"Don't get poetic on me, Drake. I buy poetry for window displays. I know when it's overpriced."
"Then I'll stick to prose. Claire Whitmore, I am glad the clerk made a mistake."
She held his gaze. The winged eyeliner did not waver; the lighter pink of her mouth parted on a breath that fogged faintly in the cooling air near the window. Outside, the snow came down as if it had infinite inventory. "Samuel Drake," she said, "I am trying very hard not to be glad about a clerical error while I am allegedly thinking about another man's proposal. Trying is the operative word. Trying is currently losing."
"How's the margin?"
"Historic failure. Possibly seasonally festive failure. The kind of failure you put in a Polaroid and keep forever against your better judgment."
They did not kiss then. The delay stretched like taffy, sweet and thin and longer than expected. They told worse stories to fill it: the time Claire accidentally sold a customer on a coat that made her look like a warning buoy in a shipping channel, and the woman had loved it so much she came back for the matching hat; the time Samuel glued his own sleeve to a table leg and had to cut the shirt free with a chisel while Bevel the cat watched in pure judgment, tail flicking like a metronome of shame. They spoke of music without quoting a single lyric—only the feeling of certain songs in certain Decembers, the way a cassette could rewind a year if you let it, the particular static between tracks that sounded like snow if you were lonely enough. Samuel produced his Walkman from his bag, the plastic scuffed, the foam earbuds compressed by years of ears. He offered one bud; Claire leaned in, white fur and camel wool and cream cable-knit briefly becoming one geography, and they listened to a crackly radio recording of a choir from 1958, the sound thin and brave, like hope with interference.