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“Thank you. That’s very generous.”
The comment earned her a sideways smirk—the smirk she thought of as his spinster smile, since he saved it for when she said something that came out particularly old-maidenish.
It wasn’t her fault. It was tricky trying to figure how to be with him. He was hardly a stranger, but she knew only one way to treat him other than icy. It wasn’t an option.
Meanwhile, all the pretending was wearing on her. Pretending not to hear him walking in her hallways, not to notice his damp towel hung over the towel rod in his room. Not to be thinking about his body, stripped and wet.
Pretending that she was here to serve him breakfast and change his sheets, and that she didn’t want to talk to him or see him smile, to tackle him in the hallway and roll around on the floor with him until she was wet and panting and out of her mind.
“You always run the bake sale?” he asked.
“Always.”
“And you spend Sunday mornings doing the Methodist breakfast.”
“Yep.”
“And organize the volunteers for the hospital gift shop.”
“Yeah.”
Carson smiled that wide, crooked grin of his, and her stomach filled up with adorable cartoon grasshoppers, springing around on their grasshopper feet. “Taken over any more of my mom’s jobs?”
She had. She’d taken over almost all of them at one point or another in the past five years, as Glory’s health declined. He probably thought that was old-maidenish, too, or weird, or unnecessary. Julie was the youngest person on every board she belonged to, and the only outsider. Why don’t you just write a check? her mother would ask.
But she appreciated having been given so many ways to belo
ng. Growing up, she’d felt like she was supposed to become nothing more than a polished, unemotional set of accomplishments to be admired or envied by others. As though society were nothing but a collection of individuals, preening for one another. Her parents weren’t bad people, but their way of life felt so lacking to her. When she moved to Potter Falls, she’d wanted nothing more than to be one of a group, pulling together toward a common goal. Ordinary. Useful.
“I like it,” she said simply. His lips quirked again, and she had to fight off an answering smile. “Don’t judge me.”
“I wouldn’t dream of judging you.” He wiped his fingers over his jaw with a scraping sound, feigning deep thought. “You’re a very superior sort of person, Julie Long. I’m not entitled to judge you, or hurt you, or kiss you.” He slanted her a meaningful look. “Or so I’ve been informed. And if I break your heart, Mrs. Miller is going have my guts for garters.”
“She didn’t say that.”
“You think I came up with it myself?”
“Oh, God.” Julie polished off her water, smiling into the glass. Guts for garters. How disgusting.
“I should eat some real food,” Carson said. “You have lunch already?”
Lunch. It sounded innocent enough, but the possibility zinged through her in an entirely not-innocent way.
There were ground rules, even if he didn’t know what they were. Guidelines for getting through the day with minimal contact and even less conversation.
Right now, she was too excited—too wired to have any kind of safe conversation with him. She’d ask him questions. She’d smile at him. She’d somersault backward into all these feelings, and if she didn’t watch it, she’d keep tumbling until she loved him all over again.
“I ate earlier,” she said. Too late, she remembered that he knew she hadn’t. She’d been home all morning.
When his face fell, she felt a pang of guilt, but she quashed it. He’d asked her to help him. She was doing them both a favor.
“Have a good one,” someone called, as Carson pushed his way out onto the walk.
“You, too.”
The bell over the door of the diner jingled behind him. He turned left, bracing himself against the wind as he walked up the block, then left again to climb the hill that took him away from downtown, toward home.
Though he wasn’t going home. This time of day, when he’d worked all he could at Julie’s and he still had energy to burn, he’d taken to just walking. Up and down the pitched streets of Potter Falls, some of them so steep that as a kid on his bike he’d imagined flying downhill and coming unmoored from gravity. Drifting off into space, no longer bound by the laws of physics.
