“See you Thursday, Tessa.”
He left. The bell chimed, and she watched him disappear into the river of commuters.
Her phone buzzed.
Lucy: WHAT’S UP BUTTERCUP.
Tessa: Ran into Gabriel. Again.
Lucy: WHERE.
Tessa: The Strand. We got coffee.
Lucy: WHAT IS HAPPENING.
Tessa: I don’t know.
Thursday morning.
Tessa changed her outfit three times. The first was too casual, jeans and a sweater that saidI didn’t think about this at all. The second was too much, a dress that screamedI have been thinking about this since Tuesday. She settled on something in between. Dark pants. A cream blouse. Professional enough to pretend she had meetings after, casual enough to suggest she hadn’t agonized over it. She had.
The coffee shop was five blocks from her apartment. She arrived fifteen minutes early, claimed a table by the window, and immediately reorganized everything on it. Napkin on the left. No, the right. Sugar packets in a neat row. Her phone face-down so she wouldn’t check it. Face-up so she could see when he texted. Face-down again. She was being ridiculous.
Gabriel walked in at exactly eight o’clock. He saw her immediately, and the look on his face stopped her hands mid-fidget.
“You’re early,” he said, sliding into the seat across from her.
“So are you.”
“I’ve been circling the block for ten minutes.” He admitted it like a confession. “Didn’t want to seem too eager.”
The honesty disarmed her. “I reorganized the sugar packets four times.”
“Only four?”
“Maybe five. I lost count.”
They ordered coffee and talked about Devney’s wedding. She told him about a previous event, a bride who’d asked her to add a vegan menu three days before the ceremony. He told her about the time Knox had attempted to host a dinner party and called him at eleven at night to ask whether the salmon had gone bad. (It had. Knox served it anyway. Two of the four guests spent the night sick. Knox was so mortified he taught himself to cook for real and got frighteningly good at it. To this day he won’t plate a piece of salmon without checking it three times.)
She told him about the night her sous chef had set off the warehouse fire alarm during a tasting because he had decided to flambé something he hadn’t flambéed before. He told her he didn’t own a single piece of cookware that had ever flambéed anything. She offered to teach him. He said he’d hold her to it.
An hour passed. Then two.
When he finally stood to leave, he paused beside her chair. Close. Too close.
“This was good,” he said.
“It was.”
He leaned down. His lips brushed her cheek, the barest contact, a whisper of warmth that shouldn’t have felt like anything.
It felt like everything.
“I’ll call you,” he said.
She told herself she wasn’t waiting by the phone.
She was.
