Then he lets go.
Returns to his omelet. Picks up his fork. Cuts a precise bite. Chews.
As if nothing happened.
As if he didn't just catch a falling coffee pot and my entire composure in the same breath. As if my wrist isn't still burning where his fingers were. As if my heart isn't doing something structurally unsound in my chest.
I should say something. Thank you, or sorry, or please excuse me while I go have a quiet breakdown in the walk-in freezer.
But I can't speak, so I do what I do best.
I become invisible.
I take the coffee pot. I walk back to the counter. I don't trip, which feels like a minor miracle. Jolie takes one look at my face and opens her mouth, and I give her a look that says ‘do not’with such force that she actually closes it again, which might be the first time in recorded history that Jolie Liang has chosen silence over commentary.
I busy myself with napkin dispensers that don't need refilling. I wipe down a counter that's already clean. I count the sugar packets in the caddy by the register (twenty-two, and one of them is aSplendathat someone put in the wrong section, and I fix it because I fix things,
that's what I do, I fix small things because the big things have never been mine to fix).
And I do not look at the corner booth.
I do not.
I absolutely, positively do not look at the corner booth, where the man who just shattered thirty-six days of carefully maintained distance is eating his omelet with the calm of someone who didn't just set a girl on fire with five words and the grip of his hand.
But I don't have to look to know he's smiling.
Not at me. At his plate.
Like I'm already the most amusing thing that's happened to him in thirty-six days.
Chapter Two
DID I ACTUALLY DROPthe coffee pot?
In front of him?
In front of a man whose hands moved so fast I didn't even see it happen?
What was he, a magician? A surgeon? Some kind of professionally trained coffee-pot-catcher who moonlights in corner booths eating omelets with devastating precision?
Stop it, Thea.
But I can't stop it. My shift ended twenty-seven minutes ago (I checked—I'm always checking, always counting), and I'm standing in the back room with my apron half-untied because my fingers won't quite cooperate, and my brain is stuck in this loop, replaying the exact moment when gravity betrayed me and he—
He caught it.
And me.
His hand on the coffee pot. His other hand on my wrist.
Both at the same time.
Like it was nothing. Like catching falling objects and falling waitresses was something he did every Monday morning between bites of omelet.
I press my palm against the cool metal of my locker and try to breathe like a normal person. In through the nose, out through the mouth. The way Sarah taught me during that one panic attack I had last year when the anniversary of my father's sentencing rolled around and I couldn't get out of bed.
You're safe,Sarah had said, her hand on my shoulder, steady and sure.You're loved. You're okay.It’s okay to breathe. Just breathe. Everything is different now. Because you know who you belong to.
