I set the bottle down, took my seat, and said, as gently as I could, “Why are you wishing you hadn’t kissed me?”
She flinched, barely, but I felt it. For a beat, the only sound was the radiator ticking and the wind dragging a branch across the glass. Then she lifted her eyes to mine and, for once, didn’t deflect.
“Because,” she said, voice steady in that way people get when they’re walking into a truth that scares them, “I don’t want to screw up something that could mean something.”
The fork slid out of my fingers and tapped the plate.
“You know I wouldn’t move here,” she went on before I could answer. “And I know you wouldn’t move to Seattle. And it just…” She shook her head, helpless and a little angry with herself. “The situation confounds me.”
I exhaled a breath, half laugh, half self-defense, and rubbed the back of my neck. “Aw, one of those big-city words.”
Her mouth opened, then shut, then curved despite itself. “Don’t do that.”
I tipped my head. “Don’t do what?”
“Act like you’re some country bumpkin who isn’t smart and…” She searched my face, and the word landed like warm hands on cold skin. “Sexy.”
That one went through me. Lighting me up and hollowing me out at the same time.
I stared at her, at the seam of her pajama top where it crossed her collarbone. At the tiny sauce fleck at the corner of her mouth. Every part of me wanted to stand, close the space, and kiss the rest of that sentence right out of her.
Instead, I took a slow sip of wine and put it down carefully, as if setting it down cautiously could keep the whole thing from tipping.
“You’re scared of messing this up,” I said. “So am I.”
“That’s not what I said,” she replied, quickly. “But yes.”
We sat in it. Not the silence of people with nothing to say. The silence of people with too much.
“You know what the worst part is?” she asked after a moment, twisting her napkin. “I liked tonight. I like… you. It’s not nothing. It’s never been nothing.”
“Not for me either,” I said, and it came out rougher than I meant.
The relief that flickered across her face made me want to be a better man than I had any idea how to be.
“But wanting something,” she said, “doesn’t always mean you can have it. I have a life, Drew. An apartment that isn’t this adorable shoebox. A job. A pace that makes sense to me.”
“And I have a bar,” I said. “And a brother who just found out he’s,” The word stuck for a second, surprised me anew, “gonna be a dad. A town that knows me, for better or worse. The river. The… everything.”
She swallowed, nodding. We were both looking at the edges of our lives like they were maps we didn’t know how to overlay.
“I hate it,” she admitted, a small laugh breaking. “I hate that this,” she drew a messy circle in the air between us, “has to be a puzzle.”
“It doesn’t have to be tonight,” I offered. It was the best I had. “We can eat. We can talk about anything else. We can let the storm do what storms do and worry tomorrow.”
She breathed out, some of the tension leaving her shoulders, but then a slap of wind with ice pellets hit the glass. The lights flickered.
“See?” I said. “Power’s holding.”
“For now,” she said, and there was the line. The invisible one. For now.
We picked at the pasta. We talked about the chili throwdown, about the squirrel with a death wish, about the way Lydia had practically radiated joy all afternoon. I made a joke about Uncle Drew teaching a future niece or nephew to cheat at Go Fish; she smiled into her glass.
But the easy laughter didn’t come back, not fully. I could feel her drifting, the way she did when she started building walls out of practicalities. I couldn’t blame her. I’d done the same with jokes and flannel and late nights behind a bar.
I topped off her wine again and left mine alone. Hiding behind alcohol felt like cheating at this point.
“Mel,” I said finally. “Tell me the truth. If there were no miles. No jobs. No,” I gestured at the snow-blind window, “weather. Would you still be trying to convince yourself the kiss was a mistake?”
