Sweet Romance12 min read
The Little Shop, The Big Smile, and the Day We Woke as Wolves
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I used to call our little shop "the pocket of color" because it fit in a pocket of the street, and because it made people feel like they had kept brightness in their hands. I painted names on boxes, mixed shades like soups, and always fixed the lid wrong so customers had to come back. That part was my pride.
"Boss, what new gloss have you brought in this week?" Antonella asked, leaning on the counter and peeking into the trays as if she expected the colors to jump up and speak.
"I'm the boss, not the boss's wife," I said, tugging Christoph's sleeve and bringing him forward. "Try this, it'll make your face pop."
Christoph pretended to look bored. He let me roll a color across his arm and watched it settle on his skin like a small, polite exile of paint.
"That one's like a peony," Antonella said, smiling. "Wrap it for me. I'll take it."
Christoph kept his head down and rubbed the spot where the gloss had been, slow and careful, like he had a secret he wanted to hide in the lines of his fingers.
"You've been good for business," I teased, because that was easier than telling him he had been good for me.
He blinked, then smiled a small private smile that I had learned to watch for. "When I was admired," he said, "you didn't even know a man from a button."
"Compliment me and you start wheezing," I said, nudging him. "You're the one who gives a glow to people."
"You're the one who makes the colors."
We laughed, and customers came and left, and the little town kept its slow rhythm. People came for the lip glosses and stayed because of Christoph. He had that lazy way of leaning on the counter with a fan in his hand and a smile that made women forget what they had come to buy.
"Do you have a wife? Or maybe a concubine?" a young woman asked once, just at the register, when she thought I wasn't listening.
Christoph clicked the abacus beads and then looked up with that smile. "No concubines," he said. "We have wolves."
He made a joke and the girl blushed and paid. The joke was his, the shop was ours, and our lives stitched together like the layers of pigment I kept in wooden drawers.
I had wanted a quiet life beside him. We both came from places that wanted us to be other things—he from a home that polished the wealthy shapes of a gentleman, I from a life that had taught me how to spin a trade into a meal. We decided to open a shop because it fit us. We liked the small cleverness of it. He liked the way people found excuses to visit. I liked arranging colors in neat rows, naming them for things I loved: peony, dusk, gentle rain.
"You're too grand," people told him, because he had the habit of saying things like "my lady" and "my jewel" like they were old coins. But when he tucked his hand into my sleeve and pinched my cheek, I could not complain.
One day, when the weather had only just turned warm and the bell above the door chimed more slowly than usual, I tested a shade on his wrist and kissed him quickly on the cheek.
"You're catching on," I said. "You're quite the lady-killer."
He lowered his eyes as if he had been struck by shyness, then lifted them to stare straight at me. "When I was admired," he said again, "you wouldn't know whether a man is round or flat."
"I praise you and you begin to pant," I answered, because I wanted him to be embarrassed and I liked that the embarrassment softened him.
He carried his old ways into our quiet life. He had the habit of appearing with a folded fan, leaning like a painted figure among my pigments, and letting his smile do the work. It was a small theater. When a customer gave him a hard look and asked about concubines, he would click the abacus and say, "No concubines. I have wolves," and the shop would laugh.
Eventually we talked about plowing fields. "We could go plant," I said one evening, wiping my hands on my apron.
"I don't know how," he answered. "And you don't either."
Then we nodded at each other and turned back to our colors. Brains had served us well. Money was tucked away in a box. We preferred the safe, clever plan: sell small beauty to a town that liked pretty things.
But then, one morning when the rain had not yet dried and I was closing up, Christoph caught my hand and asked in a new and small voice, "Have you been feeling strange?"
"What nonsense," I said, and kept closing jars. But the thought stained the air. He took my hand and kept it, eyes round and careful.
"You are," he said, kneeling as if to listen to something secret. "Sit, Aiko. Sit still."
He put his ear to my belly like a man who had been surprised by thunder. I laughed—"You can't hear anything—"—and then I heard his breath change as if he had found a missing bell.
