Page 62 of Stuck with the Hero Next Door

I set down my fork. “What did you think?”

“Not as bad as I expected, actually. The tree company cleared the pine, and Bob’s insurance adjuster thinks the structure is salvageable. Most of the damage was to the roof and the front wall. The back half of the house is mostly intact.”

“That’s good news.”

“It is. Though I’m not sure what I want to do about it yet. Bob says I can break the lease without penalty, given the circumstances. Or I could move back eventually, once the rebuilding is done.”

“What do you want to do?”

She was quiet for a long moment, considering. “I loved that cottage,” she said finally. “It was the first place that felt truly mine. But this...” She gestured around the apartment, toward the window that looked out on Main Street, toward the life she was building here. “This feels right too. Different, but right.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to say anything that wouldn’t sound like I was trying to influence her decision either way. I wanted her to choose what made her happy.

“Good news is you don’t have to decide today. Or even this month.”

She smiled, that soft, grateful expression that told me I’d said the right thing. “You’re right. Tonight, we have bigger decisions to make. Like what to watch.”

After dinner, we settled on her couch with coffee, a movie, and the comfortable contentment that had become our specialty. She was watching the movie and grading papers, red pen moving across lab reports efficiently, while I watched more intently—something about a tornado ripping through a town, leaving destruction in its wake. It wasn’t Cassie’s usual choice, but I couldn’t sit through another rom-com while she graded papers, and I did the actual watching.

Every few minutes, she made a small sound—a satisfied “mmm” when a student got something right, a soft laugh at a particularly creative interpretation, the gentle scrape of pen on paper. It was the soundtrack of contentment, and I found myself looking away from the movie because I was too busy listening to her to focus on the screen.

“Oh no,” she said suddenly, holding up a lab report with something that looked like abstract art drawn in the margins.

“What is it?”

“Tyler drew what I think is supposed to be the blood vessels, but it looks like...well, it looks like a spider having an identity crisis.”

I leaned over to look at the drawing, and she was right. The diagram bore a striking resemblance to an eight-legged creature contemplating the meaning of life.

“Maybe he’s just ahead of his time. Could be the next breakthrough in scientific analysis.”

“Or maybe I need to work on my teaching methods.”

“Or maybe Tyler has a promising career in surrealist art ahead of him.”

She laughed, shaking her head. “This is nice,” she said, looking up from Tyler’s attempt at surrealism. “Just...being together without it having to mean anything complicated.”

The words hit me like a gentle punch to the solar plexus. Because for me, this meant everything was complicated. Every shared meal, every casual touch, every moment of easy companionship was another thread in a web of feelings that was getting stronger and more intricate by the day.

But I understood what she was saying. After months of upheaval and uncertainty, she wanted simplicity. She wanted to be able to sit on her couch and grade papers without having to analyze the implications or worry about what came next.

The problem was, I’d stopped being just a friend somewhere between pulling her out of that snowdrift and watching her laugh at her students’ creative interpretations of biology. Now I was something else—something more complicated and more invested in her happiness than simple friendship would account for.

“Yeah,” I agreed, because it was partly true. This was nice. It was also exquisite torture, but she didn’t need to know that. “It is nice.”

She went back to her grading, and I returned to pretending to watch Twister. But I was acutely aware of everything about her—the way she tucked her hair behind her ear when she was concentrating, the soft sound of her breathing, the warmth of her presence just an arm’s length away.

I was also aware of the careful space between us on the couch. Just the width of a cushion, but enough to signal that we were still in the realm of friends who were cautiously becoming something more. Enough to maintain the illusion that this was casual and uncomplicated.

It wasn’t safe, though. At least not for me. Every day I spent with her like this, every evening of shared dinners and comfortable silences, every moment of watching her settle into her life here made me fall deeper into something I wasn’t sure she was ready for.

But I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

When she laughed at something one of her students had done, the sound went straight through me like sunlight through a prism, breaking apart into all the colors of joy and longing and hope. When she absently reached for her teacup and her fingers brushed mine on the way to the coffee table, the contact sent electricity up my arm and directly into the part of my heart that was already entirely hers.

I was in trouble. Deep, serious, probably permanent trouble.

And I wouldn’t change a thing about it.