She closed her eyes for one long second, and when she opened them, she had the expression of a woman who had decided not to be embarrassed about something and was committing to that decision fully. “I’m going to keep doing it,” she said. “I’ve accepted this about myself.”
“Good,” I said. “Don’t stop.”
She looked at me across the table and smiled, and I picked up my glass, looked back at her, and felt the thing behind my ribs pressing outward again, warm and patient, waiting for the right moment.
It wasn’t yet. But it was coming.
She looked at me across the table, and I looked back at her, and somewhere in the middle of that, the conversation had run its course—not emptied out, just arrived somewhere that didn’t need more words put on top of it. The restaurant crowd had thinned around us without either of us noticing, the evening having done what good evenings do and gone faster than it should have.
The check came, and I took it before she’d registered it was there.
“Jasper—”
“No,” I said pleasantly.
She pressed her lips together in a way that meant she had opinions about this and had decided to keep them to herself for now, which I appreciated. She reached for her coat, and I stood and helped her into it, and she stilled slightly when my hands settled briefly at her shoulders, and I let them rest there for just a second before I stepped back and let her have her space.
We walked out hand in hand through the dining room, and the room was warm behind us and the night air outside was cool and crisp, and Cara turned to look up at me on the sidewalk with her hair down and her cheeks slightly pink from the warmth of the restaurant and I thought about Eric Michaelson bringing her here and making it feel like something to endure, and I thought that some people did not understand what they were standing in front of, and I was not going to make that mistake, not ever, not once.
“That was the best dinner of my life,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Same,” I said. “Nothing close.”
She looked up at me for a moment, something in her expression open and unguarded in a way she wasn’t always, and then she said quietly, “I’m not ready to say goodnight. I know we have to eventually. I just—tonight was something, and I’m not quite ready for it to end.”
I looked at her standing there on the sidewalk outside the restaurant where someone else had made her feel like a problem to be managed and felt everything I hadn’t said all evening press forward at once, and held it where it was, because tonight wasn’t the night for it, but let myself feel everything else without apology.
“Then it won’t,” I said. “I’ll drive you home the long way. We can talk, or you can just look out the window. Either way, I’m not in any hurry to get you home.”
Her face went completely soft. She looked at me like I’d said exactly the right thing, which I supposed I had, and squeezed my hand.
We walked to the truck, and I opened her door, and she looked up at me one more time before she got in, and I thought that I had spent most of my adult life leaving this town and that standing here in the dark outside a restaurant in Willowmist Falls, I could not imagine wanting to be anywhere else on earth.
I closed her door. Walked around to the driver’s side. Sat for a second before I started the engine, hands on the wheel, the night quiet around us.
Then I pulled out onto the road and drove her home slowly, the long way, and she looked out the window at the passing streets, and neither of us said anything for a while, and it was the best silence I had ever experienced.
Chapter 24
Jasper
We did not talk much in the cab. The radio was off. The dashboard was dim. Cara had put her hand on mine across the gear shift about thirty seconds after I had pulled out of the parking lot, and her fingers had laced through mine without either of us commenting on it, and now her thumb was moving in small, slow circles against the side of my hand in a way I was pretty sure she did not know she was doing. I was aware of every single pass of it. I was aware of every single thing she was doing right now.
I let myself look at her when the road was straight enough to spare the attention. She was looking out the windshield with the soft, undone expression she had been wearing since I told her about my father. She was holding the book of poems in her lap with her free hand resting on the leather cover. She was perfectly still.
I thought about the dinner. I could not help it. The whole evening was still sitting in my head, in pieces, refusing to be arranged into any sort of order. Memories bright like akaleidoscope swirled through my mind, and it was all I could do to keep my face neutral and not scare her away with my feelings.
I turned off the main road and onto the narrow back street that led behind the row of shops on Cara’s block. There was a single streetlight there, throwing a warm yellow pool onto the gravel. Cara’s small dark car was directly below the wooden staircase.
I pulled the truck in next to Cara’s car and cut the engine.
The quiet that followed was immediate and complete, just the tick of the cooling engine and the soft sound of the town settling into itself around us. Neither of us moved.
I didn’t look at her right away. I sat with my hands on the wheel and looked at the alley, and gave her whatever she needed to do with the moment. We’d been quiet most of the drive back—not the uncomfortable kind, the kind that had something living inside it, warm and unresolved, and I hadn’t tried to fill it because it didn’t need filling. It needed to be what it was.
I heard her exhale slowly beside me.
I looked over then. She was still facing forward, her hands folded in her lap, the book of poems pressed against her. Her bottom lip was caught between her teeth in the way it got when she was working something out, and she was very still, and I could see the moment she made her decision by the slight change in her posture.
