He should leave it there. He understood perfectly well that he should leave it there.
"My ex-best friend, who…" Wren made a sound that was not quite a laugh. "She and I co-ran everything. Every joint project, every plan, every decision. And I'd make something good,, and she'd make it better, and then somehow it was hers. I never really noticed until there was no more hers and mine." A brief pause, her jaw working. "And then there's my parents, who thought I was making a mistake with the shop and said so, fairly regularly, in the way people do when they love you but can't quite believe in you."
"Dylan believes in you," Freddie said.
"Dylan. Maggie. You." Wren smiled at this, genuinely, the tension in her jaw releasing."I'm really glad we're friends, Freddie."
There was that word again. She'd made up her mind that they were friends, and Oliver was hero material. And that was that.
"Yes," he said.
Not me too. Not likewise. Just yes, which was the word available to him, the only one that didn't require him to say something more or less than the truth.
Wren nodded, as though this were the response she'd expected, and began buttoning her coat. They left together, which was not something Freddie had planned and which happened anyway. He simply fell into step beside her.
The main street was quiet; the shops sealed and dark. Their footsteps had different rhythms—hers quicker, his more measured, even with his limp—and they had not yet found a shared pace, which meant they were slightly out of sync in a way that felt oddly comfortable. She didn't seem to require talking. He was grateful for this.
They passed the bakery, its windows dark. Passed the point where the pavement narrowed slightly, where the old curbing jutted out an inch further than it should, and where?—
"Glass," he said.
"What?"
He touched her elbow, briefly, just a direction—steered her two inches to the left. On the pavement ahead, just visible in the lamplight, a broken bottle had shed itself across the stone in a scatter of small, bright pieces.
"Oh." She looked down at it as they passed. "I wouldn't have seen that."
He had seen it because he had been looking. They walked on. At the point where the pavement narrowed further—the stretch by the old grain merchant's building where the road curved slightly—he shifted without comment to the street side. It was a small adjustment, a half-step, positioning himself between her and the road. She didn't appear to notice for a moment, then she did, because Wren noticed things. He had always known she noticed things.
"If a car hops the curb," he said, in the same tone he used to discuss booth placement, "it has to go through me first."
There was a pause. Then she laughed—a surprised burst that came out of her, the sound of it rising and then softening in the cold air.
"Preston never did that." The laughter had settled, but the warmth of it remained in her voice, an afterglow.
"A man should protect his treasures."
"He didn't treasure me."
"He sounds like a fool."
The pause this time was longer. Freddie heard her breath, visible in the cold. It was a slow exhale, the kind that meant something was being considered.
"Yeah," she said quietly.
"I'm sorry, Wren."
She stopped.
He stopped too, half a step later. It was the slight delay of a man who had not expected a stop. He turned to look at her.
She was looking at him. Not the quick social glance or the analytical appraisal she used when she was working something out. This was the other kind, the kind that had no agenda except to see. Her hazel-green eyes were steady behind the glasses, and the lamplight from across the street caught in them and made them impossible to look away from, and she was looking at him as though she were reading something she had not fully understood before and had just reached a sentence that clarified everything prior.
He did not know what was on his face. He was aware, in an abstract and inconvenient way, that he probably should.
He had walked her home from committee meetings. He had noticed glass on the pavement and moved to the street side and said a perfectly ordinary thing about cars and curbs. He had said you deserve better in the tone of a man stating a fact and not in any other tone, and she was looking at him like?—
She rose on her tiptoes.
It was the smallest movement, just the shift of her weight forward and upward, the slight unsteadiness of it, and his hand moved before he had made any decision to move it—found the curve of her waist, steadied her, because she had teetered and steadying her was simply what the situation required and his body had understood this before he had.
The warmth of her registered through the layers of wool and coat. She was very close. She smelled of old paper and something autumnal and the particular tea she'd been drinking lately, and she was looking at him from two inches away with an expression he was not going to be able to file anywhere sensible, and then?—
She pressed her lips to his.
