I didn't sleep because I could still taste him.
Cedar and coffee. His mouth had tasted like the cortado I'd made him and the cedar that lived in his skin, and the combination was so specifically, devastatingly right that my body had been replaying it on a loop since I'd locked Treeline's door behind us and walked to my car and driven home to Baker with my hands steady on the wheel and my lips still burning.
I'd kissed him. In my shop. On my ground. My choice. I'd said don't move and he'd stood still and I'd put my mouth on his and the sound he'd made had rearranged something inside me that was never going back to its original shape.
And now it was morning and the rearrangement was terrifying.
I stood in my kitchen — Cole's kitchen, Cole's building, Cole's ground — and made coffee from my own beans in my own pour-over because the act of making coffee was the one thing I could still control while the rest of my life tilted on an axis I'd set in motion with my own mouth. The coffee was good. The coffee was always good. The coffee didn't care that I'd kissed a man who owned my lease and my apartment and a nightclub where his ex-girlfriend kissed his cheek three inches from the mouth I'd claimed four hours later.
Claimed. The word arrived and I shoved it back.
I hadn't claimed anything. I'd kissed him. People kiss. Kissing isn't a contract. Kissing isn't an engagement clause. Kissing isn't a man standing in your shop in the dark saying wanting like the word cost him a decade of composure. Except it was. It was all of those things and the woman who'd built Treeline from dead wood was standing in her kitchen at dawn trying to un-build something she'd constructed with her own mouth in the dark.
My phone had three texts from Wen.
First: Did you go back to Treeline after Elevation? Second: Your location says Union Station at midnight. LARK. Third: I swear to God if you kissed him in our shop and didn't tell me I will quit and take the pastry recipe with me.
I didn't answer. I couldn't answer because answering meant confirming and confirming meant it was real and real meant I'd have to face what came next, and what came next was the part I didn't have a blueprint for.
Cole hadn't texted. Cole hadn't called. The man who tracked my route and owned my building and had kissed me back with hands so careful they'd hurt — that man was somewhere in Denver not reaching for his phone, and the silence was either the most patient thing he'd ever done or the most devastating.
I went to Treeline.
The shop smelled like coffee and pine and the ghost of what had happened in the dark. I could feel it — the place where we'd stood, the air between the counter and the door where his hands had been on my face and my hands had been in his sweater. The molecules hadn't rearranged. It just felt like they had.
Wen arrived. Took one look at my face. Set down her bag.
"You kissed him."
"I don't want to talk about it."
"You kissed Cole Ashford in this shop. In the dark. After closing." She looked at the space between the counter and the door like she could see the outline of it. "Right there."
"Wen."
"Was it—"
"I said I don't want to talk about it."
"Your face is talking about it. Your face is giving a full press conference."
"My face needs to make espresso and open the shop and pretend that last night didn't—" I stopped. Because the sentence I was building had a destination I'd reached on a sidewalk outside Elevation and the destination was that last night meant everything and I was standing in my own shop trying to pretend it into something smaller than it was.
"It didn't mean what you think it means," I said.
Wen stared at me. "Who are you talking to?"
"Everyone. You. Him. Myself."
"It didn't mean what it means. That's what you're going with."
"I kissed him because of Sloane. Because a woman touched his arm and kissed his cheek and I felt something I've never felt before and the feeling made me do something I can't take back."
"You kissed him because of jealousy?"
"I kissed him because I'm an idiot who can't tell the difference between jealousy and—" I stopped again. The sentence kept building destinations I wasn't ready to drive to. "I need to not have this conversation right now."
"Okay." Wen tied her apron. Pulled the espresso machine out of its sleep cycle. Did the things baristas do when the world is normal and the shop needs opening and the owner is standing behind the counter having a crisis that smells like cedar. "But Lark?"
"What."
"The difference between jealousy and what you're not saying? There isn't one. Jealousy is the alarm system. What you're not saying is the house it's protecting."
She walked to the pastry case. I stood behind the counter and gripped the edge of the wood — his wood, my wood, the wood where his hand had been and my hand had been and his lips had been on my knuckles and later my lips had been on his mouth — and I felt the weight of what I'd done settle into my body like concrete setting.
I'd kissed him. And I was going to have to face him today because he came to this counter every afternoon and he was going to walk through that door and look at me with the October eyes and the broken sound would be in the air between us and I was going to have to say something.
The something I wanted to say: do it again.
The something I was going to say: that can't happen again.
The morning rush came and went. I pulled shots. Counted tips. Did the math. The math that doesn't lie. Except the math was lying now because the math said Treeline was mine and the math didn't account for the fact that I'd kissed the man who built the ground under it and the kiss had changed the molecular structure of every surface in the building.
