SHELF LIFE

Chapter Eight

Neither of them mentioned the email.

Not directly, anyway. It sat between them for the rest of the week like a piece of furniture they'd both silently agreed to walk around — present in every conversation, unaddressed, occasionally bumped into. Ivy caught herself rereading I had a genuinely terrible time hating you at least once a day, usually at inconvenient moments, usually while she was supposed to be doing inventory.

By Friday, the posters were printed — three hundred of them, stacked in a box by her register, the two shop names bridged together exactly as Nash had sketched them, a small illustrated cat curled in the corner like a signature. They looked good. They looked, if Ivy was honest with herself, like something she was proud of, which was a strange thing to feel about a project that had started as a hostage negotiation.

"We should hang the big one in your window tonight," Nash said, arriving just after close with the oversized print rolled under one arm like a scroll. "Mine's already up. Symmetry, or whatever the mayor wants us to be projecting."

"Symmetry," Ivy repeated, unlocking the door to let him back in. "Sure. Let's project symmetry."

The store was quiet in the particular way it got after hours — string lights on, everything dimmer and softer than it looked under the fluorescents, Marmalade already curled in her evening spot on top of the returns cart. They worked the poster into the window frame together, Ivy holding it steady while Nash adjusted the corners, close enough in the narrow display space that she was aware of exactly how little room there was between them and exactly how little either of them seemed inclined to fix that.

"Little higher on the left," she said.

"It's straight."

"It's not. Your left is crooked."

"My left is fine. Your standards are unreasonable." But he adjusted it anyway, and when he stepped back to check the angle, his shoulder brushed hers, and this time neither of them moved away fast, or moved away at all, actually, both of them just standing there in the window display light, close enough that she could see the small crease of concentration between his eyebrows smoothing out as it turned into something else.

"It's good," he said, quiet, not looking at the poster anymore.

"Yeah," Ivy said, not looking at it either. "It is."

The store was very quiet. Outside, Maple Street had gone that particular blue-gold color it turned right after the streetlights came on, and somewhere behind them Marmalade shifted on the returns cart, a small rustle of movement that neither of them registered, because Ivy's attention had narrowed down to the six inches of space between her and Nash Calloway and the specific, terrifying fact that she did not want to close that space so much as she wanted him to close it, which felt like an important distinction and also felt like something she was too far gone to actually parse right now.

"Ivy." Her name, low, the way he'd said it in the stockroom during the storm, except with none of the careful distance that had been in it then.

"Yeah."

"I keep telling myself this is a bad idea."

"It's a terrible idea," she agreed, not moving. "You're my direct business competitor. We have a joint bank account for tote bags."

"Truly disastrous foundation for anything."

"Truly."

Neither of them stepped back. He reached up, slow, like he was giving her every possible chance to say something that would stop this, and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear with a gentleness that felt entirely at odds with three weeks of chalkboard warfare, and Ivy's whole ribcage seemed to reorganize itself around the point of contact.

"Just so we're clear," he said, quiet, "I am about to make a very bad business decision."

"Noted for the record."

He kissed her — soft at first, like a question, and then considerably less like a question when she answered it by fisting a hand in the front of his shirt and pulling him closer, and for one entirely unguarded moment the whole feud, the banner, the stolen cat, the poll with the eighty-one comments, all of it just — stopped mattering, replaced by the very simple, very inconvenient fact that Nash Calloway kissed like he did everything else, with more care than his confident posture let on.

Which was, of course, the exact moment Marmalade — startled by god knows what, possibly nothing at all, possibly pure feline chaos theory — leapt off the returns cart directly into the window display, caught her back paw on the edge of the newly hung poster, and brought the entire thing crashing down on top of them both in a spectacular avalanche of vinyl, thumbtacks, and one badly dislodged pyramid of autumn releases.

"Oh my god—" Ivy jerked back, half-laughing, half-mortified, pulling a paperback off her own shoulder. "Marmalade!"

The cat, from somewhere under the poster, made a sound of profound and total innocence.

Nash was laughing too, extracting himself from a corner of vinyl with a copy of a debut novel stuck to his sleeve. "I want it on the record," he said, breathless, "that this is the second time she's ruined a moment between us. I'm starting to think it's personal."

"It's very personal. She's protecting my honor."

"Bit late for that."

"Excuse me—"

"I mean," he said, grinning, pulling the poster off both of them and rehanging it with slightly less precision than before, "the honor left the building about ninety seconds ago, is what I'm saying."

Ivy threw the paperback at him. He caught it without looking, which was, she thought, deeply unfair, and set it back on the shelf with the easy competence of a man who had apparently decided that surviving a poster-avalanche was not going to derail his evening.

"So," he said, once the display was more or less reassembled and Marmalade had retreated to the top of a bookshelf to observe the wreckage from a safe distance, "where does that leave the whole 'terrible business decision' situation?"

Ivy considered him — hair mussed, one thumbtack still stuck to his collar, looking entirely too pleased with himself for a man who'd just been buried under promotional material.

"I think," she said, "we're going to need to gather a lot more data before we can responsibly assess the risk."

"I like data," he said. "I'm very thorough."

"I'd noticed."

He kissed her again, more carefully this time, one eye apparently on the returns cart, and Marmalade, to her credit, stayed exactly where she was.