"Don't make me a liar," he begged. "Tell me."
I told him. I was clumsy with the news in a shop where paint fumes always smelled like small promises. We shut the shop for a while and let people think we had gone away. "We will rest for ten months," Christoph said, as if he could count months like beads. He worried the way people worry over fragile things.
"Ten months?" I said. "They'll think we've separated and gossip for us."
He sat very still. "I worry. What if the baby—no, the babies—are too big? What if you're in trouble?"
"You're not the one who will be giving birth," I pointed out, but it didn't stop his worry. He bought silly soft foods and forced them on me, and when I ate less, he ate less in sympathy until his portion looked like it belonged to a small bird.
Time, when you watch it from behind a counter, moves in small patient intervals. I grew round with the secret in me. Christoph pretended to be the only one who could think of names.
"For a boy," he said, scribbling on scraps of paper, "he should be... Armando Picard."
"And if it's a girl?"
"Iris Banks."
He wrote and crossed and wrote again until papers lay like scattered leaves. The day the midwife—Burke Andersen—came from the city, Christoph sat outside in the dust and kept talking to the sky like a man learning prayers.
"You will make a fool of the whole square," I told him, because I did not know how else to turn the lump of worry into light.
He went down on his knees in the yard and looked up at the eaves. "I swear to the roof," he said, "I will be a good father."
It was late when our first child let out a wail that sounded like a firm declaration. The second one followed with a small laugh as if the world had told a joke. Armando cried first and Iris smiled like she had known a secret all along.
He worshipped them like he worshipped colors. When Armando kicked and fussed, Christoph took it as a personal amusement. He would rise from where he bumbled, and, even when drenched by the baby's mess, he would laugh as if this were the best trick in life.
"Will she be all right?" Christoph asked one night, staring at Iris whose eyes were barely open.
"If she marries someone like you," I said, "she will be lucky."
He looked at me as if I had placed a crown on his head.
One year, two, it felt like living in a warm painting. We closed the shop sometimes and placed our small family in the center of the canvas. Christoph learned how to carry babies in the hollow of his arms and to mimic their small expressions until they were laughing.
He had a dozen small gentlenesses. He would unbutton his coat and drape it over me when the night smelled like river and cold. He was not loud with love. He was a man of small, private offerings. Once, when I had frozen my hands returning from market, he took off the coat without asking and wrapped it around my shoulders.
"You're silly to keep me in a shop like a charm," he said. "You are the keeper."
I remember the day he put a folded piece of paper in my hand. "I wrote names again," he said. "This time I am serious."
He had been always good at making me blush.
Our days rolled like wooden beads—children's laughter, the warm smell of wax, the chime of the door. But once, on a morning painted in thin silver, something impossible happened.
I woke to the sound of a howl too close to a throat I knew.
"Ah—" I tried to speak. My mouth felt furry. I lifted a hand and saw claws where fingers should be. The skin under my nails had become soft pads. I became a small wolf.
"Christoph!" I wanted to shout.
"Ow—" The word that left my throat was a small howl, and the whole thatch of our house answered.
Across the room I saw him. He lay like a great gray thing, and his coat shone silver. It was strange and true: Christoph had become a wolf too.
I could have fainted at the oddness of it, except the first impulse was practical: if we went out like this, people would kill us with sticks. If the children saw us, they'd be afraid. If anyone in town found two wolves wandering the lane, they'd chase us until we died.
Christoph blinked and then jumped to his feet and came to the bed. He nudged at my fur with his nose, then did something very human: he grabbed my little pink jacket in his jaws and brought it over, dropping it on me like a tender offering.
"You are Aiko?" he seemed to ask.
I tapped the jacket with one paw and then pawed at his fan on the floor. He helped, nudging it with his nose. We looked at each other like two people who had lost language and were making tools of instincts.
