I’m terrified I have, in the most unlikely place…but can I stay? Does Luke want me to?
Chapter Ten
LUKE
Gabe and Madison leave at dusk.
I walk them out to the truck. Gabe claps me on the shoulder, says he'll see me at the main house tomorrow whenever we're ready to come back, no rush. Madison hugs Anna on the porch, holds her face between her hands and says something I can't hear that makes Anna laugh once, one that kisses her eyes. Then they're climbing into the cab and the headlights cut a slow arc through the trees and they're gone.
I stand on the porch and watch the dust hang in the last of the gold light.
Anna's behind me. I can feel her there without turning around. She's wrapped in one of my flannels again, sleeves swallowing her hands, and she's quiet in the way she gets when her head's working harder than her mouth.
She's free.
She's free, and she can go back to Portland. Get a new job. Find a new apartment. Call her mama in Connecticut and tell her she's been on a work trip and laugh through her teeth about it.She can put this whole week down like a coat she's done wearing, and walk out of my cabin, and out of my life, and back into the one she actually built.
She is twenty-six years old. She has a marketing degree and parents who set her up on dates and a city she's spent five years making her own. She is twelve years younger than me and she has a whole life that does not include a tattooed ranch hand with a small cabin and a dog buried up the ridge.
She should go.
That's the right answer for a woman like her. Go back. Heal up. Live.
I tell myself that the whole time the dust settles in the trees.
It doesn't take.
I turn around.
She's leaning on the porch rail with her arms crossed, watching me. The last sun is on her face. Her hair's down. She's got a smudge of something on her cheek from the earlier, maybe when she rubbed her eye with the cuff of my flannel, I don't know, but I want to thumb it off her skin but I don't trust my hands to stop there.
"Hey, Brown Eyes."
"Hey."
"Hungry?"
"Not really."
"Tea?"
"Sure."
I go inside. She follows. The cabin's small enough that it doesn't really matter where I am, she can stand at the counter and watch me put a kettle on and we're in the same space anyway. I get the kettle going. Pull two mugs down. The fire in the wood stove is dying. I crouch and feed it another log. Behind me she's quiet, leaning on the doorframe, and I can feel her looking at my back.
I don't look up.
"Luke."
"Yeah."
"Are you mad?"
I stand. Turn. Her eyes are wet at the edges.
"What?"
"You haven't said anything to me. Not really. Not since they told us. And I don't know if I'm reading it wrong, but you've been acting like…"
