“You’re good at this,” I said.
“Construction is straightforward.”
“I don’t mean the construction.” I picked up a brush from the tray he’d set up and dipped it into the cream paint. “I mean hearing what someone wants and figuring out how to give it to them.”
He went quiet. The silence lasted three strokes of my brush before he spoke.
“You wanted a reading nook in the corner of the first shop. Cushions from a garage sale, a blanket you’d had since college.” His voice was low, steady. “The register stuck on seven and you’d hit it with the side of your palm to unstick it. Your favorite mug was behind the counter, the blue one with the chipped handle.”
My brush stilled against the wall.
“You organized the romance section by heat level, not author name. The top shelf was what you called‘light and fluffy.’The bottom shelf was...” He paused. “You described it as‘absolutely unhinged.’“
I turned to look at him. He was facing the wall, roller moving in precise strokes.
“You remember all of that?”
“I remember everything about you.” He said it the same way he’d said it the first time, with certainty, no exaggeration. “Even the things you’ve forgotten.”
My chest ached. The bond pulsed with a second thread. Faint, waiting, not yet sealed but present. Solomon’s frequency, reaching for me the way his silence always did.
I dipped my brush in the paint. Flicked it at him.
The cream splattered across his shoulder and neck. He went completely still. The roller stopped mid-stroke.
I bit my lip. “Oops.”
Solomon turned his head slowly.
“Did you just...”
“It slipped.”
He set the roller down. Picked up his own brush from the tray. His movements were measured.
“Solomon.” I took a step back, grinning, hands up. “Let’s be reasonable about this.”
“I’m always reasonable.”
“You’re holding a paintbrush with murder eyes.”
He advanced. I retreated. The empty bookshop became our arena, the drop cloths crinkling under our feet as I circled behind the sawhorse table.
“If you throw that at me,” I warned, pointing my brush at him, “I will escalate. And I fight dirty.”
“I know.”
He flicked the brush.
Cream paint arced across the space and caught me on my collarbone, a stripe that dripped down toward the neckline of my tank top. I gasped, partly from the cold of it, mostly from the shock that Solomon, three-word Solomon, Mr. Efficiency, had actually retaliated.
“Oh, it’son.”
The next ten minutes were chaos.
I scrambled for the paint tray, dipped my whole hand in, and smeared it across his shirt when he caught my wrist.
The moment shifted.
