“A glove lecture?”
“You’ll want ’em. You do it wrong, you bleed.”
“Good to know,” I say faintly, taking the gloves. He glances around the store, eyes snagging on the window where the pigeon has returned to do his little judgment dance.
“Nice bird,” Sawyer deadpans.
“He’s part of the board,” I say. “Votes on acquisitions.”
“Smart.” Sawyer tugs his cap. “Call if you need a hand. Or two. Because, Bailey, it’s okay to ask for help, you know?”
When he’s gone, the gloves sit on my counter like a dare.
I stare at them until the angle of the light shifts and turns the fibers gold.
“Fine,” I tell the empty shop and the meddling sky and the part of me that’s been teaching herself to do things without permission since she was ten. “Tonight.”
I lock the door when the sign says I should. I count the drawer. I turn the lamps low. And then I climb.
The spiral stairs are a hymn I know by heart. Step, breath, hand to rail. The lantern room waits at the top with the same patience it has for a hundred years of weather and more than enough secrets. The glass is cold and clouded, the crack a white seam like an old scar.
I set down some duct tape and rope, strip off my sweater, roll my sleeves to my elbows like a battlefield nurse, and test each pane with careful fingers. Gloves and patience.
“Ask Sawyer,” the note had said. “Or ask me, if you can stand it.”
I tie the first anchor knot by memory—the one my grandfather taught me on the dock until my fingers bled and I cursed. The rope settles heavy against my palm, and the old glass looks at me like,That’s not going to hold very long.
Halfway through the second tie, my phone buzzes on the floorboards, screen lighting the room with a square of blue.
Crew:Don’t start without me.
A beat. Then another.
Crew:Fine. Start without me. But leave me something to fix. It’s a man’s fragile ego at stake.
I stare at the screen, every muscle in me trying not to move fast enough to be called a decision.
Me:Bring your own gloves.
A dot. Then two. Then nothing.
I tie the last knot on the rope to secure the glass from moving anymore, with my mouth curved into something I don’t name. The lighthouse breathes like a steady chest. The rope hums against my hands like a word I’m about to learn fully.
Down below, on the boardwalk, a truck door shuts. I don’t go down to meet him. I keep my hands on the old glass, shoulders squared, breath even. I let the footsteps come up to me—spiral, spiral, nearer—and when his shadow finally spills into the lantern room, I’m ready enough to pretend I have always been.
“Gloves,” he says, holding them up in triumph, then takes in the knotwork and whistles low. “Not bad, Book Girl.”
“Don’t sound so shocked,” I say, but softer than I mean to. “I can tie more than metaphors.”
He steps closer, the room shrinking to fit us both, salt air threading between our words. “Show me what you did,” he says, and it’s not an order. It’s an invitation. “I’ll follow your lead.”
I do. He does. Our fingers learn the same language.
We do not kiss. We do not fall. We do not do anything that will ruin this, yet I walk down the stairs later feeling ruined in the best, oldest sense of the word. Changed by weather I invited on purpose.
At the bottom, in the shop, under the lamp that always turns everything gold, he finds the cream envelope I didn’t tuck far enough and slides it back to me without comment, his mouth tipping like a secret he won’t use against me.
“Harvest Bash this weekend,” he says lightly, as if his pulse isn’t banging in his throat in sync with mine. “They roped me into a pie auction. I’m terrible at pie.”
