Page 27 of Soft Serve

The fire crackles in the distance. The music has shifted to something slower, drifting across the water with the warm evening air, and the town continues its easy noise, oblivious or pretending to be.

"Charles," she says.

I look at her.

Her eyes are steady, the dark water behind her, the glow of the bonfire catching the edges of her hair.

"I'm not pretending that didn't happen," she says.

"Neither am I," I say.

She nods once, a small, decisive thing, and turns toward the path.

I fall into step beside her.

We walk back toward the fire together, not touching, the space between us charged and full of everything that has been said and everything that hasn't been said yet and everything that is going to happen whether either of us is ready for it.

Theo is busy with the lights. Mrs. Calder is back in her chair with her drink. Millie sees us emerge from the path together and does something with her expression that she converts, with more effort than usual, into a very neutral look at the fire.

Nobody says anything.

Nobody needs to.

I stand beside Paloma at the edge of the gathering, close enough that our arms almost touch, and I watch the fire and the people and the easy warmth of a town that knows how to be together, and I think about a dock in the dark and the sound she made against my mouth and the weight of a decision I have no intention of reversing.

She glances at me sideways.

I look back.

Something passes between us, quick and warm and entirely private in the middle of a crowd, the shared knowledge of two people who have crossed a line and are standing on the other side of it together.

The fire burns lower.

The town hums around us.

I am standing in the middle of a life I didn't plan, and I am not looking for the exit.

That, I think, is probably everything.

Chapter 9

Paloma

The bonfire dies the way good things do.

Slowly, without drama, the crowd thins in ones and twos until the music stops and the bottles are gathered, and the last of the string lights get coiled by someone's careful hands. The town says it's goodnight the way it does everything, warmly and without rushing, and I move through the cleanup the way I always do, automatic and present, collecting things that need collecting, saying the right words to the right people.

Charles works beside me.

He doesn't ask what needs doing. He just sees it and does it, quietly, and I am aware of him with every nerve I have and doing an increasingly poor job of pretending otherwise.

Theo leaves with a look that says everything and nothing.

Mrs. Calder squeezes my arm once on her way past, a small, firm pressure that feels like a whole conversation.

Millie hugs me, which she does every time she leaves anywhere, but this hug is slightly longer than usual, and she says into my shoulder, very quietly, "You're allowed to want things, you know," and then she's gone before I can respond.

The last car pulls away.