare you.”
“I can spare her,” Tristan confirms, without looking up.
“Traitor,” I say.
