Page 52 of Once Upon A Small Town Secret
Paige.
I’ve seen her less in the last week than I did when she first got the keys. She’s been in there—I know she has. I follow the rhythms of the block without meaning to; the bakery’s lights tell their own schedule.
This week they’ve been on late, flicking off around the time I lock up. But we haven’t crossed paths. Not once. Either I’m a master at missing her, or she’s better at avoiding me than I am at not looking.
Jason told me a few days ago that everything’s installed and the place is “shiny enough to blind you.”
He said it in that proud-brother voice he gets without noticing he’s doing it. “She made us scrub baseboards,” he added, like itwas a war story. “Paid us in cinnamon rolls. And yes, they were amazing.” He laughed. I did too.
I didn’t ask the thing I wanted to ask: How was she? Was she tired? Happy? Has she eaten? Is she sleeping? Does she smell like lemon and vanilla, or is that just how my head fills the air when she walks into a room?
I cap the sanitizer and slide it beneath the bar. The rag goes over the divider to dry, neat and square because I can’t stand it any other way. The register drawer pops with a click. I count down, bills in short stacks, quarters by tens. The steady clack of coin on wood steadies me more than it should. A man can build a life on repetition. He can hide in it, too.
Jason would ask what’s crawled up my ass and died if he saw me now. He has asked versions of that for weeks. I told him I was fine. I told him I was tired. I told him we were short-staffed. Not technically a lie, but not the whole truth either.
He’d smell something if I asked about Paige more than once, so I don’t ask. I let the questions burn in my gut as I go crazy, wondering.
I glance toward the front windows. The bakery is dark from here— no way to see into her kitchen without walking outside, rounding the building, peering down the narrow run where the delivery truck backs in. I’ve done that on nights I’m not proud of.
Not stalking.
Just… checking. The way I stand on my back deck and listen to the river at 3:00 a.m. when sleep won’t stick. The way I walk through my house with the lights off to remind myself it’s mine.
I flip off the row of overheads above the bar. Half-light. Wood glows. Bottles throw tiny crowns on the mirror. There’s a comfort in closing up that feels a little like prayer: wipe, stack, click, lock, breathe. I wish it were enough.
It’s stupid how much I miss her. It’s worse because I don’t have the right to say it, not to anybody, and certainly not to myself, if we’re playing by the rules I set.
I told her I’d change what I do. I have. I don’t step into her space unless it’s about a door stop or a hinge. I don’t linger when I see her on the sidewalk. I say hello, like a neighbor, like a decent man, and keep moving. I keep my hands in my pockets. I keep my mouth shut.
Jason is the closest thing to family I’ve ever had. The idea of lying to him sat wrong from the first second the thought entered my head, and I did it anyway when he asked if everything was cool.
“Yeah, man,” I said, crisp as a well-poured lager. “All good.”
I said it because telling him the truth would have been the same as pulling a pin on a grenade and dropping it between us. You don’t come back from sleeping with your best friend’s sister easily. Maybe at all. You definitely don’t come back from doing it and then hurting her with your words like I did.
I lean both palms on the bar and let my head hang for a beat. The wood smells like oil and cleaner and ten thousand nights of conversation. I keep thinking that if I breathe enough of it in, I’ll choke on the guilt and get it over with. It doesn’t work like that, though.
I’m just not that lucky.
What would I even say to him? Hey, I broke the first rule neither of us ever said out loud. Hey, I touched the part of your life I should have kept my hands off, and then I said something I’d give weeks off my life to take back.
Hey, I think about her when I’m slicing limes, when I’m scrubbing the floor, when I’m lying in my bed staring at the crack in the ceiling plaster I never seem to get around to patching.
Hey, I want to be the guy who shows up for her—not to fix it all, just to stand in a kitchen and zest lemons without cutting into the pith because she asked me, please, carefully.
I exhale and straighten.
I’m tired of this space I built between us. I’m the one who hammered it in. It needed to be there. It still needs to be, or at least that’s what I tell myself on nights like this. But God, I am exhausted. By pretending my avoidance is noble. By the way my stupid, obsessed brain writes lists and lists of things that I don’t yet know.
I don’t know what music she likes to listen to. I don’t know how she takes her coffee when she’s on hour eleven on her feet. I don’t know whether she likes to curl up in bed with a good book, or if she passes out the moment she hits the pillow.
I don’t know if she wakes up at night thinking of me the way I do with her.
Sweet Confessions is opening soon. Two weeks, give or take. I should send flowers. No, not flowers—everyone sends flowers, and they die in two days and leave a glass vase she has to wash.
Something better.
A credit at the restaurant supply store? Impersonal.
