Salt and Caramel

There were two ice-cream kiosks on the seafront at Porthallow, forty metres apart, and for the whole summer they had been at war.

Lena ran the blue one. She had been there six summers and knew every regular by name. Jamie had taken over the yellow one in May and immediately undercut her prices, painted a giant cone on his shutter and started playing reggae from a tinny speaker. She had retaliated with a loyalty card. He had introduced a salted caramel flavour that was, she privately admitted, better than hers.

They glared at each other across the sand every morning. They raced each other to open first. They spent their quiet afternoons pretending not to watch each other, and both of them failed.

On the last day of the season, a cold wind blew in off the sea and the beach emptied by three o'clock. Lena was pulling down her shutter when Jamie appeared beside her with two cones.

'Peace offering,' he said. 'Mine's better. Try it.'

It was. She told him so. He looked so astonished that she laughed, and then he laughed, and they sat on the sea wall in their fleeces eating ice cream in the wind like idiots, talking properly for the first time all summer.

He was nicer than his music. She was funnier than her loyalty card. When the ice cream was gone he wiped a smear of caramel from her lip with his thumb, and she caught his hand and kept it there.

They closed both kiosks for the winter that evening and walked along the empty beach as the sun set. In spring, they reopened only one.