"Get up, finish your coffee, and go get your mail."
I peeled my face off the table and wiped under both eyes with the heel of my hand. "Thank you, Willow."
"For what."
"For looking out for me."
And there — for one second, gone almost before it arrived — the mischief dropped off her face and something like sincerity came up to the surface. The whole operation had only ever been the wrapping on it. Then she pulled the bossing back on like a cardigan.
"Hurry up,” she said. “That man is going to come over here if you don't go over there, mark my words, and I am too old to witness anything I am going to wish to God I hadn't witnessed."
A few minutes later, I left Willow on the porch — with a knowing laugh I didnotappreciate — and walked my flagstones to the gate because pretending I had any other reason to be outside would have required acting, and I was too tired to act.
I’d grabbed my trash bag off the side gate on the way past — a small concession to dignity. If I was going to be observed by half the cul-de-sac, I might as well be doing two errands.
He hadn’t seen me yet.
He had his back to me, bent over the bike, one hand braced on the tank and the other working a wrench. The man beside him was talking. The black t-shirt across his back had given up trying to lie about any of what was under it. I could see his back muscles moving each time the wrench turned — a slow seam of motion under the cotton that my eye followed before I'd had the chance to ask it to. The hem had ridden up at the waistband, an inch of skin showing low on one side where the shirt had untucked itself. Hair damp at the nape of his neck. Black ink running the length of one forearm and disappearing into the sleeve. When he switched his grip, his shoulder rolled, the cottonacross it shifted with the muscle underneath, and my hand went slack at the wrist.
The trash bag bit into my palm again when my fist closed around it. My mouth had gone dry. My heart rate had picked up the way it picked up before a code.
There was, on the available evidence, no code.
I lifted the latch on my mailbox.
The man beside him said something I didn't catch and nudged him with an elbow. He straightened and turned. He saw me across the road, and the slow left-side half-smile came onto his face like he had been waiting all afternoon for an excuse.
His face. The mouth. The jaw. The two days of dark stubble along it.
Oh.
Oh, no.
Oh god. His mouth.It’s him.
"Sophia," he said.
The drawl ran under the second syllable. The hairs on the back of my neck lifted. I shut my mouth around the breath I was halfway through taking and made it stay shut.
"Oh," I got out. "It's you."
He set the wrench down on the bike's seat before crossing his driveway and stopping at the edge of the asphalt. The toe of one work-boot half an inch back from where his property ended and the street began.
I could feel the color traveling up the side of my neck.
"It's me," he agreed. The half-smile did not leave his face. "Small world."
I nodded. I tried to make a word. My mouth did not currently know any.
"Caleb." He tapped the center of his own chest with two fingers. The back of my own left hand, currently in possession of the trash bag handle, started to prickle warm right where histhumb had pressed four nights before — skin remembering on its own. "In case the first time wasn't a memorable —"
A laugh got out of me. Half a laugh. Quarter of a laugh. The smallest possible audio escape that could still be classified as a laugh.
The half-smile went up a degree.
"It was memorable," I said.
"I'll keep that in mind." He tipped his chin at the bag in my hand. "Want me to take that to the curb for you?"
