Page 79 of Smoke and Roses

“You are pushy.”

She leans forward on her bucket. “Have you told him?”

I don’t pretend not to know what she means.

“No.”

“Why the hell not? He looks at you like you hung the damn moon. He brings you coffee every morning. Rob says he changed your furnace igniter.”

“He did.”

“So?”

“So I keep waiting for the right moment.” I get the thorn out and flick it at the trash can. “Like there’s going to be a sign, or a sunset, or a song. Something special. Not just, like, Tuesday, or ‘pass the salt, I love you.’ ”

Cassia and Tara exchange a look.

“Lindsey,” Cassia says. “I told Rob I loved him at the Nielsen training burn. Covered in soot. In front of Betsy Morris.”

“You did not.”

“I had ash up my nose. It was the most romantic moment of my life.” She points a finger at me. “There isn’t a right moment. There’s just the one where you open your mouth.”

The bell rings out front.

All four of us freeze.

“That’s him,” Heidi whispers. “That’s his six o’clock.”

“It’s eight-thirty,” I say.

“Then it’s his eight-thirty.”

It is. Travis comes through the curtain into the workroom with a paper grocery bag on his hip, and stops dead when he sees four women and a box of wine on the floor.

He looks from Cassia to Tara on the floor in her cardigan to Heidi with her cheese, and then at me with my mason jar and my wine-pink cheeks.

“I’ll come back,” he says.

“No, no, no,” Tara says, scrambling up. “We were just leaving. We were absolutely just leaving. Weren’t we, Cassia?”

“Yep,” Cassia says, standing up and grabbing the box of wine. “Leaving. Bye. Love you, Linds. Open your mouth.”

“Cassia!”

They’re gone in about forty seconds. The bell rings three times out front. Then it’s just me and Travis and a grocery bag in my workroom.

“Open your mouth?” he says.

“Ignore her. She’s a pushy pain in the ass.” I look at the bag and grin. “What’s that?”

“Dinner.” He holds out his hand.

He walks me up the outside stairs to his apartment above my shop, and puts me on a stool at his little counter, and pours me a glass of water.

The man makes me spaghetti. Real spaghetti. With garlic and butter and too much parmesan, the way my grandma used to make it on Sunday nights, which I told him about one time, one sentence, three weeks ago, in passing, while I was arranging gladiolus.

He remembered.