SHELF LIFE

CHAPTER THREE

for six o'clock, which Ivy considered a hostile choice in itself — six o'clock was closing time, the one sacred hour when she got to lock the door, put on the espresso machine nobody else was allowed to touch, and not talk to another human being until morning.

Instead, at six o'clock, she was standing in the back room of Between the Lines with a legal pad, a lukewarm cup of tea, and Nash Calloway, who had arrived four minutes early carrying a laptop, a leather folio, and — she noted, with real betrayal — a small paper bag that smelled unmistakably like the good scones from the bakery on Fifth.

"You're eating my traitor cat's affections and now you're going to eat pastries in front of me," Ivy said, by way of greeting.

"I brought two." He set the bag on the table like a peace offering, or possibly a trap. "One's yours, if you want it. I wasn't going to assume."

"That's very considerate of the man who put a six-foot sign where a hardware store used to be."

"The hardware store had been empty for eight months, Ivy." He said her name easily, like they'd been doing this for years instead of one contentious week, and something about the ease of it annoyed her more than the sign had. "I didn't evict anyone. I signed a lease."

"You signed a lease four hundred feet from an independent bookstore that was already struggling."

That landed somewhere it wasn't supposed to. She watched it land — watched something flicker behind his eyes, quick and gone, like she'd stepped on a footnote she didn't know was there — and immediately regretted saying struggling out loud, in her own back room, to a competitor with a laptop.

"I didn't know that," he said, quieter. "For what it's worth."

"It's not worth anything. It's just true." Ivy pulled out a chair with more force than the chair deserved and sat. "Can we just do the festival thing so I can go home?"

To his credit, he let it go. He opened the folio, pulled out a legal pad of his own — of course he had his own legal pad, of course it was the expensive kind with the leather cover — and clicked a pen.

"Okay," he said. "Programming. The mayor wants author readings, kids' activities, and some kind of joint promotion that makes it look like the whole street's one big happy—"

"We are not one big happy anything."

"—event," he finished, unbothered. "I was going to say event."

"Fine. Event." Ivy uncapped her own pen, a chewed ballpoint that had been rattling in a drawer since spring, and felt suddenly, absurdly self-conscious about it next to his fountain pen. "I do the readings every year. Local authors, a few debut novelists, one guy who self-published a WWII naval thriller and cries a little every time someone buys it. That stays with me."

"Agreed. I wasn't going to fight you for the crying man."

"And the kids' table — face painting, the scavenger hunt through the shelves, the little reading nook with the beanbags. That's mine too. I built that from nothing."

"Also agreed." He made a note. "I was thinking coffee and pastries could be on us — obviously — plus maybe a late-evening thing. Something for the adults who drop the kids at face painting and then want forty minutes to themselves. A reading with wine. That's more our — my — vibe anyway."

It was, annoyingly, a good idea. Ivy hated that it was a good idea. She wrote it down like it personally offended her.

"Fine," she said. "Wine thing's yours."

"Great. So we're doing this."

"We're doing this."

They looked at each other across the table for a second longer than the sentence required, and Ivy became abruptly, unhelpfully aware that up close, without a latte between them, he had the kind of face that made bickering feel like it was doing a lot of unnecessary emotional labor.

She reached for her tea to have somewhere else to look. Her elbow caught the mug's handle wrong. The tea — lukewarm, thank god, but still — went sideways across the table, across the legal pads, and directly into Nash's lap.

There was a beat of profound silence.

"I want it on the record," Nash said, standing very fast, tea dripping off the edge of his very nice, very ruined cardigan, "that I did not do that on purpose, but I understand if you did."

"I did not — it was an accident—" Ivy was already up, grabbing the roll of paper towels she kept by the register, shoving a fistful at him with the mortified efficiency of someone trying to undo a war crime. "I'm not a saboteur, I just have terrible spatial awareness, ask anyone—"

"I believe you." He was laughing now, which somehow made it worse, dabbing at his shirt with her paper towels while tea pooled on the legal pad, blurring both their handwriting into one illegible, co-authored smear. "This is genuinely impressive. You've ruined my shirt and both of our notes in a single motion. That's efficient."

"I can pay for the dry cleaning."

"It's fine."

"I can also pay for a new cardigan, if the tannins—"

"Ivy." He was still laughing, holding a soggy wad of paper towels, wearing a cardigan that now smelled like Earl Grey, and he said her name the same easy way he had before, except this time it didn't annoy her at all, which was its own kind of alarming. "It's a cardigan. I own more than one."

"Of course you do," she muttered, but some of the fight had gone out of it, replaced by something warmer and much more inconvenient. "Rich sign-guy probably owns twelve cardigans."

"Eight," he said. "I counted once, during a bad week."

She didn't ask about the bad week. She wanted to, which was the alarming part.

Marmalade, who had watched the entire debacle from atop the bookshelf with the detached interest of a war correspondent, chose that moment to drop down onto the table, step directly through the puddle of spilled tea, and walk two perfect, damning pawprints straight across Nash's ruined notes.

"She's judging both of us equally," Nash said. "I respect that."

"She's the only neutral party in this whole street," Ivy said, and reached for more paper towels, and did not examine, too closely, the fact that she was smiling.