“Jasper. I’ve been thinking about you all morning.”
“Yeah?”
“I have been completely useless today.” She said it with the fond exasperation of someone reporting a disaster they are not actually upset about.
I looked at her for a second before I said anything. Not because I didn’t know what to say, but because I wanted to take it in properly—the fact that she’d said it at all, that she’d walked up to me and just told me, without hedging it or wrapping it in something safer. Cara, who chose her words carefully and kept the tender ones close, stood in front of me telling me plainly that I’d been on her mind.
I huffed a small laugh. “Useless how?”
“I mislabeled an entire box of mysteries as romance.” She opened her eyes. “Which, to be fair, is arguably a reasonable categorization, but it’s not the system.”
I lifted my hand and brushed two fingers along the edge of her jaw, slow and deliberate, watching her face while I did it. Her breath caught—a small involuntary thing—and I felt it register all the way through me, that she was affected, that being this close to her and watching her respond to my touch was doing something to my ability to think in anything other than very immediate terms. She was warm and beautiful and looking up at me with those eyes that had always seen the real me, and she’d spent her morning thinking about me, and I was done pretending any of that wasn’t exactly what I wanted.
“Good,” I said quietly. “Me too.”
I leaned in and pressed my mouth against her cheek, just to the left of the corner of her mouth, the way I had done before.
When I pulled back, her eyes were a little glassy, her hand half-raised toward my arm without quite having decided to reach for it.
“I will be at your door at seven,” I said quietly.
“Okay.” She breathed it more than she said it.
I held her gaze for one more second, and then I made myself step back, and I made myself walk to the door, and I made myself push it open and step out onto the sidewalk before I could lose my nerve and stay.
I drove back to the cabin slowly, the book of poems on the passenger seat, my hands a little less steady on the wheel than they had been an hour ago.
I showered and shaved. I stood in front of my closet longer than usual, even though I had pulled the shirt out two days ago and set it aside, and knew exactly what I was wearing. The shirt was dark blue, soft cotton, a button-down I had owned for years and never worn out because I never had occasion to wear it. I put it on. Tucked it into the nicest pair of jeans I owned. Put on my best pair of boots.
I looked at myself in the small bathroom mirror and tried to see what Cara might see when she opened the door and found me standing there, and I was not entirely sure what I saw, but I hoped it was enough.
I picked up the book of poems from the kitchen table, still wrapped in its brown paper. I put on my jacket. I grabbed my keys. I stood in the middle of the cabin for one long, quiet second, examining my small, ordinary life.
The drive into town was quiet and empty, the roads cool and dim under the early-evening light, the sky doing its slow Oregon-fall thing, where the gold turned to lavender, then to a soft, deep blue at the edges.
Honeybrook Hollow at six-forty on a Friday in early fall was kind of magical. The streetlights were just starting to come on. The diner had its windows lit up. The Coffee Cabin was closing for the day. A few couples were walking on the sidewalk in jackets and scarves. The air smelled like fireplaces and pine, and the whole town looked like it had been arranged specifically for tonight.
I pulled up at the curb in front of Pine & Pages at six-fifty-five. Sat in the truck for one full minute before I got out. Checked the mirror once, briefly, just to make sure I wasn’t going to embarrass myself. Picked up the book of poems from the passenger seat.
Got out of the truck.
The bookshop was dark, the lights off behind the glass. I walked around to the back of the building, where the stairs led up to her apartment, climbed them slowly because my knee was aching a little after the long day, and stood on the small landing at the top with the book in one hand and my other hand raised to knock.
I knocked.
A small movement inside. A pause. Soft footsteps coming to the door.
The door opened.
I had seen Cara Darlington in her element behind her bookshop counter, on the floor surrounded by paperbacks, in her kitchen making soup, in the reading nook with her feet tucked beneath her and her hands wrapped around a mug. I had been paying close attention for weeks. I thought I had a reasonable handle on what she did to me.
I did not have a reasonable handle on this.
She was wearing a dark green dress, thin straps, the fabric draping softly over her shoulders and the curve of her waist and falling to just above her knee, and she was standing inthe warm light of her doorway with her hair down over her shoulders the way it had been at lunch, loose and dark, and she’d done something to her eyes behind her glasses that made them deeper, more luminous, and there was a hint of gloss on her mouth and small silver earrings catching the light, and I stood there on her doorstep and forgot entirely what I had been planning to say.
I took her in slowly, because she deserved that, because she had clearly stood in front of her mirror and made decisions, and the decisions were devastating, and I was not going to rush past them. The line of her collarbone above the neckline of the dress. The way the fabric moved when she breathed. The smooth skin of her shoulders, bare above the thin straps, in a way that made me want to reach out and touch, just lightly, just to see how soft her skin would feel. Her hair I had seen down before, but not like this—not with the light behind her and the dress and the earrings and everything assembled together into something that was making it genuinely difficult to remember how language worked.
She was beautiful. She had always been beautiful. But standing in that doorway, having made this particular effort for this particular evening, she was something else entirely, and it moved through me with a force I hadn’t anticipated and didn’t try to contain.
