On Pins and Needles. Victoria Pade

plates, silver ware, napkins and tall glasses of iced tea.

      “Cloth napkins aren’t too casual, though,” Josh observed as he sat just around the bend of the oval table, also on the floor, with his back against the sofa and one leg bent at the knee to brace his forearm while his hand dangled over his shin.

      “We don’t use paper napkins. Cloth can be washed and reused. It’s better for the environment,” she explained.

      “Ah.”

      He didn’t say more on that subject and Megan appreciated his restraint.

      “Big sandwiches,” he said then, nodding toward his plate as he used his free hand to flip open the cloth napkin and lay it across the thigh of the leg he had extended out in front of him.

      “The bread is seven grain, homemade,” Megan explained. “Inside yours is a grilled portobello mushroom, tomato slices, roasted red peppers, artichoke hearts, black olives, onion, sprouts and a little vinaigrette.”

      Some thing about that made him smile at the same time his brow wrinkled up. “I’d have been happy with meat and mayo. This sounds like more trouble to go through than a sandwich deserves.”

      “Try it,” she urged.

      He looked skeptical but in a more con genial way than he had the day before when they’d talked about acupuncture. Still, he didn’t dive in, though. It took him a moment of eyeing what was on his plate before he picked up one half of the three-inch-high sandwich. Then he gave it a meager taste, as if it might bite him back.

      Megan waited for the verdict, watching him chew and pleased that it was with his mouth closed and without so much as a crumb on his supple lips.

      Then he swallowed and his eyebrows rose. “It’s good. Almost tastes like a steak sandwich.”

      Megan felt as if she’d finally won one small victory. She stretched out her own legs so she could sit more comfortably on the floor, too, and finally began to eat her own food.

      “You told me what was inside my sandwich,” Josh said then. “Does that mean there’s some thing different in yours?”

      “Turkey, ham and bacon,” she answered with a straight face once she’d swallowed her own bite.

      His responding expression was exactly what she’d been going for and she laughed at him.

      “I’m kidding. Mine is the same as yours. Want to see?”

      He grinned at her joke. “Last time a girl asked me that she wasn’t talking about what was between two slices of bread.”

      Megan laughed at his innuendo but didn’t give him the satisfaction of a comment.

      Josh ate more sandwich, a few potato chips, and then poked his chin at the room in general. “Did I get the furniture pretty much back where you had it?”