“Oh god, what?”
He was looking at me with his whole face. That was the only way I could describe it—he was not managing his expression or keeping any of it back, just looking at me the way he had on the landing, like I was someone he had been waiting a long time to see standing in his driveway with a bag in the backseat and color in her cheeks.
“Come inside,” he said.
He crossed the last few feet between us, opened the back door, picked up the bag, and slung it over his shoulder. He held out his other hand.
I took it.
His fingers closed around mine, and we walked across the gravel toward the cabin. I looked straight ahead and tried to look like a person who had not just announced her overnight arrangements to a man she was desperately falling for before he had even said hello.
Jasper’s thumb moved once across my knuckles.
I decided it had been worth it.
The porch creaked under our feet. He held the front door open, and I stepped inside and stopped.
The cabin was warm. The stove was going, throwing orange light across the small living room. The couch was against onewall—old and deep, with a knit blanket draped over the arm. A lamp on the end table was on even in the middle of the day, because the trees outside the windows filtered the light down to a permanent soft dusk. The kitchen was to the right, narrow and clean, with a small table pushed under a window that looked out on the river. A kettle that had recently boiled. Everything had a place. Nothing felt crowded. The whole space smelled like lemon cleaner, coffee, and the clean, wonderful scent of him.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
“It’s small.” He set my bag down by the door, and I could hear in those two words the self-consciousness of someone who had only ever lived here alone and was now standing in the middle of it while someone they cared about formed an opinion.
“It’s beautiful, and it’s small, and I love it,” I said, and meant it completely, and heard the small exhale he let out behind me.
He made me tea. The kettle was already warm and a mug already set aside, and the box beside it was the same tea I kept in my own kitchen, which meant he had gone out and bought it for today. I did not say anything about it. I filed it away with everything else that was making me fall in love with him.
We sat at the small table by the window with our mugs and the river outside and the soft gray light coming in. The mallards he’d told me about were on the far bank, working the shallows in their slow, methodical way. The trees across the water were showing their first edges of color. I understood for the first time why Jasper was so soft spoken. A man who lived in this much stillness would learn to speak carefully.
I wrapped both hands around my mug and looked at the river and tried to find the right way to start.
“Eric came into the shop yesterday,” I said.
Jasper set his mug down. His whole body went still, not tense, just entirely present, all of his energy focused on me. “Tell me,” he said.
So I told him. I told him about Eric coming in with that prepared smile, the comment about the dinner, and how he’d said it was our place, as if he was correcting a misunderstanding, like that evening had been something mutual and meaningful that I was now betraying by going back without him. I told him about the look that had dropped to my mouth and the way it had gone down my spine, and the way I’d tried to be direct with him and it had simply not landed, sliding off him like he hadn’t heard it at all.
Jasper listened without moving. His hands were around his mug, his eyes were on mine, and he didn’t say anything, didn’t make a sound, just let me get through all of it without interrupting, which I was grateful for because I needed to say it in order, needed to get it out cleanly before I could figure out what I actually thought about it.
When I finished, he was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I saw him watching you at Mystery Night. Not just—I mean, he was there most of the evening, but there were moments where I looked over, and he was just—” He stopped, jaw tightening. “I didn’t say anything because I kept second-guessing what I was seeing. I didn’t want to put something in your head that wasn’t there. Something that might scare you for no reason.” He looked at the table. “I should have said something.”
“You couldn’t have known?—”
“No, I know, but—” He exhaled. “I watched him the whole night. The way he kept finding reasons to be near you and how he looked at you when you weren’t looking back. Something about it sat wrong with me, and I didn’t say anything, but I should have.”
“Jasper, it’s not your?—”
He reached across the table and put his hand over mine, and I stopped.
“You closed the shop,” he said. Not an accusation. Just making sure he had the full shape of it.
“Yes.”
“And you called Paige.”
“Yes. She came straight away, she didn’t?—”
“Good.” His hand tightened over mine. “That was exactly right. But I need you to call me too. Not instead of Paige—as well as. When it happens, not later. I want to know when things happen.”
