Page 13 of Soft Serve

I am cataloguing all of it.

Paloma emerges from the kitchen just after ten with a small steel dish and a spoon, and she sets it on the prep counter without ceremony.

"Come here," she says.

I cross to her side of the counter, close enough that I can smell the cold and sweetness that clings to her in the mornings, and she turns the dish slightly toward me.

The color is deep, the kind of amber that sits at the edge of burnt without crossing it, with something darker swirled through it that I can't immediately identify.

"What is it?" I ask.

"Tell me after you taste it," she says, holding out the spoon.

I take it, aware in some precise and inconvenient way of the brief contact of her fingers against mine, and taste it slowly the way she tasted it herself before she called me over, giving it the attention it deserves.

It hits sweet first, caramel or something near it, and then it opens into something smokier and stranger, a low burn that isn't heat exactly but shares its architecture. Then underneath all of it, quieter than everything else, something floral. Fleeting. Almost gone before I've identified it.

I set the spoon down.

"It tastes like the end of summer," I say. "The last night when the heat finally breaks, and you can smell everything the season held onto."

The kitchen goes very still.

Paloma is looking at me with an expression I haven't seen from her before, unguarded in a way that lasts only a second before she catches it and files it away somewhere I'm not permitted access.

"That's…," she starts, then stops.

"Too much," I offer.

"No," she says, and her voice is quieter than usual. "That's exactly it."

We stand on the same side of the counter, closer than the task required, the steel dish between us doing very little to justify the proximity. I'm aware of the warmth of her, the quality of her attention when it isn't armored, and I'm aware that I have stopped thinking about the campaign or the board or anything that exists outside this kitchen in any meaningful way.

She reaches past me for the notebook she keeps on the shelf behind the prep station, the one where she records flavor notes in handwriting that's half print and half something entirely her own, and her arm crosses in front of me at the same moment I reach to move the dish out of her way.

My hand closes around her wrist. Not firmly. Not deliberately. It’s an automatic response of a body moving to prevent a collision, my fingers wrapping around the inside of her wrist for one suspended second before my brain catches up with what my hand has done.

Neither of us moves.

I can feel her pulse under my fingers, quicker than her composure suggests, and the shock of that small honest thing moves through me with a force entirely disproportionate to the moment.

I release her.

"Sorry," I say.

She pulls her arm back slowly, not quickly, which tells me something, and looks down at her wrist for a half second before she looks back up at me. Something passes through her expression, complicated and brief, acknowledgment and retreat happening simultaneously, and I watch her make a decision.

"You're going to need better reflexes if you're working the counter," she says.

Her voice is perfectly even.

"I'll work on it," I say.

"You do that." She opens her notebook, uncaps her pen, and writes something with the focused attention of someone who has decided the previous ten seconds did not happen and is prepared to defend that position under oath.

I turn back to the prep station and stand there for a moment with my hand at my side, still feeling the memory of her pulse against my fingers, and I understand with complete clarity that I am in considerably more trouble than I assessed two days ago.

The trouble is, I don't want to fix it.