He walked in mid-afternoon.
The bell. The cedar. The room shifting. He was in the charcoal sweater — the original one, the Vail one, the one that had been against my hands in the dark. He sat at the counter. Not the corner table. The counter. Eighteen inches. His eyes found mine and they were — God. They were the eyes of a man who hadn't slept either. A man who'd spent the night replaying a sound he'd made against a woman's mouth and hadn't decided if the sound had been the bravest or the most dangerous thing his body had ever done.
"Hi," he said. Quiet. The quietest word he'd ever spoken to me. A word that held everything and asked for nothing.
"That can't happen again."
His face didn't change. His hands didn't tighten on the counter. His breathing didn't shift. But something behind his eyes — the October, the wanting, the broken sound — went still. The way a man goes still when he hears the thing he was afraid of hearing and has been preparing for it since dawn.
"Okay," he said.
"It was — I was reacting. Sloane. The jealousy. I wasn't thinking clearly and I—"
"You don't have to explain."
"I do. Because what happened in this shop last night can't become the foundation of whatever this is. I can't be the woman who kisses you because another woman made me feel something I didn't want to feel. That's not — that's reactive. That's not a choice."
"It felt like a choice."
"It felt like a lot of things."
He looked at me. The counter between us. The same counter. Except the counter held a kiss now and we were both standing on either side of it pretending the kiss was something it wasn't.
"You said don't move," he said. "You crossed the shop. You put your hand on my chest. You said my ground, my shop, my choice." His voice was even. Not arguing — reciting. "Which part of that was reactive?"
I couldn't answer. Because he was right. Every part of that sentence was a choice. The crossing. The hand. The mouth. The don't move. I'd engineered that kiss the way he engineered everything — deliberately, precisely, with the full knowledge of what I was doing and why. The jealousy hadn't made me kiss him. The jealousy had broken the last wall between me and the truth, and the truth was that I'd wanted to kiss him since a chairlift in January and the wanting had been building in my body for weeks and the only thing Sloane had done was remove the last excuse I had for not doing it.
"The part where I pretend it didn't matter," I said. "That part is reactive."
Something moved in his face. The crack. The real one. The one that had been showing through since a dinner table in Vail when I'd said You bought a debt and his composure had fractured for the first time.
"Does it matter?" he asked. Not rhetorical. Not architecture. A man asking a woman a question he didn't know the answer to, in a coffee shop that smelled like them.
"It matters so much that I'm standing here trying to un-say it and I can't."
"Then don't."
"Cole—"
"Don't un-say it. Don't un-kiss it. Don't stand behind your counter and tell me last night was reactive when we both know you crossed that shop because you wanted to and the wanting is the realest thing either of us has felt since October."
The shop was quiet. Wen was in the back — she'd disappeared the second she'd heard his voice, because Wen read rooms the way I read espresso and this room needed exactly two people in it.
I looked at him. Charcoal sweater. Cedar. The counter between us holding the weight of everything we'd said across it and everything we'd done on the other side of it in the dark.
"I'm not yours," I said. Quiet. Not a blade this time. A boundary. "I kissed you. I'll probably kiss you again. But I am not yours. I am mine. And the second you treat that kiss like ownership, I will walk out of this shop and you will never sit at that counter again."
"I don't want to own you, Lark."
"What do you want?"
"I want you to keep choosing. Every day. Not because of a clause or a debt or a building I own. Because you walked across the shop."
I made his cortado. Twenty-two seconds. Set it on the counter. This time I didn't pull my hand back. I left it on the ceramic. His hand came forward and his fingers found mine on the cup and the touch was warm and deliberate and neither of us pretended it was an accident.
"Same time tomorrow?" he said.
"Don't push it."
"That's not a no."
"That's a not yet." I pulled my hand back. Slowly. The same slow withdrawal from Elevation except this time the withdrawal wasn't leaving. It was pacing. "I need time."
"Take your time," he said. The same words from the VIP lounge. Except now they carried the weight of a kiss and the taste of coffee and the knowledge that both of them were standing on the same ground for the first time since a man had watched a woman build something through a construction barrier and decided his whole life was about to change.
He picked up the cortado. Took a sip. Left. The bell. The door. The absence.
Wen materialized from the back room in under three seconds.
"I'm not yours followed by probably kiss you again followed by not yet." She was counting on her fingers. "That's a no that's actually a yes that's actually an I'm terrified and I need you to wait while I figure out how to stop being terrified."
"Wen."
"Am I wrong?"
I wiped down the counter. The place where his hand had been on mine on the cortado cup. The cedar was on the ceramic.
"No," I said. "You're not wrong."