Page 14 of Soft Serve

The morning continues around us, the shop filling and thinning in its familiar rhythm, and we move through it in the careful parallel that has developed between us over the last few days. Close enough to work efficiently. Far enough to maintain the fiction that proximity is purely practical.

It is not purely practical. We both know it.

She hands me things without looking. I anticipate what she needs without being asked. And I catch Rosie watching us once with the expression of someone observing something inevitable.

By midday, the shop has fallen into its afternoon rhythm, and Paloma is back at the prep counter, working a second iteration of the morning's flavor. I'm restocking again, a task that apparently requires constant attention in a shop this busy, and the distance between us is about three feet and feels considerably smaller.

"The smoke," I say. "What is it?"

She doesn't look up. "Lapsang souchong. Tea. Steeped in the cream base before it's cooked down."

"And the floral note?"

"Dried lavender. Very small amount. Enough to suggest rather than announce."

"Suggest rather than announce," I repeat.

She glances up at that, catching something in my tone.

"It's a flavor principle," she says.

"It's a good principle generally," I say.

Her eyes hold mine for a beat, and something shifts in the air between us, warm and aware, the morning's accidental touch still sitting in the space between us like something neither of us has found a place to put.

"You're doing it again," she says.

"What?"

"Saying things that sound like they're about ice cream."

"They are about ice cream," I say.

"Charles."

My name in her mouth, flat and knowing, does something immediate and inconvenient to my attention.

"Yes," I say.

"Stop," she says, but the corner of her mouth is doing something she hasn't authorized.

"I'm restocking the toppings," I say. "I have no idea what you're referring to."

She laughs then, a real one, short and bright, surprised out of her, and the sound of it lands somewhere in my chest and stays there.

"You're impossible," she says.

"I've been told," I agree.

She shakes her head and goes back to her work, and I go back to mine. And the three feet between us feels charged in a way that has nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with the fact that I can still feel the inside of her wrist against my fingers, and I suspect she hasn't stopped thinking about it either.

She's working the base with slow strokes, her attention absorbed, and I watch her for a moment, I don't try to account for. The way she moves through this kitchen is like it's an extension of herself. The photograph of her grandmother above the door that she glances at sometimes when she doesn't know anyone's looking. The small, precise way she catalogs everything, flavors and people and information, like she's building something she intends to keep.

I think about a family dairy in Vermont and a decision I made in a quarter when I wasn't paying attention, and I think about what it costs to build something real and what it costs to have it taken. I think about the document still presumably face down on her counter at home.

I'm about to say something, though I'm not entirely sure what, when the bell above the door rings.

Then again. Then four more times in rapid succession.