We tried to think. We made the sounds we could. We circled the hearth and sniffed the air. I discovered that a wolf's nose is always curious and that Christoph, even as a wolf, was a gentleman—he knocked delicately at the water jar and used his paws with careful motion.
"Don't go out," I wanted to say, but only a low rumble came from my throat. Christoph's ears, though furred, twitched in sympathy. He pressed his side to mine, and in that gesture I felt him promise—he would not let anything happen.
We stayed in the yard and watched the chickens explode in feathers. The hens scattered like a small storm, and one laid an egg in the confusion, which we found as though it had fallen from the sky for us to watch. We ate strange things—leftover roast and a hard piece of rice stuck to the pot—and I felt the ridiculousness of being a lady forced to bite at roasted meat with wolf teeth.
"You're right," Christoph said in a series of whines and a sort of bark that sounded almost like his voice. He mocked me by tapping the floor with his paws as if he were the one teaching a child.
We played like two careless animals. I pushed him with my shoulder and he rolled on his back, all quick spirited moves that left both of us breathless and laughing with high little sounds. For a day we were all limbs and paws and simple pleasures: chasing sticks, stamping in the dirt, making a mess in a way that a neat life couldn't permit.
At noon I heard the children's small feet padding in the house. They skipped into the yard and found us. Iris pointed as if she recognized something ancient in our faces.
"What is that?" she asked, and because she was a child, she did not scream.
Armando came closer and put his small hand on my head. He was not afraid. "Mama?" he said, and his voice held the steady calm of children who believe their parents could be anything and still be their parents.
Christoph bowed in a way that mimicked his gentlemanly pose, and the children laughed because he put a paw to his chest and made a ridiculous curtsey.
All of us—two parents, two children—sat in the sun like a small pack. The world felt remarkably intact. I still worried, but I also felt softly delighted by the way Christoph's eyes shone even without a human face. He still had the same hesitation before a laugh, and the same way his tail—if he had a tail—would have flicked if he had one.
At dusk we curled up together on the pallet. The chickens had resumed their polite gossip, the town went on with its soft business, and the moon made our fur silver in a way that made us look like two small myths.
The next morning I woke and stretched my fingers. The claws had gone. Christoph sat up as a man and shuffled toward the kettle like nothing had happened. We never spoke of it at first. We treated it like a private magic that belonged only to us.
Later, though, Iris found a drawing in the yard: small paw prints stamped in a circle like plums. She came in with it grinning.
"Look what I found," she said, and it was a simple sketch of paw prints with five dots like plum blossom petals.
"We should keep it," Christoph said, very tender. "Put it where a drawer cannot swallow it."
We slid the paper into the deepest corner of a drawer where our small dear things went. I pressed it between a box of old ribbons and the list of names Christoph had written years ago. There, the paw-print plum blossoms stayed like a secret proof that we had been wolves for a little while.
People sometimes asked if anything strange had happened while we were closed. I said nothing, because lies were heavy and I prefer to keep my truth light like the color on a cheek. We went back to selling gloss and mixing shades, and every so often Christoph would watch me with an odd small look and touch my sleeve just where a paw print might have rested.
There were three times when my heart leaped like it had forgotten a beat of a small drum.
The first was when he laughed in the shop at a girl's shy question and then, without warning, reached over and brushed a fleck of paint from my hair. The touch was quick, ordinary—like wiping dust from a book—but it made my throat tighten. I realized then that his hands were the same ones that had once counted money and now counted the days with me.
"You're serious?" I asked, feeling foolish.
"Always," he said, but he was looking at my hair like it held a secret.
The second time my heart fluttered was when rain started to patter and I had no coat. He slipped his over my shoulders with such slow care that I almost told him to hurry up because the rain was cold. Instead I let him, and for a moment I felt like a child being wrapped in something warm.
"You're heavy with it," he murmured—meaning my pregnancy then, but meaning more than that, too.
