Twenty minutes later, she was back at the hardware store unloading bags of art supplies and spreading out posterboard on the floor.
“There’s a table in the back.”
“This is fine.” She uncapped a thick black marker and wrote SALE in bubble letters. The bright florescent green posterboard was impossible to miss.
Harrison finally turned on the lights, but the store still had the eerie vacancy of a mausoleum. “Can you turn on some music?”
“What kind?”
“Anything. It’s too quiet in here.”
She outlined her letters in a spiked bubble. When he set his phone on the counter, she pointed to the drug store bags. “There are scissors in that bag. Can you toss them over?”
The slow beat of Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” cut the silence and she tensed. Maybe silence was better.
Harrison dug through the bag. “You got a lot of stuff.”
The stroke of the marker slowed as the lyrics distracted her. “Well, the goal is to get the town to notice, right? So you can sell the store?”
She didn’t care about the store, but she cared about him. Her masochistic heart was basically sawing through the last of his ties to this place.
Throat tight, she said, “I aim to succeed.”
“Here.” He handed her the scissors.
The love song taunted her and her fingers shook as she cut out the bubble letters. Harrison lowered himself to the dusty floor, folding his feet under his knees as he watched her.
His attention traced over her skin and she tried not to acknowledge his stare, but she felt his focus so deeply she couldn’t forget he was there.
Her hand stopped and her head dropped. This was impossible.
“What’s wrong?”
Pushing through the emotional turmoil that was gnawing away at her insides, she forced herself to keep making signs. “Nothing.”
“What were you painting?”
Her lungs tightened around her breath. “Huh?”
“There’s a paint stain on your ass.”
That confirmed where his stare had gone. “A deck.” His hand trailed the curve of her butt and she tensed. She couldn’t focus when he touched her. “Harrison…”
“Hmm?”
“Let’s get this done.”
The heat of his touch disappeared. “Okay.”
For the next hour she designed bold signs and Harrison taped them to the front window. She did most of the writing and cutting, but that was fine. It gave her somewhere to look so she didn’t have to face him.
Standing, she brushed the dust off her faded leggings and went outside to get an exterior peek at the display. She came back in and shot him a thumbs up. “It looks great.”
James Arthur’s voice cut through the store, singing “Say You Won’t Let Go” and their eyes met. The instant tangle of their chemistry tied her in knots.
He closed the distance and laced his hand with hers, pulling her close and pressing her palm to his shoulder. She laughed and blushed when he lifted her right hand and started leading her in a slow dance.
Maybe he didn’t hear the lyrics, or maybe they didn’t mean anything to him and he was just being cute, but as the singer begged someone to say they won’t let go an ache formed in her chest, rising to her throat, until her eyes prickled with implication.
Harrison never took her to a dance. Tickets were always expensive and they weren’t that type of couple. He used to claim he couldn’t dance, but he’d obviously learned. A pinch of jealousy nipped as she wondered who taught him.
Their feet shuffled over the dusty floor, and she gave in to the moment, leaning her head to his chest and drawing comfort from the steady beat of his heart. Like the song said, she wanted to live with him until they were gray and old, and she’d probably love him until her lungs gave out. As the thought escaped, so did a tear.
She blinked rapidly, the runaway tear vanishing in the cotton of his shirt, hopefully undetected. Breath tight, she slid her hand from his shoulder and untangled their fingers, pulling away before the song finished.
Facing the door, she showed him her back as she scrambled for composure. The last lyric begged, say you won’t let go, and something painful tore through her heart, a sort of unspoken promise that she could not lower herself to begging and needed to accept that, like before, he was going to leave.
Enough. That was enough.
With a quick sniffle, she cleared her throat and lifted her chin. “We should make a sign for the door, so people know when the sale starts. You’ll have to open for a few days.”
She forced her thoughts on simple objectives, keeping all emotion out of it. Having a clear-cut purpose let her amputate the sadness, or at least momentarily anesthetize the pain.
At the prices he’d chosen, it wouldn’t take long for the inventory to sell out. And once the store was empty, he’d have no reason to stay. Maybe it was best to get to the inevitable misery, so they could break this cycle once and for all, and she could stop repeating the same old injury.