He just remembered. From a conversation I barely remember having, weeks ago at his job site over lemonade, where I said olives were a personal betrayal and a texture crime. He laughed that surprised laugh and saidnoted,and I thought he was being polite.
He wasn't being polite. He kept it.
And now there's a little pile of olives on his side and a cup of orzo I can actually eat on mine, and he's already moved on totelling me something about the shims, and I'm standing in the middle of the farmers market having a quiet crisis over a salad.
“You okay?” He's looking at me now, head tipped, a little worried. “Is the orzo bad? You don't have to eat it. I can get you the other one.”
“The orzo's perfect,” I manage. “You took my olives.”
His ears go pink. “You said you didn't like them.”
“I said that once. In passing. Weeks ago. It was barely even a sentence.”
“You said they were a texture crime.” He says it like that settles it. Like of course he'd remember. Like keeping track of what a texture crime is to me is a perfectly normal use of the space in his head. “Was I supposed to let you eat them?”
And he means it. That's the part that undoes me.
There's no angle in it. No charm, no working a bit. He's not doing it because we're practicing, or because the town's watching, or because it'll sell anything to anyone. He did it because I don't like olives and he was standing next to my olives. To Logan, that's the whole entire argument.
I think about handing all of this back in two weeks and have to look very hard at my orzo.
We finish the walk slow. He tells me about the shims, and then, when I ask, a little about the house, and somewhere in there he mentions the nest room again, the one he showed me, the one that's built but still waiting on everything soft. He doesn't make a thing of it. He just says he found the right wool blankets, finally, the heavy kind, and went quiet after, like he'd said more than he meant to. The careful way he talks about that room, like it's a held breath, like it's waiting for someone, snags somewhere behind my ribs and won't let go.
I find myself watching him instead of the stalls. The way he thanks every vendor by name. The way he drifts a half pace to the outside of the sidewalk without thinking, putting himselfbetween me and the street, a thing so automatic he'd deny it if I asked.
He is the least complicated man I've ever met and somehow the hardest to look directly at.
And the worst part is what it does to me. Not soft, not sweet. Low and hot and immediate, a pull behind my navel that has no business being there over a salad. I find myself watching his hands on the bag, the rolled sleeves, the forearms, the easy way he carries my weight like it's nothing, and thinking about those hands somewhere they have absolutely no business being. I have to look at the tomatoes very hard for a second.
By the time he walks me to my car, the bag still on his shoulder until the last second, I have eaten a whole cup of orzo with no olives in it and fallen a distance I'm refusing to measure.
“My turn comes back around in a few days,” he says. “If the rotation holds. Or whenever. No rush.”
There won't be a few days. There's the reunion, and then there's the part where I give him back.
I don't say that. I say, “Yeah. A few days.” And the lie comes out so easy it scares me, because it doesn't feel like the operation anymore.
It feels like wanting.
Monday it's Finn,because Monday Dottie does meatloaf and apparently we're a meatloaf-on-Monday couple now. A thing nobody consulted me about and that I am powerless against.
He's already in the booth when I get there, which is new. There's a glass of water sweating on a coaster on my side of the table and another in front of him.
I slide in and start talking about my day. The chaos of the last week of term, still settling. The kid whose mother wants him reading chapter books at four. And somewhere in the middleof it I reach for the water without looking, and it's just there, exactly where my hand goes, full.
I don't think anything of it. I drink half of it. I keep talking.
It happens again twenty minutes later. I get to the end of a sentence and reach, and the glass is full again.
I look down at it. Then I look at Finn, who is studying the menu he's known by heart for nine years with the focused attention of a man who would rather do anything than be caught.
“Did you refill my water.”
“Dottie refilled your water.”
“Dottie's been in the back ten minutes.”
“Then I don't know what to tell you.” He turns a laminated page he isn't reading. “Water's a mystery. Drink it or don't.”
