I was not going to text her tonight. It was late, and she was standing in her kitchen, coming down from our dinner, and this was not a text message conversation. This was the kind of conversation you had in person, with her coffee going cold between her hands and enough time to ask every question sheneeded to ask. I was going to call her tomorrow. And when I saw her next, I was going to tell her about the job.
The job was not easy to explain to someone who had never needed a mission to feel like themselves.
Before the Corps, I had been a boy in a house where nothing was reliable, and nothing was asked of me except to stay out of the way. The Marines had handed me something I hadn’t known I was starving for—structure, purpose, the dignity of being useful in ways that mattered. I had been good at it. Not just competent.Good, in the bone-deep way that tells you you’ve found the thing you were built for. And then the knee had taken it, and I had come home and spent months trying to locate that feeling in other things—the cabin, the bar, the runs I pushed too hard because moving felt like the closest thing to having a direction.
The job Emmett was offering wasn’t the Corps. But it was the nearest thing to it I’d ever find in civilian life. Work that required the same set of skills, the same controlled attention, the same willingness to walk into uncertain situations and stay useful inside them. Work that asked something real of me. I had spent enough time in Honeybrook Hollow to know that I loved it here, that it was home in a way I’d stopped believing a place could be, but I also knew what I became when I had nothing to point myself at. I’d seen it in the months after the discharge, the restlessness that had nothing to do with where I was and everything to do withwhoI was without a purpose underneath me. I did not want to become that man in front of Cara. I did not want her to watch me hollow out.
The work Emmett was describing included travel. Risk that was probably manageable but was still real. It was not the life of a man who stayed in one place and tended things. It was not the life of a man with mallards, a cabin, and a woman who left books on his doorstep.
And yet.
I was going to tell her about all of it—the work, the travel, the risk. I was going to tell her about the deployments and the relationships that hadn’t survived them, and what kind of man that had made me. I was going to put it all on the table the way she had put herself on the table tonight, without apology and without armor, and I was going to let her decide what she wanted to do with it.
She might decide it was too much. That was a real possibility I had to face.
I finally took my jacket off. Folded it over the arm of the couch. The rosemary smell rose faintly into the quiet room.
That was the thing about love. It didn’t announce itself. It just waited until you were tired of the alternative, and then it stood there in a green dress in a doorway and made every carefully maintained reason feel thin and unconvincing. I was falling for her. I had probably been falling for her since I walked into her bookshop and watched her push her glasses up and talk about Agatha Christie, and maybe longer than that, maybe since I was seventeen years old sitting across from her in a school library, pretending I was only there to pass English.
But I also knew what happened when a man with no sense of direction tried to make a person his purpose. I had watched it happen to people I’d served with. The relationship became the mission, and that was too much to ask of anyone, especially someone as quietly careful with her own heart as Cara was with hers.
I needed to be someone before I could be someoneto her. The job was part of that. The complication was that she was already part of it too, and I wasn’t sure yet how to hold both things without one of them costing the other.
I was going to have to figure that out. Soon, and honestly, and in person.
But not tonight.
Tonight I sat on the thirty-dollar couch in the quiet of the cabin and listened to the river and thought about her laugh, and let myself have that much, and left the rest for tomorrow.
Chapter 25
Cara
Iwoke up on Saturday morning with my face in my pillow and Wentworth a warm, heavy weight against my hip. The light coming through the curtains was gray and misty, and the apartment was quiet. I had been dreaming about Jasper. The dream was already dissolving—not in images or words but as a feeling in my body, a warmth fading at the edges that I reached for before I was even fully awake.
I had been fifteen, and he had been seventeen, and I had wanted him badly enough that it embarrassed me even now to think about it. Wordlessly, hopelessly, with nowhere to put any of it. I hadn’t known what to do with it then—hadn’t even entirely known what it was. It had just lived in me, large and privately held, and when he left, I had shoved it down and moved on because there was nothing else to do.
I had assumed it was a fifteen-year-old thing. The hormonal fever of that age, ungovernable and temporary, the kind that burns out on its own because it has to.
Lying in my bed now—fully grown—I understood I had been wrong about that. It had not been a fifteen-year-old thing. It had been aJasperthing. The fever had just been running low all thistime, banked down under the ordinary years of my life, waiting with more patience than I had given it credit for.
The difference was that at fifteen, I would have died before letting him see any of it. Now, I had stood on a landing in the cold night air and let him kiss me, and I had kissed him back, and I had meant it, and he had known I meant it, and it was?—
I pressed my fingers against my mouth.
Wentworth lifted his head from my hip and looked at me. I took my hand away from my mouth. He put his head back down, satisfied I was not dying, just apparently coming to terms with something years in the making.
Get up,I told myself.You have a shop to open.
I did not get up. I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling and let myself feel each piece of the kiss settle back into my body like something returning to where it belonged. The way he had looked at me first. The small breath he had taken before steadying himself, as if it had wrecked him too.
Eventually, I made myself get up. I made coffee and stood at the kitchen window with the mug in both hands, looking down at the alley—my car in its spot, the wooden staircase, the landing where I had been kissed last night. The wood looked different in the early morning light.Everythinglooked different. I was standing in the same kitchen I had stood in a thousand times, and it felt like new construction.
I took a sip of my coffee and went to get dressed.
My phone buzzed on the counter while I was pulling on my sweater.
JASPER: Good morning. I slept about four hours, and none of them were restful, and I am not complaining. I am telling you so you know what you’ve done to me.
