It’s mid-October, the air sharp enough to make his nose run, crumpled maple leaves crunching under work boots every time someone shifts their weight, when he sees her walking toward him. Lila, 28, the daughter of his paper supplier, who just took over the family business when her dad retired last spring. He’s known her since she was 14, when she’d trail into his shop after school with her dad, lollipop stuck in her cheek, asking quiet questions about the maps hanging on the walls. He’d always thought of her as a kid, off limits, too bright and loud for his quiet, routine-driven life. She stops a foot away from him, close enough that he can smell pine soap on her flannel and the faint sweet tang of lavender hand cream, a smudge of black printer ink smudged along her left jaw. She’s holding a paper bag with his name on it, the special linen-backed paper he ordered for an 1892 coastal Oregon map he’s restoring.
“I stopped by your shop an hour ago, you were gone,” she says, leaning in a little to yell over the band’s cover of *Folsom Prison Blues*, her elbow brushing his when she holds the bag out. The contact is light, accidental, but he flinches anyway, his first instinct to reach for the sanitizer in his pocket. He stops himself when he sees the grin tugging at the corner of her mouth, hazel eyes flecked with gold crinkling at the corners. He never noticed the gold flecks before. “Javi said I’d find you hiding over here. Still weird about touching people, huh?”
He snorts, takes a sip of his beer to buy time, his chest tight with a weird mix of embarrassment and something warmer he hasn’t felt in years. It’s wrong, he tells himself, he’s 25 years older than her, knew her when she was still in middle school, this is the kind of thing people side-eye at the grocery store. But when she leans in closer, her knee brushing his denim-clad thigh when she nods at the map he’d tucked under his arm to bring to Javi to show off, that tightness shifts to something sharper, hungrier. She points at the inked outline of Cannon Beach, her nail chipped with forest green polish, and says she used to stare at that exact map when she was a kid, daydreaming about camping there with her friends.
He’s still arguing with himself, half ready to make an excuse and leave, half ready to ask her to sit down, when she lifts her hand and wipes a fleck of beer foam off his upper lip with her thumb. The contact lingers, her skin warm against the rough stubble on his jaw, and he doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t reach for sanitizer. Doesn’t step back. The noise of the beer garden fades for a second, just the low thrum of the bass and the crunch of leaves under a stranger’s boot, and she says she’s been working up the nerve to ask him out for coffee for three months, was scared he’d turn her down because he always seemed so closed off.
He says yes before he can overthink it, tells her he can meet her at the little bakery down the street from his shop tomorrow afternoon, after he finishes touching up the map’s faded lighthouse markers, he can show her the finished piece if she wants. She lights up, pulls a scrap of the same linen paper he uses for map backing out of her pocket, scribbles her phone number on it in the same deep blue ink he uses for line work, and shoves it into the pocket of his flannel. Her fingers brush his wrist when she does it, and he doesn’t even think about sanitizer this time.
She stays for another hour, sits next to him on the splintered pine picnic bench, their shoulders pressed together the whole time while they talk about old maps and her dad’s terrible golf game and the time she snuck a bottle of her dad’s beer when she was 16 and got sick on the floor of his shop. When she leaves, she gives him a quick, warm hug, and he tucks his hand into the small of her back for half a second before she pulls away. He stands there for ten minutes after she’s gone, holding the scrap of paper with her number on it, the cold IPA long forgotten on the table next to him. He doesn’t wipe his hands once.