The third time was one evening when the square held the market and people had cleared out and left only the perfume of dusk. I was counting a handful of coins and he came to the counter and knelt down on one knee as if in something borrowed from a story.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"Listening," he said, putting his ear to my belly like he had done the first time. "I want to know if our small ones are awake."
I pressed my hand on his and felt like a flame. He looked foolish and brave all at the same time. "They move like lively colors," he said. "Like paint that can't sit still."
We had quiet days after that, days colored by little gestures—him bringing me a pillow, him putting a cooling cloth on my forehead, him explaining names he'd chosen for our children as if each name were a list of virtues.
I learned that a simple life could be full of hush and storm at the same time. There are mornings when the sugar in the bowl feels like wealth enough. There are bad days too—much cooking, spilled ink, a storm that tore our awning. But Christoph would stand under the torn cloth and hold my hand and make little jokes to make the sky feel less high.
Once, in the market, an older woman passed by and warned me, "You are too soft with that man. He will be taken easily if you do not bind him."
"What will bind him?" Christoph asked, in a voice that everyone liked like honey.
"A ring," the woman said, and laughed like she had told the end of a story.
I did not want to marry in the grand way families sometimes do. But we all found our small ways to promise each other: he learned how to change diapers with practiced speed and how to lull Armando with ridiculous songs. I learned how to strike a bargain fast and to keep the oven warm when the day felt cold.
The years rusted like a gentle bell. Armando grew loud and impatient, Iris stayed a quiet spy, and Christoph, who used to sit like a painted figure, started to be clumsy in the best ways—dropping ribbons and leaving a mark of kind behind him.
As for the wolves—we never turned into wolves again. The paw-print plum blossom stayed in the drawer and sometimes I would pull it out and hold it between my fingers, remembering the silly thunder of that day. It was a secret proof that our life had a seam where something out of the ordinary had been sewn.
When I am old and the shop makes a different kind of noise—voices of grandchildren and the clink of cups—I will take that small paper out and press it for the little ones. They will ask what made the prints.
"It was a day," I will say, "when love decided to try on fur."
They will believe it, because children are generous with believing, and because love, in our house, had once turned us into two silver wolves who ate roast like a pair of misled kings.
I keep treasures. I keep small slips of paper where Christoph wrote names badly and cases where customers did not buy anything but left smiling. I keep the paw-print plum blossom pressed between ribbons, folded into the darkest corner of a drawer. When I pull it out now and see the little circles of prints, I smile.
"Do you keep it?" Christoph asked one evening as the children were tucked in.
"I do," I said.
He put his head on my shoulder. "I'll keep you," he said very softly, "no matter what shape we take."
I believed him then, and I believe him now. The house had kept our smallness and our transformations. The shop kept the color for selling. The drawer kept our quiet proof. And the children kept us honest and alive with their small constant questions.
I cannot tell if the wolves came because the world wanted to play with us, or because someone somewhere thought we needed a reminder: that even tidy lives can hold a day wild as a tooth. All I know is that the paw-printed plum blossom still has the scent of that day, faint as magnolia, and when I slide it out, I can remember the way Christoph's laugh sounded without a mouth.
"Do you remember?" I asked him once, holding the paper.
He looked at the little prints and then at me. "I remember being afraid I'd hurt you when I licked your face," he said.
"You didn't."
He kissed my forehead. The kiss was neither grand nor small; it simply fit. He folded his hand over mine like he always did and we sat in the shop with the light bent around our faces, a little older and a little kinder than before.
Outside, the town walked on. Inside, we made color and kept secrets. When evening came and the lamp burned low, I put the paw-print picture back in its drawer. I closed it gently.
The little shop still keeps its colors, but now when I mix a shade I think of wolves and little feet and a day when the world let us be wild and then gentle again. I tie a ribbon around the drawer knob, not to bind us, but to remember that promises may be small and they may be strange, but they hold.
If anyone asks why the ribbon is there, I will tell them a short, true answer: "We were wolves once."
And then I will wink, because Christoph would want it that way.
The End
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