Chapter 6
Ethan
Evening finds us on the porch.
The ranch is alive with dusk, the chirp of crickets tuning up, a horse blowing near the south barn, the creak of cooling wood.
Jenna sits in the chair next to mine, wrapped in my blanket. The one I left folded on her bed because it gets chilly at night. Now she’s wrapped in it, sitting on my porch, her chin tucked against the wool.
“I thought you’d be taller.” Her voice cuts through the dark, her comment surprising me.
“What?”
“When I imagined you from the phone calls.” She pulls the blanket tighter. “Your voice is so low. I pictured someone... bigger.”
“I’m six-two.”
“You’re lean. Long. Like a—” She catches herself and laughs. “I was going to say, like a paragraph that’s all one sentence and keeps going.”
The practical description is so typical of Jenna. “What else did you imagine?”
She pauses for a moment. The porch light catches her glasses and the soft line of her jaw. When she speaks again, her voice has shed its careful edges, the formal vocabulary, and measured pace. This is the Jenna from the phone calls, who shared stories about the library in her third placement and how rain sounds different when you’re sleeping in a car.
“Older. I thought you’d be older because you’re so steady. And I thought you’d be loud. Not loud exactly, but your voice fills a room even when you’re not trying.”
The air between us is charged and close. She’s the epitome of everything I never knew I wanted in a woman, but it’s too soon.
“I thought you’d be taller too,” I say, playing along.
Her laugh is startled and genuine. “I’m five-six.”
“I know. You’re—” I pause, hesitant to sayperfectbecause I'm not ready to say that out loud. “Exactly right.”
She falls silent. A listening quiet. It’s the stillness I’ve come to recognize as Jenna preparing herself. “I was afraid you wouldn’t be the same.” The words spill from my mouth before my brain can catch up. “In person. I worried you’d be different face-to-face, and I’d lose the version I’ve been holding on to for six months.”
“Am I different from what you imagined?”
“Everything about you is better, and it’s… yeah. It’s a lot.”
Her fingers toy with the edge of the blanket, picking at the wool with bitten nails. I’ve noticed her doing this all week, a tell shehad long before I came along. In the porch light, the skin on her wrists reveals angry, red welts where her sleeves have ridden up.
She catches me looking and stills.
Her body pulls inward and her chin lifts, not defiantly, but defensively. There it is. The brace. She’s been hiding her skin her entire life, and I’ve just seen it. Now, she waits for whatever comes next: pity, disgust, judgment. I remember the night she told me in a flat voice about a foster father who left cortisone on her pillow because he thought it was contagious.
“When I brought you home from the crash and the doctor came and checked you over, your skin was flaring. Bad. Worse than now.” My jaw works. “Maggie put cream on you. The doctor showed her where and how much. She did it while you were unconscious because it needed to be done, and I—” I stop and breathe. “I wanted to do it myself. I wanted to be the one taking care of your skin. But you were unconscious, and you hadn’t chosen that. You hadn’t chosen me. I’m not the kind of man who—” I shake my head. “Maggie did it. I stayed in the hall.”
I don’t tell her the rest: how my hands pressed flat against the hallway wall to resist reaching for the door handle.
Her face crumples.
She’s not crying. It’s something that comes before tears. The expression of a woman who’s hidden her body her entire life, realizing that someone saw it at its worst and chose to protect her dignity instead of touching her while she couldn’t consent. I will carry that expression to my grave. Her face in the porch light, breaking open.
“The soap,” she whispers. “That was you.”
I exhale. “I swapped it. I didn’t want to make it a thing.”
She looks at me as if I’ve done something extraordinary. I haven’t. I noticed her skin and replaced the soap. This isn’t heroics; it’s simply the minimum I want to do for her.
