Page 12 of Gatsby's Starlet
“You’re serious about the tile,” he said after a moment, watching me instead of the menu in his hands.
“I am,” I replied, still studying the floor. “If they’d renovated it, they would’ve lost half the story.”
“It’s cracked.”
“So are most things worth keeping.”
His mouth shifted slightly at that, not quite a smile, more like he’d filed the statement away for later inspection.
The waitress came and went with coffee orders, and when she left us alone again the noise of the diner seemed to expand to fill the silence, forks against plates, a child whining two booths over, the hiss of the griddle from the open kitchen, and I became acutely aware of how small the table suddenly felt compared to the length of his back on the motorcycle.
“So,” he said, lifting his mug but not drinking yet, “Patina & Pearl.”
“You remembered.”
“I remember things that stick.”
That did something very inconvenient to my pulse.
“It opened three years ago,” I said, because facts are safer than implications. “The building used to be a tailor shop. I kept the original counter. It has burn marks from someone who ironed too close to the edge.”
“Most people would’ve sanded that down.”
“Most people don’t understand that evidence is the point.”
His gaze held mine longer this time, steady but not invasive, and I felt the same awareness I’d felt on the bike, that sense of being observed not for surface, but for structure.
“You do all the sourcing yourself?” he asked.
“Yes. Estate sales mostly. Sometimes auctions. Sometimes places where things have been sitting untouched long enough that dust feels like a second skin.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
“Dust?”
“The history.”
I tilted my head slightly. “Why would it?”
“Because sometimes history isn’t clean.”
There was something in the way he said it, not dramatic, not heavy, just stated like fact. But I knew the comment wasn’t random, but personal.
“It doesn’t have to be clean to be worth saving,” I replied quietly.
The words sat between us.
He took a slow drink of coffee. “You always been like that?” he asked after a moment.
“Like what?”
“Looking for what survives.”
I hesitated. “Yes,” I said finally. “I suppose I have. Even as a kid I was rescuing things.”
He nodded once, like that tracked with whatever he’d already decided about me.
I shifted slightly in the booth, suddenly aware of how easily this was sliding somewhere deeper than pancakes and tile, and I redirected before it went too far.
