Sparks Fly

Twenty-six years of friendship. One almost-kiss. And a car alarm with the worst timing in town.

June Whitaker has three rules for surviving Cherry Hollow: keep her column inches tight, don’t ask Mrs. Petrakis about her love life, and absolutely do not think about the way her best friend Theo Lang looks in the light off the lake on the Fourth of July.

She’s been following rule three for twenty-six years. She’s very good at it.

Theo Lang has spent his entire adult life maintaining a careful, friendly, perfectly reasonable distance from the girl who’s been in the corner of every good memory he owns. He calls it being a good friend. His mother calls it a casserole dish situation. Theo calls it fine.

It is not fine.

When a car alarm interrupts what might have been a moment — or might have been nothing, June is choosing nothing — both of them retreat to their corners. June to a job offer in Columbus she can’t quite bring herself to accept. Theo to a silence that says everything he won’t.

Two weeks. One street dance. One lemonade table and a woman who’s worked it for thirty years and knows exactly where everyone should be standing.

Sparks were always going to fly. They were just very, very slow about it.