“Is it?”
Her eyes lift to mine. “I don’t know. I think that’s what’s bothering me most. That they could be right. I don’t…” she pauses. “I don’t know what I want. I just know that I’ve always been needed here. What I wanted didn’t really matter.”
“It matters,” I tell her.
My mind slips back to last night, to the way she stepped into me, her eyes dipping to my lips. To the way she told me this morning that she wanted to kiss me. I’m not sure how someone sogoodcould want me. It feels inconceivable. I have dedicated my life to caring for others when they need it, but it’s been a selfish escape for me more than anything else. I left the people who needed me.
But Stevie never has. She stayed even when she didn’t want to. And now they’re throwing it back in her face. Anger burns in my stomach, hot and powerful.
She slips her hand from mine and tugs up the corner of the blanket that has slipped off her shoulder, her eyes focused on a point on the floor. She looks hollow, and it makes something inside me crack in half.
“How can I help?”
Her gaze latches on mine. “You being here is helping.”
The ache inside me soothes just a little. “Yeah?”
She nods. “I wanted to be alone at first, but when I got here…”
I know the feeling. For years, I’ve treasured my alone time. After a long shift or a night out. Loneliness was never something I dealt with. But after living with her for the last seven weeks, time alone has become taffy, stretching and bending over and over again. Waiting for her to come home today was endless.
“I understand.”
Looking into her eyes is like falling face first, and I feel myself bracing for the impact. “Jack, I…” she stops, shaking her head before starting again. “I’m going to miss you when you’re gone.”
Her words pelt me in all of the soft places I’ve taken so much time to protect. I swallow, throat thick. “I’m going to miss you, too.”
Her bottom lip tucks between her teeth again, and I can’t help the way my eyes dip to watch it. “If you’re ever in the area, you know you can always come here, right?”
It would be a bad idea. I know that. My self-control is barely hanging on by a thread. But I also know if another job came up in a fifty mile radius I’d take it, just for a chance to spend weeks at a time near her again.
I nod and taste the words on the tip of my tongue before I speak them aloud. “And if you ever want to get away for a bit, visit somewhere new, call me, okay? You’ll have a place to stay wherever I am.”
“Okay,” she says, and for a heartbeat, I think she may actually be considering it. But then a cloud covers her face, and she looks sad again. Enough that it makes my chest hurt.
“Do you want to get out of here?” I ask.
She looks up at me, blinking away the fog in her eyes. “And go where?”
I shrug. “Out of town. Go to Asheville or Gatlinburg or something.”
One of her dark brows lifts. “You want to go to Gatlinburg in October?” She sounds incredulous.
“I’ve never been. Why not?”
A warm laugh rumbles out of her, and it chases away some of the lingering ache that settled in when I saw the sadness on her face.
“We can go, but just be warned that it’s going to be kitschy and packed.”
“Would you rather go somewhere else?”
The truth is, I’d go anywhere with her right now. I’d do anything to keep her smiling just like this.
She shakes her head, the grin lingering on the edges of her lips. “No, let’s go to Gatlinburg.”
It’stheearlymorninghours when we stumble back into the cabin. Technically it’s now Halloween, and Jack has to work a shift this evening. My feet hurt from walking in less than ideal shoes, and my cheeks are chapped from the cold. My heart is still raw from the arguments with Wren and my mom, but for a while tonight, I forgot about it.
When Jack and I were picking out candy from a shop on the main drag and eating it right from the bag, teeth aching from the sweetness, I felt nothing but happy. When we designed airbrush T-shirts for each other and wore them out of the store, my cheeks hurt from laughing. When we tasted blackberry hard cider and it turned our teeth and tongues purple, I didn’t want to come home. I wanted to stay in the bubble with him forever, far from the clouds that would swoop back over me when we crossed the state line from Tennessee to North Carolina.
