Page 28 of Soft Serve

The fire is embers now, orange and low, the smell of wood smoke threading through the warm night air. The lake is very still. The string lights are mostly down, a few strands still caught in the lower branches, casting a dim, warm light over the grass and the water's edge.

I stand at the edge of the dying fire with a stack of folded blankets and the very clear awareness that there is no one left.

Just Charles, a few feet away, and the night, and the water.

He looks at me.

I look at him.

"I should go," I say.

"Yes," he says.

Neither of us moves.

The embers tick softly. Somewhere on the lake, a bird calls once and goes quiet. The night air is warm and heavy and smells like summer at its fullest, the kind of night that feels like it was built specifically to make sensible decisions difficult.

"The dock," I say, and I'm not entirely sure what I mean by it.

He extends his hand, open and not reaching for me, just offering me a choice, one that is laid out without pressure, does more damage to my self-possession than anything he's done all evening.

I take his hand, and we walk to the dock.

The wood is warm under my feet from the day's heat. The lake is dark and still around us, and the last of the ember light doesn’t reach this far. There’s just darkness, water, and the distant scatter of stars, and his hand in mine, and the knowledge that I am standing at the edge of something I have been pretending I could avoid.

I can't avoid it.

I couldn't avoid it the moment he walked into my shop with clean soap, quiet money, and the kind of attention that sees things rather than assesses them.

I've known that for days.

I drop his hand and step to the railing and stand there looking at the water, and I give myself one last moment. Not a doubt, exactly, just feeling the full weight of what I'm about to choose with both hands before I choose it.

This changes things.

It changes the campaign, the negotiation, the careful professional distance I've been using as a structure to hold everything else in place. It changes the story the town is already telling about us, which will now become a different story with different stakes. It changes the shape of my mornings, which have already reorganized themselves around his presence without my permission.

It changes me. I know that. I turn around.

He's closer than I expected, having followed me to the railing without crowding me, standing in the dark with the patience he carries everywhere, watching me work through something he seems to understand without being told.

"I know what this costs," I say.

"So do I," he says.

"I'm not someone who does this lightly."

"I know," he says. "That's not why I'm here."

"Then why," I ask, and it comes out quieter than I intended, stripped of its edges.

He steps closer.

"Because you are the most honest thing I have encountered in longer than I want to admit," he says, low and even. "And because I have been paying attention to you for a week, I am not done. And because I think you know exactly what this is, and you're still standing here."

I am still standing here.

He reaches up and pushes a curl back from my face, his fingers gentle at my temple, and I feel my breath change, the shallow, careful quality of it giving way to something less controlled.