“Go.”
“I’m going.” He didn’t move. He was looking at me like he was memorizing something, like he wanted the picture of me standing in my shop with my hands pressed to my face to be the last thing he took with him out the door.
“Jasper.”
“I’m going.” He pushed off the doorframe. “Tomorrow. Your place. Lunch. What time?”
“Noon? Is noon okay?”
“Noon’s good.” He paused, his hand on the door, mouth tipping up at the corner. “Give me your number.”
“You know where I live,” I sputtered. “You don’t need my number.”
“I know.” He held out his phone anyway, like he had all the time in the world. “I still want it.”
Oh.
Wow.
Okay.
I took the phone with fingers that were not entirely cooperative and tapped in my number and handed it back. He looked down at the screen and saved it, and the whole thing took about fifteen seconds, but felt considerably longer. He slid the phone back into his pocket and looked at me one more time, his hand still on the door.
“For the record,” he said, “I’m counting it as a date.”
“Out. I can’t take any more. My face is on fire. I could literally spontaneously combust, and it would be your fault.”
He went, the smile still at the corner of his mouth. The door swung shut behind him.
I stood there for a full ten seconds with my hands still pressed to my face. Then I walked, very slowly, back behind the counter, sat down on one of the stools, and put my forehead flat against the cool wood of the countertop.
“Oh my god,” I said to no one. “Oh. My. Freaking. God.”
I had invited him upstairs. I had invited him upstairs, to my apartment, to meet my cats. I had, in the space of roughly ninety seconds, escalated from labor lunch to home-cooked meal in my living room with all three of my Austen cats present as chaperones, and he had said yes,andhe had called it a date,andhe had asked for my phone number even though he already knew where to find me. Tomorrow he was going to walk up the stairs to my apartment, and Wentworth was going to climb him like a tree, and I was going to have to cook something that wasn’t cereal, and oh my god,oh my god.
The copy ofPersuasionwas still sitting there, a few inches from my nose, exactly where I’d left it. I turned my head just enough to look at it. Then I picked it up and held it for a moment, running my thumb along the cover, and laughed—a small, helpless, disbelieving laugh—into the quiet of the empty shop.
I hadn’t felt like this in a long time. Maybe ever—not quite like this. I’d told Eric the truth. I wasn’t dating anyone. I wasn’t looking to date anyone. I had a shop to run and a life I’d only just finished rebuilding and a list of reasons, very good reasons, why getting tangled up with someone right now was a bad idea.
But I kept thinking about Jasper’s hands at my waist on the ladder. And the way he’d saidI knowlike it was a whole sentence. And how he’d looked at me, thirty seconds ago, when he said he liked it when I blushed.
Labor lunch, I thought.Sure, Cara.
My phone buzzed on the counter. I picked it up.
Unknown Number: Looking forward to tomorrow.—J
I made the not-word noise again. Louder this time, because nobody was around to hear it. I saved the number under Jasper and then, before I could overthink it, typed back:Me too.I hit send before I could delete it. Then I set the phone down and stared at it for a full five seconds like it might do something else.
It didn’t.
Something had changed. For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t in a hurry to figure it out. I set the book down on the counter—not in any of the sorted stacks, just there, where it had been—and went to finish unpacking the last box with my face still warm and a small, foolish smile I couldn’t seem to get rid of.
Tomorrow, I have to clean my apartment. Tomorrow, I have to figure out what to cook. Tomorrow, I had to introduce a man I was absolutely, definitely, one hundred percentnotdating to the three cats I had named after literary heroes because I was a romantic at heart and had been pretending otherwise for years.
Tomorrow was going to be a problem.
I could not wait.
