Chapter 8

Piper's POV

I stood behind the counter with my mouth still open and my hand still half-raised in the automatic welcome gesture, and I watched Declan step through the door.

He had been running. That was the first thing I clocked.

His T-shirt was dark at the collar where the sweat had soaked through, the fabric pulling against his collarbones, and the morning light came in slanted through the glass and caught one shoulder and lit it up like someone had aimed a lamp at him specifically.

Under the wet cotton, the lines of his chest and ribs showed through, one after another, like the cloth was just barely remembering to be opaque.

Two of the regulars at the corner booth looked up, then looked back down at their pie.

My cleaning rag stopped moving in mid-air.

Men who just finished running, I thought, with no preamble and no shame, should not be allowed to walk into public spaces. It should be a law. There should be a sign on the door.

"Oh my god," Roni said, very quietly, right next to my ear.

I had forgotten she was there.

She turned her head toward me, eyes wide, and mouthed something without making a sound. I read it off her lips: That's him? He's so much better-looking than the photo.

I gave her the smallest nod I could manage.

She leaned in another half-inch and dropped her voice to something that was technically a whisper but was doing a lot of work to qualify. "Forget everything I just said. That man is absolutely worth a one-night stand. If you don't go for it, I will."

"Roni —" I got my elbow into her ribs.

She held both hands up, the picture of innocence, and then picked up her coffee cup and slid off the stool with the practiced ease.

I turned back to the counter.

Declan had crossed the room. He stopped on the other side of the counter, and I became very interested in the surface I was supposed to be wiping.

"Last night," he said. "I owe you an apology. I didn't handle that well."

I pressed my fingers into the rag. Then I made myself let go.

"You don't have to," I said. "You told me it was a reflex. I understood."

"It wasn't appropriate regardless."

"I was wearing headphones." The words came out before I'd fully decided to say them. "I was on the phone. That's why I was wearing my earbuds." I lifted my chin toward the window. "With her, actually."

At the window table, Roni looked up with the timing of someone who had been listening the entire time, raised her hand, and said, cheerfully, "Hi."

Declan turned his head. He looked at her for a moment, then nodded once.

From the window, very clearly, in a volume calibrated with surgical precision to carry exactly as far as the counter and no further, Roni said, "If you really feel like you need to apologize — you should take her to dinner tonight."

The heat hit my face so fast I felt it in my ears.

"No — that's — " I started waving one hand in what I hoped was a dismissive gesture. "You really don't have to do anything like that, it was just a misunderstanding, it wasn't even a big —"

"Okay," Declan said.

I stopped.

The diner was not quiet. There was the sound of the coffee machine and someone's fork scraping a plate and the low murmur of the TV above the counter.

None of it registered.

I turned and looked at him. "You mean it?"

"Tonight," he said. "I'll cook."

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out for a second. I tried again. "You're — sure?"

He looked at me with those light, unreadable eyes. "Yes."

I turned back to the counter and picked up the rag again, because I needed something to do with my hands immediately.

He said yes, something in the back of my head announced, in the tone of a breaking news alert. He said yes, he said yes, he actually said yes —

And then, without my permission, my brain skipped straight back to last night — the weight of him, the warmth of his hands at my waist, the specific heat I'd pressed my palm against through one thin layer of cotton, the sound he'd made that he'd tried to swallow in my dream.

My face was already hot. I pressed my free hand flat against the counter and focused very hard on the grain of the wood.

Is this the night, I thought. Is this actually going to be the night.

"Last night I was rude to you," he said. "Dinner covers the apology and the moving help. Both."

I made myself look up. His expression was the same as it always was — steady, careful, giving away nothing — but he hadn't moved, and he was still watching me, and something about the combination of those two facts made it very difficult to arrange my face into something that looked like normal.

"Okay," I said. "Then yes. I'll come."

The silence that settled between us after that was a different kind than the ones before it. Neither of us said anything for a moment. Neither of us looked away.

I cleared my throat. "What can I get you?"

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile, but in the neighborhood. "Black coffee. The kind you mentioned before."

I blinked. He had remembered that. "The very black kind?"

"The very black kind."

I turned around to start the grinder, and the moment my back was to him I stopped trying to control my face at all.

I was grinning at the wall like an idiot, and I knew it, and I did not stop.

I made the coffee carefully. I handed it over, he paid, and he said "Seven o'clock" the way someone says a fact, not a question.

The bell above the door rang.

I watched him go.

Roni materialized back onto the stool beside me approximately four seconds later, coffee cup in hand, looking extremely pleased with herself.

"Did you see that?" she said. "That was my strategy working. I want it acknowledged."

"Yes," I said. "Your strategy. Acknowledged. I don't know what I'd do without you."

"You'd be polishing that glass forever and he'd have walked right back out." She reached over and patted my hand once, firmly, like she was closing a deal. "Tonight. Don't waste it."

I looked down at the counter and kept wiping. I know, I thought. I know, I know, I know.

The TV above the counter cut to the local news, and the weather segment was already up, the meteorologist standing in front of a green map with a band of dark blue spreading across the coast. "Expect heavy rainfall tonight across Oakhaven and surrounding areas," she was saying. "Residents are advised to take precautions —"

I glanced up. The dark blue covered most of the map.

It wasn't surprising. Every year around this time the rain came in off the water and sat on top of the town for days, the kind of rain that didn't stop and didn't vary, just kept going all night at the same steady weight.

I still remembered my first week in Oakhaven — two suitcases, three wrong turns, forty minutes in the rain before I found the right street, and then standing in front of Pinecrest with water running into my shoes and my hair completely flat.

"Oh," Roni said, from beside me. She was looking at the weather map with an expression I had learned, over several years of friendship, to be cautious about. "I just had a better idea."

I put the rag down. "The last time you said that, I ended up flashing my neighbor."

"That was a different situation entirely."

"Roni."

She picked up her coffee and took a long, satisfied sip, and said nothing.

"What is the idea."

"You'll see tonight." She set the cup down and smiled at the counter. "Just be ready. I'm a genius, honestly."

I looked at her. She looked at the window.

I just hope I would not end up embarrassing myself in front of Declan again.