Chapter Text
Fernie Street had exactly two diners, and they stood directly across from each other.
On the north side sat The Rosy Cherry, with red doors, red vinyl booths and a chrome counter Dan Howell polished twice a day. On the south side, thirty feet away across two lanes of road and one zebra crossing, sat Blue Moon Milk Bar, painted a pale, cheerful blue that made Dan's red look aggressive by comparison.
Phil Lester had opened it four years ago. Then he stood on the pavement and waved at Dan, who had been unpacking napkins in his front window, like a golden retriever who had just committed a crime. Despite Daniel’s wishes, the waving had never stopped.
At twenty to eight on Tuesday morning, Dan was wiping down the counter in the last quiet minutes before the breakfast rush. The Rosy Cherry looked the way it always looked: chrome trim, a jukebox that only played songs Dan approved of (muse was of course a staple), and every single cupboard door shut.
Through the front window, across the road, he could see straight into Blue Moon.
The blue-and-white bowling shirt behind the counter was Phil, hunting for something. The cupboard under the register was open. The one over the sink was open. The syrup drawer was hanging out like a tongue. Phil was rummaging through all of it with one hand and holding a piece of toast in the other, looking like a man being personally betrayed by his own kitchen.
"Unbelievable," Dan muttered.
"Are you doing the thing again?" asked Louise, his only full-time waitress, without looking up from the napkin dispensers.
"What thing?"
"Staring at him like he owes you money."
"He owes me peace of mind."
"He owes you nothing. He waves at you!"
"That's the problem."
The front door banged open before Louise could reply, and Mrs. Abernathy from the town council came in holding a stack of paper. She was seventy-three, and she ran Fernie Street through sheer force of character and a collection of cardigans.
"Dan, dear," she said, slapping a flyer onto the counter. "Cherryfest. This Saturday. Every business on the street does a themed event. Something with cherries."
"It's always cherries," said Dan.
"It's Cherryfest, dear." She peered at him over her glasses. "Last year you did a cherry-pie slice for a pound. The year before, cherry sodas. Do something a bit more exciting. The committee's giving a plaque this year for Best Festival Offering."
Dan looked at the flyer. There was a cartoon cherry on it. It was smiling, which felt unnecessary.
"A plaque," he said.
"A plaque." Mrs. Abernathy was already halfway to the door. "I'm popping over to tell Phil the same thing now, so do make an effort, won't you?"
Dan stared through the window as she crossed at the zebra crossing, cardigan flapping, and pushed open the door of Blue Moon. Through the glass, he watched Phil freeze mid-cupboard, listen with his whole face, and light up like Christmas.
Great, thought Dan. He's excited. He's always excited. It's exhausting.
He grabbed a pen and started to brainstorm.
The idea arrived at a quarter past eight, in the lull between the first and second rush of customers, and it came fully formed: the Sour Cherry Blast. A vanilla shake, deep red cherry syrup, and a whole maraschino cherry soaked in a lemon-and-citric-acid brine until it was, in his own words, "a small act of violence."
He spent the whole morning testing it between orders: the brine strength, the syrup ratio, the crunch of the cherry. He tried it on Louise, who shrugged. He tried it on the fryer cook, Richard, who said "sure." By half eleven, with the lunch crowd starting to drift in, he carried the sandwich board out onto the pavement outside The Rosy Cherry and wrote it in cherry-red chalk, with a lightning bolt beside it.
He stepped back and admired his work.
Then he looked up.
Across the road, on the pavement outside Blue Moon, Phil Lester was standing next to an identical sandwich board, holding an identical piece of chalk, wearing an identical expression of quiet triumph.
Dan squinted across the two lanes of traffic.
The board read, in loopy blue handwriting: THE SOUR CHERRY SPLASH!!! There was a little doodle of a cherry with a cartoon face. The cherry was wincing.
Dan crossed the road so fast that a passing cyclist rang a bell at him.
"No," he said, arriving on Phil's pavement just as the church clock down the street struck noon.
Phil turned. His whole face went pink and delighted. It was the kind of delight that had no business existing at midday on a Tuesday between two men who had sworn eternal enmity.
"Oh, hi, Dan!" he said, and waved. Dan had been waved at with that exact wave roughly nine hundred times. "I was just about to come over. Did you see? Mrs. Abernathy said it should be exciting, and I had this idea about a sour cherry, because—"
"Sour cherry."
"Yeah! Because—"
"Sour cherry shake."
Phil's mouth opened, then closed. His eyes went to Dan's sandwich board on the far pavement, thirty feet away across the road, then back to Dan.
"Oh, no," he said. "Did you do a sour cherry shake?"
"The Sour Cherry Blast."
"Mine's the Sour Cherry Splash."
"That's worse. That's a worse name."
"It's a lovely name."
"It sounds like a children's swimming lesson."
"And yours sounds like a bomb!"
