He smiled. “Don’t knock it. I’m just soaking everything up before you leave again.”
She felt his eyes on her, and she knew she was blushing, and as much as she tried to swallow the smile, there it was. “Here we are again,” she said. “Flirting in the kitchen. This is how we got in trouble at Dana Koppke’s sixteenth birthday.”
He frowned. “I’m pretty sure you started it at Dana Koppke’s sixteenth birthday. I was just doing the dishes, up to my elbows in soapy water. And you”—he stepped closer—“kissed me right on my clueless mug.” He pointed to his cheek. “I’ve never washed it, you know.”
“Oh, brother,” Laurie muttered down toward the glass she was cleaning, and she heard him chuckle. “My greatest hits. For the record, I was at least smart enough that I was mortified.” She glanced at him for the shortest moment she could manage. “I can only imagine what you told everybody.”
“I didn’t tell anybody. I was trying to figure out my big move.”
She swirled water in a glass. “You waited a week to call me, you know.”
“Of course I did. I thought I might have imagined it, since you immediately ran out and never said anything about it again.”
She opened the dishwasher, and he had to step back. “Exactly. It was step one in my big romantic plan in which I had absolutely no step two.” She lined up the plates and the glasses and shut the door, wiping her hands on a towel that was folded on the counter.
“Well, it worked on me,” he said, taking hold of a salt shaker on the counter and spinning it in his fingers. “So there’s that.”
“Yeah,” she said, “there is that.” She looked at his hand moving. “I forgot how fidgety you are.”
“Ah, that. Becca called it ‘twitching.’ It drove her nuts.”
“Ah,” Laurie said. “Is that why she so foolishly let you go?”
He nodded slowly. “Yes. That and a very appealing job offer that took her very far away.”
“You couldn’t go?”
“I really couldn’t.”
“No libraries in Michigan?”
“I couldn’t,” he repeated. “I was in the process of taking over from my parents, and it was just the worst possible time for me to go.”
“So it was bad timing.” Laurie had come to the library a lot during their senior year in high school, when Nick was working there part-time. They would talk, make out in the stacks, shelve books, make out a little more.
He nodded again. “The county wanted to close the branch. Combine us with Wybeck and Brayer, lay off the staff, take back the budget, send all the patrons forty-five minutes away. We would have been screwed, but they did say they were going to put a vending machine that made lattes in the new building.”
“And you stopped it.” Of course he did. Of course. Hi, Mr. Cooper; thanks, Mr. Cooper; thanks again, Nick; you’re my hero. She couldn’t stop staring at him, at the corners of his eyes, the shape of his shoulders, the way his fingers were nimble and still spinning the glass shaker. “How did you manage that?”
“I went to probably a hundred meetings,” he said. “Boards and councils and advisory groups. I ate a hundred stale doughnuts, drank gallons of the most vile coffee on the planet. We needed money for repairs that the county didn’t have, so we had car washes and book sales and a very memorable bachelor auction with a bunch of our local baseball players.”
“I honestly thought people only did bachelor auctions on television.”
“On television and in the world of my grandmother.”
“Well, it sounds exciting. Who went for the most?”
“Shortstop. Nice guy. Raised a hundred bucks. We would have needed like five thousand of him to save the place, but he did his part.” He put the salt shaker down. “It took about three years to get through it.”
“And it’s safe now?”
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned,” he said, “it’s that you’re only safe till the next city council vote.”
“Is that your parents’ advice?”
“I think it was the theme of my fifth birthday party.” He took a deep breath. “So, anyway. Right then, I couldn’t leave. And because it was the job she’d always wanted, she couldn’t stay.”
“I guess being married long-distance is not ideal.”
“Honestly,” he said, “maybe we’d have tried it for as long as we could if everything had been perfect otherwise. But it wasn’t. So we didn’t.”