He straightened from the display he’d been arranging. “I can do that.”
“Nope.” I positioned the stool and tested it with one foot. “I got it.”
“It’s a tall shelf.”
I stepped up onto the first rung and reached for the crowded top row. “I’ve done this roughly eight hundred times. I’m fine.”
He didn’t argue. He just came and stood at the base of the stool, one hand resting loose on the metal frame, present and not making anything of it. I chose not to comment and reached for the first book.
The top shelf was crowded with things I’d been meaning to rotate for months—a hardcover biography nobody had touched in a year, a coffee table book about lighthouses I’d genuinely forgotten I owned, a battered copy of something I’d been holding for a customer who’d never come back. I started passing them down one at a time. “Shelf under the register,” I said. “We’ll sort them later.”
He took each one as I handed it down, carrying them over without comment, returning each time with that same unhurried ease. The third or fourth exchange, my fingers brushed his on the spine of a book—brief, barely anything—and I lost my focus for exactly half a second.
That was all it took.
My weight shifted wrong. My foot slid on the edge of the step, and my stomach dropped, and my hand shot out for the shelf, and I knew that I was not going to catch myself in time.
Jasper’s hands were at my waist before I’d finished the thought, firm and certain, his palms warm through my shirt. He lowered me the last foot to the floor, and the world stopped.
Neither of us moved.
His hands were still at my waist. I could feel the warmth of each palm through the fabric of my shirt, every finger distinctand deliberate, and I was looking up at him from a distance that wasn’t very much distance at all—close enough to see the small change in his expression, close enough that the details of his face were suddenly very precise and my thoughts were not precise at all. They had scattered completely. My heart was slamming in a way I was fairly certain he could feel through his palms.
My hands were on the front of his shirt. I didn’t know when that had happened. Just lightly, just enough, my fingers curled into the fabric without any instruction from me, and I didn’t move them because moving them would require a level of functioning I didn’t currently have access to.
He was looking down at me with an expression that was careful and contemplative, with something underneath that pulled at something deep in my chest, and the room was absolutely silent, and I was aware of him in a way that went past physical awareness into something more like gravity—like the simple fact of him being this close was rearranging something in me that I wasn’t going to be able to put back the way it had been.
His hands were warm. And steady. And he still held me with that quiet certainty he brought to everything, his grip careful and sure, and I was looking up at him, my breath had gone shallow and uneven, and the distance between us was very small and getting harder to think around.
He let go slowly. One hand, then the other, trailing the barest second of contact before they dropped away, and the absence of them registered immediately and completely.
“Careful,” he said. Voice low and rumbly.
“I had it,” I said, because I needed to say something, and that was what came out. My hands were no longer on his shirt. I still couldn’t account for when I’d let go.
“You didn’t.” Easy. Not a judgment, just a fact, delivered from a distance that was still not far enough away from me for me to think clearly.
“I would have caught myself.” I smoothed the front of my shirt, looked at the shelf, and tried to locate the part of my brain that normally ran things.
“Probably not.”
“Probably not is different from definitely not.”
He looked at me for a moment with something at the corner of his mouth that wasn’t quite a smile, and I looked back at him, and something between us had morphed into something I didn’t have a name for yet, but I could feel the edges of with absolute clarity.
A small, dry smile. “Sure.”
My face was on fire. I knew it was on fire. I could feel the heat climbing up my neck, and there was nothing I could do about it except continue facing the shelf with great professional interest. “Thank you,” I said to a copy ofMiddlemarchthat had nothing to do with any of this.
“Anytime,” he said, behind me. The way he said it made me very glad I wasn’t looking at him.
I called a tea break ten minutes later on the grounds that I needed one—which was true—and that he probably needed one too, which was debatable. I filled the small electric kettle in the back and pulled two mugs off the shelf.
“Any preference?” I asked, opening the cabinet.
“Whatever you’re having.” He leaned against the doorframe of the back room, arms loosely crossed.
“Oolong,” I said, reaching for the tin I kept behind everything else. “I hide it so customers don’t ask. It needs a very specific steeping time, and most people lose interest halfway through.”
