Page 58 of Fall is Brewing

A customer laughs somewhere behind us. Glass clinks against glass. The register drawer slides shut with a soft mechanical chime.

Neither of us moves until Brooks reaches past me for a tasting glass on the shelf behind my shoulder.

He could ask me to move… but he doesn’t.

His chest brushes my upper arm as he reaches, a light contact that should mean nothing and somehow manages to pull every nerve in my body awake. I inhale too sharply and catch the scent of coffee lingering on him, apple and cinnamon and something darker underneath. Not cologne. Not soap exactly. Just Brooks. Warm skin and work and morning.

His hand closes around the glass.

He doesn’t step back right away.

For a second, we are both very still.

“Careful, Hartley,” he murmurs, his voice low enough to feel like a touch. “You keep selling like that, I might have to keep you.”

My pulse stumbles so hard it’s humiliating.

I turn my head just enough to meet his eyes. “You couldn’t afford me.”

His gaze drops to my mouth. Just once. “I’m starting to think you’d be worth the investment.”

Heat rushes up my throat.

It would be so easy to turn this into a joke. To snap back. To shove him lightly and roll my eyes and remind us both that we are rivals, that I am only here because I lost a bet, that every minute I spend learning his operation is a minute I’m not at Hartley & Sons.

Instead, I forget how words work.

Which is inconvenient. And unacceptable.

I clear my throat and step sideways, putting exactly eight inches of space between us because eight inches feels safer than one.

“Your next customers are waiting,” I say.

His smile is faint; knowing and infuriating all at once. “So they are.”

For the next hour, we fall into a rhythm I do not want to enjoy.

Brooks pours. I talk. I pour. He watches. We argue quietly over descriptions in between customers, low-voiced and smiling just enough that anyone watching would probably mistake it for flirtation.

Which it is most definitely not. Nope. No way, no how.

“You can’t call it brooding,” I tell him after one customer leaves with a bottle of their driest cider.

“Why not?”

“Because cider doesn’t brood. It’s not some emo kid from the early 00s listening to Radiohead and putting more eyeliner on than me.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Hartley. Grab your Jimmy Eat World cds, because this one broods.”

“It’s just tannins⁠—”

He shakes his head. “It has depth.”

“It’s fermented fruit, not a duke in a gothic novel,” I try again.

He grins, our sparring match pausing. “You read gothic novels?”

“I’m like a kaleidoscope of contradictions.”