"Good! It's supposed to sound like a bomb, it's sour—"
"Oh, so yours is actually sour?" Phil's eyebrows shot up. "Mine's properly sour, I'll have you know. I pickled the cherries myself, it's a whole process. I've been at it all morning—"
"You have not been pickling cherries all morning. I watched you lose a spatula in four open cupboards at seven-forty, and then you ate toast."
Phil blinked. "How do you know that?"
"Because you leave every door in that kitchen open, Phil, and I can see it from my front window, and it's honestly a form of psychological warfare!"
"They're not open on purpose!"
"That's worse!"
"I just forget to close them because I'm busy! I'm always in the middle of something, and then I think of something else, and then there's a whole thing—"
"You're doing it right now."
"Doing what?"
"Yapping."
"I am not yapping, I'm explaining, there's a difference—"
Dan closed his eyes. It was the only defense available. If he stopped listening at the right moment, the noise eventually turned into weather, into something nice and distant that couldn't touch him. Phil's voice had been weather for four years. Dan could hear it perfectly well; it just didn't reach the parts of him that needed to respond.
"—and then, obviously, the fizz—"
Something in Dan's face must have shifted, because Phil trailed off.
"Are you ignoring me?"
"No."
"You are! You've gone all blank, you do that! You literally just tune out!"
"I don't do that."
"You did it just now, you did it at the town meeting in March, you did it when I was telling you about the fire safety thing—"
"You said the building was on fire, Phil. It was not on fire."
"It could have been!"
"It was a toaster."
"It was an emergency toaster!"
There was a long, ringing silence. Somewhere down the street, a delivery van reversed and beeped. Two of Phil's regulars had come out of Blue Moon for their lunch break and stopped on the pavement to watch, in the way people watch when they think a show might be starting.
Dan's heart was beating faster than the argument deserved. He put that down to anger. He put a lot of things down to anger where Phil was concerned.
Because here was the annoying thing, the thing he'd been carefully not thinking about for four years: Phil Lester was very good to look at when he was furious. He went pink to the tips of his ears. His hair stuck up on one side. And even now, mid-fight, his eyes were the kind of blue that made Dan's own red-and-cream diner feel deeply underdressed.
It's the shirt, Dan told himself. It's just the shirt. Nobody should look that good in a blue bowling shirt.
"Right," he said aloud, in a voice steadier than he felt. "Here's what's going to happen. You're going to change your sour cherry shake, because I had it first."
"You did not have it first!"
"Mrs. Abernathy came to me first, Phil. Quarter to eight. She got to you at ten to. I had a five-minute head start!"
"That's not how ideas work! And she always goes to you first, she likes you better!"
Dan opened his mouth. He closed it. He hadn't known that was an option.
"She does not like me better," he said, slowly, in the tone of a man discovering something. "She thinks I'm rude."
"You are rude."
"You're chaotic."
"That's a compliment, actually."
"It is not!"
They were standing very close now, Dan realized. He couldn't have said who had moved. He glanced over his shoulder at his own sandwich board, small and red across the road, then at Phil's blue one beside them on the pavement: the lightning bolt against the wincing cartoon cherry, the same idea in two handwritings on opposite sides of the street.
Phil followed his gaze. Phil was the kind of person who noticed things, even mid-fight.
"This is honestly kind of funny," Phil said, a little breathless. "We had the exact same idea. Same morning."
"It's not funny."
"It's a bit funny."
"It's a declaration of war."
"We're already at war."
"Then it's an escalation."
Phil grinned, and it hit Dan in the sternum like a dropped tray. It was a real, unguarded, sunny grin, with no malice in it at all, and it was aimed straight at him.
"Fine," said Phil. "Escalation. May the best shake win."
He stuck out his hand.
Dan looked at it. Four years of pavement waves, open cupboards, and the smell of Phil's blue raspberry syrup drifting across the road on summer afternoons. Four years of not thinking about the way Phil laughed with his whole body, or the way he'd once crossed the road on the night of a storm to leave a slice of pie on Dan's doorstep with a note that said thought you might want this xx, which Dan had immediately thrown away and then, three hours later, dug out of the bin.
He shook the hand. It was warm, and it lingered a beat too long.
"You're going to lose," said Dan.
"That's the spirit!" said Phil brightly, which was somehow the most annoying thing he could have said.
Dan turned on his heel and marched back across the zebra crossing, spine stiff, chin high, ears burning, with the church clock still finishing its last chime behind him.
He didn't look back. Not until he got back to his own door.
Phil was still standing on his pavement beside the blue sandwich board, hand half-raised in a wave. He looked at Dan across the road. He smiled, small and lopsided and slightly confused, like he had just noticed he'd left the oven on.
Dan went inside and shut the door. Then he stood in the middle of his perfectly ordered, perfectly closed-cupboard diner and pressed the back of his hand to his cheek.
"Don't," said Louise, from the counter.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were going to."
"I was going to say," Dan said, with tremendous dignity, "that I'm going to destroy him."
"Mm-hm," said Louise.
Through the front window, thirty feet away, the door of Blue Moon swung open again. Phil went back inside. The cupboard under the register was open before the door even shut.
Dan sighed and went to get the brine.