“Um… hi,” she said, before he could crunch that data.
“You made it,” seemed a safe answer.
“Yeah. And I got a good spot in line, too.” She nodded at a queue behind her of chattering college students and parents wheeling strollers more expensive than Ethan’s car, then stepped back from the menu and gestured for him to duck under a barrier belt separating Salt & Straw’s patient hopefuls from line-jumpers. “Since I was waiting.”
He stepped over the belt, crossed his arms, and studied the offerings. “Traffic.”
“I know.” She flicked her ponytail.
Shehadseen him stalled at the Santa Cruz Avenue intersection, then—and for some reason, laughter rippled over his tongue. So he coughed and asked her, “What are you ordering?”
“I already told you: goat cheese, marionberry, and habanero.”
“That malted chocolate barley milk option didn’t change your mind?”
“No. I’m loyal to my oat milk. When you leave any of it for other people.”
“You’re the one who admits to spiking your creamer with coffee—”
—but that wasn’t something Erin had told him.
Forsterhad.
Did she realize that?
“Uh.” She edged forward through the creamery’s glass double doors when a space cleared inside, very interested in the floor. Yes, she clearly did. “No, still habanero.”
I like my spice…
Was that waft of juniper her perfume, or from a specialty ice cream?
“I’ll get the…um, boysenberry oat milk sherbet.”
“Why?” She shuffled along a snaking line toward the taster spoons, not looking at him.
“You just said you liked oat milk.” And he’d promised Forster both the habanero and boysenberry flavors, with a chance to lick the spoons.
“Oh. Right.”
They advanced to the counter in silence.
“Any taste tests of our seasonal options?” A server juggling a scooper from hand to hand in time to a bouncy pop track piping from the overhead speakers smiled at their approach; they declined tasting the malted chocolate barley milk, the salted caramel and okara cupcake, or the lemon curd and whey. “No? Then what can I get you two?”
“The goat cheese, marionberry, and habanero, please. In a cone.”
“Boysenberry oat milk sherbet. Cup.”
“Paying—”
“Separately,” they said together.
“Sure.” The server slung their orders onto the counter and tossed her used scooper into a bucket of hot water. “You can swipe your cards at the register. There’s a stack of napkins if you need them. Next in line!”
Cup, cone, and napkins in hand, they weaved through an increasingly rowdy after-dinner crowd swarming the creamery, sliding onto a bench outside just as a giggling couple trading a few last licks of ice cream on their spoons vacated it. It was a very public spot. They wouldn’t be whispering sweet nothings like the departing men, however, so it didn’t matter—and if their conversation went according to form, they’d be shouting rather than whispering. Which was… safer. Or rather, their argumentshadbeen safer, until today—
Ethan shoveled a heap of boysenberry sherbet into his mouth.
Erin mirrored him, plucking out a whole marionberry from her dessert.Crunch. Then, “So.”
