Seven months they've closed the shop together — flipping the sign, counting the drawer, carrying the last cart of returns back to the sagging shelves — and in all that time neither of them has found a reason to touch the other on purpose.
Tonight the cart holds forty books, and climbing to the top three shelves is only safe if someone holds the base. He holds the base. She climbs.
"Poetry's the second shelf," she calls down, a stack of water-stained paperbacks balanced in the crook of one arm. "I know where poetry is," he says. "I shelved it Tuesday." "Then hand them up right."
He passes them up one at a time, spine-first, the way she taught him in April, and she fits each one into its gap without looking down — her whole attention on the shelf, his on the ladder's wheels, locked, and the brake he's already checked twice.
The last book is hers to place, a slim blue thing with no jacket, and she holds it a beat longer than it needs, like she isn't ready for the cart to be empty either.
"That's the cart," he says. "Come down."
She comes down the way she always does, one rung at a time, a hand reaching for the rail and finding his shoulder instead, because the rail is already full — both his hands on it, one on each side of her hips, steadying a ladder that stopped moving ten minutes ago.
She stops one rung short of the floor. It puts her exactly level with him, close enough that neither has to tip a head to find the other's eyes, which hasn't happened once in seven months of this — not by accident, and not on purpose either.
"Last rung," he says, not stepping back, not moving his hands off the rails. "I know where the floor is," she says, and doesn't take it.
The shop holds its breath the way it does after closing — dust settling, the radiator ticking somewhere past poetry — and for a long moment neither of them does anything at all about the one rung still between her and the floor.