“I know it probably sounds like—I mean, he didn’t threaten me, he didn’t actuallydo anything that I could point to and say that was the thing; it was more just—the accumulation of it, and the way he said it, and I keep wondering if I’m reading too much into?—”
“You’re not,” he said. Quiet and completely certain. “Cara. You’re not reading too much into it. It sounds like exactly what it is, and I need you to stop trying to talk yourself into the version where it’s nothing.”
I looked at him across the table. The river ran outside the window behind him, the soft gray light fell across his face, and his hand was warm over mine.
“I’m not scared of him,” I said. “I want you to know that. I don’t like it. I want it to stop. But I’m not frightened, I just—I hate that he makes me feel like I have to be careful in my own shop. That’s the part that makes me angry, actually. More than anything else.”
Something in his expression shifted at that—softer, and underneath it something that looked a lot like pride. “Good,” he said. “Hold onto that.” He turned my hand over under his, slowly. “But I’m still going to need you to tell me when things happen. I mean it. Please.”
“I will,” I said. “I promise.”
He brought my hand up and pressed his mouth to my knuckles, slow and warm, and held it there for a moment with his eyes closed, and I understood that the gesture was not only tenderness—it was also something he was doing for himself. A way of confirming I was here and whole and sitting across from him in his kitchen with the river outside and the tea going warm between our hands.
“Okay,” he said quietly, against my knuckles. And then, after a moment: “I’m glad you came today.”
“Me too,” I said. “I really am.”
After a while, the conversation softened.
We were on the couch by then, having moved there without quite deciding to—the kitchen table had become too much distance between us as the afternoon wore on and the fire settled lower and the light through the windows went softer and golden. He was at one end, and I was at the other with our knees almost touching, and the blanket on the arm of the couch sat between us, and neither of us had moved it.
“Can I see the rest of the cabin?” I asked.
He looked at me. I looked at him. We both knew exactly what room I wanted to see.
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Come on.”
He stood and held out his hand, and I took it, and he led me down the short hallway.
The bedroom was small and simply kept. A full bed pushed under the window that looked out on the trees, the glass dark now with the early evening coming in. The quilt his grandmother had made lay pulled neatly across the bed, worn soft at the edges in the way of something that had been loved for a long time and wasn’t going anywhere. A nightstand with a lamp and a glass of water. A dresser against the opposite wall with nothing on top of it except a stack of books.
I stopped in the doorway.
I could see the spines from where I stood. Every single one of them. Lined up together as if they belonged there. “Those are all from me,” I said. My voice had gone a little uneven, and I wasn’t entirely sure what to do about that.
“Every one,” he said. He was standing just behind my shoulder, close enough that I could feel his warmth. “I couldn’t have given them away even if I’d wanted to. Which I didn’t. Not for a single second.”
I stood there for a long moment. Each book was a small act of reaching toward him before I had known how to reach. Stories I had pressed into his hands because I had not yet found the words.
I turned to look at him. He was in the hallway behind me with his shoulder against the doorframe and his hands in his pockets and the expression of a man who had just shown a woman the most private thing in his home without entirely meaning to.
I crossed the small room. I put my hands on his chest and felt his heartbeat under my palms, steady and strong and a little fast.
I kissed him.
Chapter 27
Jasper
She kissed me in the doorway of my bedroom with her hands flat on my chest and the stack of books on the dresser behind her. Her mouth was warm and certain. On the landing outside her apartment, she had been brave but tentative, feeling her way toward something. Here, in this room, she was sure. Her fingers curled slowly into my flannel shirt, and she kissed me as if she had already decided I was hers, and something in me that had been wound tight for a very long time came undone.
I rested my hands on her waist and felt the warmth of her through her sweater, and tried to stay present in the moment and not in the secret I still hadn’t told her.
It was there. It had been there all day—through the tea and the conversation on the couch and her standing in my doorway looking at those book spines with her voice going uneven—sitting in my chest like something with edges, waiting. I had told myself I would tell her soon. I had told myself the right moment was coming, and then the right moment would arrive, and I would find another reason to let it pass, because every time I opened my mouth to say it, she would do something like stand inmy doorway with her voice going soft over a stack of books, and the words would dissolve before I could get them out.
I wanted one more hour. That was the honest truth of it. One more hour of her looking at me the way she was looking at me right now, before I handed her something that might change the look entirely.
It made me a coward. I knew that.
