He was right. Lynda had handled Saturdays for thirty years, first for my grandmother, then for me. Since December, I'd been running six days a week, open to close, no backup. The exhaustion had become background noise, the kind of tired I'd stopped noticing because there wasn't any alternative.
“Maybe,” I said, now wondering if I could just hand over control of the store, even for a day, to a wet-behind-the-ears kiddo.
“Not maybe. Definitely.” He reached for my arm and squeezed. “You need help, Holden. Real help, not just me crashing the register and knocking over rose buckets.”
“You've gotten better.”
“I've gotten adequate.” He smiled, that crooked thing that did something to my chest. “But you need someone who can actually cover shifts. Let you take a day off once in a while.” He stepped behind me as he spoke, scritching his nails up and down my back.
I closed my eyes at the feel of him.
A day off. I couldn't remember the last one. Even Sundays, when the shop was closed, I usually spent catching up on orders or doing inventory or fixing things that had broken during the week. The apartment above the shop meant I was never really away from it. Never really anywhere else.
But this week, I'd been somewhere else. Jamie's apartment, his couch, his bed. Walking the dogs on trails I hadn't bothered with in years. Eating meals that someone else cooked, or that we cooked together, bumping shoulders in his tiny kitchen while the eggs burned.
If I hired Jake, I'd have coverage. Help that wasn't contingent on a deal with an expiration date.
And Jamie...
I didn't finish the thought. Didn't want to look at it too closely. The deal ended on Valentine's Day, and whatever came after would be its own thing, separate from arrangements and terms and the careful structure we'd built around this.
“I'll talk to him,” I said. “If he comes by.”
“Good.” Jamie pushed off from the workbench and brushed a kiss against my jaw, quick, casual, like it was something he did every day. “Coming over later?” he asked as he leashed the dogs.
The question had stopped feeling like a question days ago. More like confirmation of something already decided.
“If you want.”
His smile widened. “I want.”
He pulled his jacket from the hook, and then he was gone, the bell ringing behind him. The shop went quiet.
I stood there for a moment, looking at the space he'd left, now quiet and empty.
My grandmother used to say some people are built for leaving and some are built for staying. I'd built my whole life around that idea, staying here, in this shop, in this town, while everyone else moved on to bigger things. It was enough. The quiet was what I wanted. Needing anything else would only lead to losing it.
But Jamie kept showing up. Every morning he'd been here, as promised. Every evening with the dogs, every night tangled together in whoever's bed we'd ended up in. He kept showing up, and I kept letting him, and somewhere along the way the quiet had stopped feeling like peace and started feeling like waiting.
I finished the Culver order. Cleaned up the workbench. Checked the cooler, locked the register, turned off the lights. The routine was the same as always, but the apartment felt different when I climbed the stairs. Fuller, somehow, even though I was alone.
I'd be at Jamie's soon. The dogs would claim the couch, and we'd eat whatever takeout he'd picked up on his way home, and later we'd figure out what later looked like.
For now, I finished closing up the shop, checking the cooler one last time, making sure all my tools were where I'd need them in the morning. The routine was the same as always, but theapartment upstairs held no pull tonight. Just a place to grab my jacket and keys before heading across town.
This is what it could be like. The thought circled back, persistent. And underneath it, smaller and harder to ignore:What if I let myself want it?
Chapter Seven
Holden
The Ridgeline Tavern was louder than usual for a Saturday night.
Someone had set up in the corner with an acoustic guitar and a voice that carried. She was young, maybe twenty-five, with dark hair cropped short and silver rings stacked on her fingers that caught the light when she strummed. Folk songs, mostly, the kind that made people tap their feet without realizing they were doing it. The bar was three deep with ski crowd overflow, and every booth was full. Jamie had snagged us a table near the back, away from the worst of the noise, but close enough that the music wrapped around us like something warm.
The tavern's idea of decor was neon beer signs and mounted elk antlers. Not a flower in sight, unless you counted the fadedsilk arrangement on the hostess stand that had probably been there since the place opened.
My grandmother would have had opinions about that.
