“I grew up here.” Eric’s composure was fraying now, the reasonable tone starting to slip. “I’ve known her my whole life. You left. You don’t just get to come back and?—”
“She made her choice.”
“She didn’t know what she was choosing. You showed up, and she got—” he stopped, jaw working, “—confused. That’s all this is. You took advantage of a naïve woman.”
“Eric—” Paige started.
“She would have come around.” He said it with a certainty that made my stomach turn. Not angry certainty—something worse. Settled certainty. The certainty of a man who had been telling himself a story about me for a very long time and had come to believe every word of it. “If you hadn’t shown up, she would have come around. We made sense. I make sense with her. You were just—convenient, because you were new, because she was?—”
“Stop.” Jasper’s voice cut across him, not loud but absolute. “I’m going to say this once. Cara is not athingthat happens to you. She doesn’t owe you her attention or her time or anything else just because you decided you wanted it. She told you no. She told you clearly and more than once, and you didn’t hear it, andthat is not her failure.” A pause. “Now you’re going to walk away, and you’re not going to come back, and this is going to be over.”
Eric looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked at me again, and I held his gaze and did not look away, and whatever he found in my face finally, finally seemed to land—because something in him shifted, some last resistance crumbling, and he looked suddenly less like a man with a grievance and more like a man who had just heard himself out loud for the first time and did not entirely like what he’d said.
He straightened his jacket. He looked away. “You don’t know her like I do,” he said, but it came out quieter than he intended, and hollow, and we all heard it.
Jasper said nothing. He just waited, steady and immovable, until Eric finally looked away and walked to his car. He got in without looking back. He pulled out fast, almost spinning out on the wet street, and then he was gone around the corner, and the sound of the engine faded, and the street was quiet.
We stood there for a moment in the cold, watching the empty road.
“Good riddance,” Paige muttered.
I stood on the sidewalk with Jasper beside me and Lucy at my back, and I took one long breath of the night air—cold and clean and smelling of rain—and I felt something I had been carrying for months finally, quietly, put itself down.
Jasper turned to me. He was breathing carefully, and there was a mark on his jaw where Eric had caught him. When his eyes found mine, they were still that controlled, flat calm—but underneath it, when he reached me and put both hands on my face, I could feel that his hands were not quite steady.
“You’re okay,” he said. It was not a question. It was him telling me. It was him telling himself.
“I’m okay.” I put my hands over his. “Jasper. Your face.”
“It’s nothing.”
“It is not nothing?—”
“Cara.” His forehead came down against mine. “Are you okay?”
I took a breath. The shaking was easing. His hands were warm on my face, and the street was quiet around us, and my sisters were right behind me, and Eric was gone—finally, actually gone—and I was standing outside the Twilight Tavern on a cold night being held by the man I loved.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m okay.”
His hands were still on my face, and his eyes were still on mine, and after a moment, something in him loosened—not all the way, but enough that I could feel the change, the slow exhale of a man standing down from something.
“You let him hit you,” I deduced. “There is no way he could have done that if you didn’t allow it.”
His eyes darted away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Jasper.”
His mouth did something that was almost a smile. “I needed him to make the first move. Cleaner that way.”
“You let him hit you on purpose?” I all but shrieked. “What?—?”
“I saw it coming from about four seconds out.” He tilted his head slightly, testing his jaw. “Took it a little harder than I planned, if I’m honest.”
“That is insane.”
“It’s practical.” His thumb moved across my cheekbone. “If I put my hands on him first, it’s a bar fight. He swings first; it’s self-defense, and he’s trespassing. Paige gets to ban him clean. No argument.”
I stared at him. “You thought all of that out.”
