Page 24 of Bargains with her Naga Boss

He didn’t know what to do with the scarf.

She shifted on her feet.

“I’m…” He pointed into the back. “I’ll hang this up with my backpack.” He did carry a backpack with him, since they didn’t really make functional clothing with pockets for nagas. They did make clothing, of course, it just wasn’t functional. Once he’d looked into a sleeve/skirt/pants thing for his snake body. But it was uncomfortable and it got bunched up and turned around and it was entirely unpractical unless he did things like where suspenders and he had given up on the idea pretty quickly.

He headed back through the swinging door.

When he got back to the front, she was ringing up sandwiches for a group of people who had come in.

The phone rang.

He answered it. It was someone asking about their hours and what was left in stock. Did they have any more vegan egg salad sandwiches. They did have it and he relayed the message. The person on the phone wanted to know how many. He put it down to go and check. While he was checking, Gordon called Dahlia to the back. Niles got back on the phone, told the customer there were seven sandwiches and the customer informed him he was coming to buy them all.

Then some more people came in to buy more sandwiches, and it stayed like that until around 2:00 p.m. Busy. Too busy to do anything other than see to one issue after the other, and he was grateful, because if it was busy, it couldn’t seem weird.

But then, around 2:00, it got dead quiet.

At some point in the middle of it all, Gordon had put the buns in the oven and had disappeared, so they were alone.

They stood side by side and stared out the front windows at the street, at the cars driving by, the people walking by, and they didn’t look at each other.

He let out a breath and he addressed the passersby. “Uh, we could make another bargain.”

“Yeah?” she said.

“Yeah, we could, uh, just make a deal that we both pretend it never happened.”

“Right,” she said. “That seems really reasonable and probably better for both of us moving forward. I mean, I guess you didn’t even think about it all weekend.”

“Are you kidding? You were all I thought about.”

“Oh.” She liked that.

Damn it, Niles, those are the sorts of signal-sending things you don’t say to girls.“You want to do something together later?” What the fuck? Did he just ask her on a date? That was pursuing her. He didn’tdothat.

“Oh,” she said, giggling. “I thought we just made a deal to pretend it didn’t happen.”

He turned to look at her. She was actually twirling her hair around her forefinger, and it was so damned cute he was going to lose it. “Yeah, sorry. Never mind.”

“Okay, I’m confused.” She was still smiling.

“Fuck, so am I.” He held her gaze, smiling, too. He felt like maybe he could fall into her gaze.What if this is being sure?The thought flitted across his brain and he didn’t even know what to do with it. “Not because of you. You’re not confusing. I like you. I’m very clear on that.”

She bit down on her bottom lip. “I like you, too.”

“Yeah, okay, so let’s not, um, pretend after all?”

“Well, actually—”

“Oh,” he said, flushing, turning away. “Sorry, I thought I was reading this as—”

“You were! But I don’t really want anyone to know about… about what we did.”

“Oh!” He turned back to her. “Yeah, I can definitely see that.”

“And there are things about this that are, well, confusing,” she said.

“Like, the age difference,” he said. “How oldareyou?”

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