He lifted his hand, slowly, and reached out and tucked a piece of my hair behind my ear. His knuckles grazed the soft edge of the scarf as they passed, and then the backs of his fingers brushed along my cheek on the way down, and stayed there for just a second longer than they needed to. My heart stopped.
He was looking down at me, and I was looking up at him, and the moment stretched, and stretched, and I was about ninety percent sure he was going to kiss me and ten percent sure I was going to kiss him first, and the air in my little hallway felt very thin.
He didn’t kiss me. Instead, he leaned down—slow and deliberate—and pressed his forehead gently against mine. I made a small sound I had not meant to make. His hand was still warm on my cheek. I could feel his breath. I closed my eyes because I had to. He smelled clean and solid and safe, and his forehead against mine felt somehow more intimate than a kiss would have, like he was giving me something instead of taking it.
“I’ll see you soon,” he said quietly.
“Okay.”
He pulled back. Slowly. His hand lingered on my cheek for another second and then dropped. He smiled at me—the real one, the corners of his eyes doing the crinkle thing I’d begun to crave seeing—and he reached for the doorknob, and he was gone. The door closed softly behind him. The cats emerged to see what the fuss was about.
I leaned back against the closed door and slid down it until I was sitting on the floor. I didn’t mean to. My legs just stopped wanting to hold me up, and the floor was right there, and I accepted the situation with as much dignity as I could manage, which was not very much.
Wentworth padded over almost immediately and climbed into my lap.
“I am in so much trouble,” I told him.
He purred.
I looked down the hallway toward the kitchen. I could see the edge of the mason jar of wildflowers on the table, a sliver of the couch cushion with the faint indent where Jasper had been sitting, and the two empty tea mugs on the coffee table. I pressed two fingers to my forehead, right where his had been.
And then, because I could not help it, I thought about the other thing.There’d be travel.A firm I knew nothing about, a guy he’d served with, a decision he hadn’t made. It could be a few trips a year. It could be months. It could be nothing. It could be everything. I had no way of knowing yet, and I didn’t get to ask, because I didn’t have a claim on the answer. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
Wentworth reached up with one small paw and patted my chin, which was what he did when he wanted my attention and couldn’t think of a better way to ask for it.
“Tomorrow,” I told him, “I am going to freak out about all of this.”
He patted my chin again.
“Today,” I said, “I am just going to sit here with you and let myself feel it.”
He seemed to find this acceptable. I sat on the floor with my cat in my lap and the scarf wrapped around my fingers and the ghost of Jasper’s forehead still pressed against mine, and I let myself feel it.
Chapter 18
Jasper
Aweek and a half. That was how long it had been since I’d sat at Cara’s kitchen table with a bowl of soup and three cats making their opinions of me known, and her across from me saying things she hadn’t meant to say quite so openly and meaning all of them anyway. Ten days since I’d walked down her stairs and out into the street and driven home with the windows down in the cold because I’d needed the air. Ten days of stopping by the shop on my lunch break, of her sliding books across the counter into my hands, of text messages late at night and her voice in my ear when I had enough energy to call after my shifts at the bar, and the slow, accumulating weight of wanting something I hadn’t let myself want in a long time. Ten days of being careful. I was getting tired of being careful.
I woke up before dawn the way I did most mornings. The cabin was dark except for the first pale edge of light coming in through the window above the kitchen sink. My knee was stiff—last night had been a long shift, and it was complaining a little louder than usual. I lay there for a minute before I moved, listening to the river outside, moving and restless and impossible to ignore. The sound of it had become the thing Ifell asleep to and the thing I woke up to, and most days I didn’t notice it until I tried to imagine the cabin without it.
I reached for my phone before I was fully conscious of what I was doing.
There was a message from Cara. Late. Almost midnight. Ever since our lunch, we’ve texted good morning and night to each other. It had become an essential part of my days.
CARA: Hope your shift wasn’t too brutal. The cats send their regards.
I lay there with the phone above my face and read it twice. Then I typed back.
Me: It felt long, but I’m okay. I crashed hard when I got home. Sorry for the late reply. Tell them I said good morning.
The response came faster than I expected for the early hour.
CARA: Knightley is unimpressed. Wentworth says hi back and demands to know when he can climb you again.
I smiled before I’d decided to. Typed:
Me: Tell him soon.
