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For one awkward second, neither of us seems to know what the appropriate greeting is for someone you’ve already had your tongue in the mouth of but have never actually gone to dinner with.

Merry solves it by leaning in and kissing my cheek.

Her hand touches my arm as she does, warm even through my sleeves. When she pulls back, she’s blushing. “I wasn’t sure what we were doing.”

I smile. “That worked.”

“Good,” she says, and a small, nervous giggle escapes her mouth. “I considered a handshake.”

“Yes, that would have been weird.”

I take off my coat and hang it over the back of my chair.

“I know. That’s why I didn’t do it.”

“Well,” I say as I sit down, a smile on my face. “I appreciate your restraint.”

“You should.”

For the first few minutes, it’s oddly formal. We talk about the restaurant, which Merry hasn’t been to before but I have, once, years ago. She asks what I usually order, and I tell her I don’t remember. She says I’m terribly unhelpful and then groans, as if the filter between her brain and her mouth is actively betraying her.

And I think that is what finally does it, because she visibly relaxes, her shoulders let loose and her hands start moving more freely when she talks.

Eventually, the server comes and we order drinks, and by the time we’re deciding whether to split an appetizer, whatever invisible boundary we’d been trying not to trip over has disappeared.

“I don’t eat olives,” Merry tells me.

I look up from the menu. “At all?”

“Correct.” She shakes her head. “Green, black, stuffed with things. None. Gross.”

I smile as I look back down at the menu. “Good to know.”

“Is it?”

“I don’t know,” I say with a small, casual shrug. “I’m assuming this is the part of the date where I’m supposed to collect important information about you.”

Merry laughs, and when I look up, she’s watching me over the top of her menu.

There’s something nice about being able to do that now. Look at her without pretending I’m checking if she needs something or waiting for her to finish talking. At the café, even after I started hoping she'd come in, there was always something between us: a counter, a line of customers, a nosy coworker.

The server comes back and we order, and somewhere between the appetizer and our entrées, I learn that Merry’s job at Briarwood involves far more spreadsheets than I would have expected from a company whose bestselling product is candy corn.

She tells me about forecasting and seasonal sales, and I understand maybe sixty percent of it, but I know that she’s good at it. That’s the part I like listening to. Merry changes when she talks about something she knows well. Her thoughts stop tripping over each other. She still talks with her hands and wanders occasionally into details I didn’t ask for, but there’s a confidence underneath it I haven’t seen before.

“You like it?” I ask.

She pauses with her glass halfway to her mouth.

“I like figuring things out,” she says after a moment. “I could do without most of the things surrounding the figuring out.”

That makes sense to me.

When she asks about the café, I tell her I like it for almost the opposite reason. My workday ends when I walk out the door. I know what I’m doing there. I like making something with my hands and handing it to someone and knowing the job is finished.

It leads, somehow, to the jewelry aspect of my online shop.

Merry’s whole expression changes when I mention it.