His hand flexed on the edge of the shelf. “Mel.”
“I know,” I said quickly, because hearing my name in his voice was a loaded chamber. “It’s not fair. I’m not being fair.”
“You’re being honest,” he said. “I can take honest.”
We stood in the humming quiet, and I watched the way his throat worked when he swallowed. I thought about last night and his laugh that was all breath and relief, the way he touched me like he was telling the truth with his hands, and the way his cabin had felt like a place that remembered how to keep me safe. And this morning, the way the town startled me by feeling…possible.
“I stopped,” he said, and his voice had that steadied weight he used when he needed me to hear him past the noise. “The day I met you, I stopped. Flirting. Seeing other people. Even pretending. I didn’t make an announcement about it, because I didn’t know if making it official would spook you or me. But I stopped. I cleaned up inside. It took time. Longer than it should have.” His mouth tugged into something wry. “Turns out you can’t just retire from being careless. You have to actually practice not being an idiot.”
“Reps,” I said, because if I didn’t joke, I might cry.
“Reps,” he agreed. “I kept waiting for the moment it would pay off. For you to walk in and just know. And then you’d leave again—no shame, no guilt, just… gone. And I’d tell myself to be patient, to hold the door. I didn’t chase, because I didn’t want to turn what we had into something it wasn’t ready to be.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “And that’s on me too, because I let silence do the talking and you can hear anything you want in silence.”
I leaned back against the opposite shelf, paper towels cushioning my shoulder blades. “At the coffee shop, Janey mentioned about how you like tradition,” I said. “Like you were a hymn she remembered the words to.”
“Janey liked knowing me when I wasn’t ready to know myself,” he said simply. “We were easy because neither of us asked for more. That’s not a virtue. It’s an arrangement. I don’t want arrangements anymore.”
Something in my chest uncoiled a fraction, as if a bird I’d locked up there needed to test a wing.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?” He sounded both careful and breathless.
“Okay,” I repeated. “That… helps.”
He nodded once, the kind of nod that cements a beam. “Good.”
I traced the seam of the box beside me with one finger.
“Distance,” I said finally, because the room smelled like honesty and it would be rude not to breathe it. “We can’t… not talk about that. I live in a place where people ask what time zone you prefer for meetings like it’s a love language. You live where the river sounds like a lullaby. I keep telling myself those two lives don’t fit together unless one of us warps.”
“Then we don’t warp,” he said. “We bend. We plan. We pick the next right thing and do it without promising each other the parts we can’t see yet.”
“That sounds suspiciously rational for a man who owns a jukebox that plays Elvis on a loop,” I said, because the alternative was throwing myself into his arms and letting the community center figure it out.
He smiled, small and real. “I can be rational when the power’s out.”
I looked toward the door, where the gym’s quiet breathed in and out.
“I could stay through New Year’s. We’re on winter break,” I said, the words feeling like a step onto ice you’ve decided to trust. “Help with the next festival. Learn to fold napkins in shapes that scare small children.”
“That last part is advanced coursework,” he said, relief changing his voice in a way that put heat behind my eyes again. “But yes. Stay. See how it feels when it’s not a whirlwind and a drive-by.”
“And after New Year’s?” I asked, because hope needs a map even if you only draw the first mile.
“After New Year’s,” he said slowly, “you go back to Seattle. I come down a couple weekends a month. You come up when you can. We don’t look at the calendar like an enemy. We don’t measure this by mileage. We measure it by how honest we’re willing to be when it gets hard.”
“And when the Janeys of the world ask about you in coffee shops like they’re ordering a memory?” I asked, soft and sharp at once.
He didn’t flinch.
“I’ll say I’m taken,” he said. “If boyfriend isn’t a word that makes you itch, tell them I’m yours.”
“It itches less than casual,” I said softly, shocked that I finally felt that.
“Good,” he said. “Because casual is dead and buried.”
We let that sit there, between the paper towels and the heater that tried, between the humming lights and the storm outside banging its drum.
