The muscles in his jaw tick. “You mentioned there was a lot to see around here.”

“Yes, right!” Too cheerful, again. I try to less cheerfully pass him my list, and he looks down at it for a few seconds, his brows still lowered.

“We should switch the first three with the last two,” he says. “It’s more efficient.”

I peek over his shoulder at the list, then swipe my thumb across my phone, stare down at my map. Shoot. He is correct.

“That was rude,” he says suddenly, and I look up at him. He looks tired around his eyes, the bright, piercing blue somehow wearier. “To use that word.”

I smile. I know which word he means—I’d pictured it written out, very sans serif, as soon as it had come out of his mouth. Asshole. But I feign ignorance.

“Efficient?” I say, widening my eyes dramatically.

He seems to appreciate that, the swoonsh back briefly, and it doesn’t quite break the tension between us, but it makes it more manageable. I have a flashback to every time a teacher made the class count off into partners: those initial minutes where you’re sitting next to someone who feels new to you, no matter that they’ve only been sitting a few rows away for the whole school year.

It starts out well, it really does. The first three signs—efficient, indeed!—are still visible, and while the first one is a little bland, not much more than different sizes of the same basic block lettering, the second and third are winners, basically giant, hand-painted banners on the brick sides of buildings, multiple advertisements stacked on top of one another with lots of lettering styles. For both of those, we stop, tucking ourselves out of the way as best we can so I can take photos without getting in the way of people walking, and it becomes a sort of rhythm between us as we move through the next few on the list. A couple of times, Reid takes my phone from me and gets a better angle, his height and long arms a real advantage. Sometimes he crosses the street or straightens himself beside a parked car to get closer. When we talk, it feels safe, focused—he asks me what I call a certain type of lettering, or asks me to explain some term I use for a specific part of a letter. At one point, I tease him about watching some of the short tutorials I’ve done so he can practice the basics, handing him one of my own business cards and directing him to my website. For some reason, it makes my stomach flutter to see him holding it, to see him looking down at its careful design. It’s as though I’m peeking in on the same private moment I’d had when I’d held his card in the shop.