29. Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Twenty-Nine
ELLA
I wake up somewhere that smells like cedar, coffee, and him, and for three full seconds I have no idea where I am.
Then it assembles itself. The guest cabin.
Gray-gold light through the curtain. A quilt I washed myself before he arrived, a warm wall of sleeping man at my back, his arm heavy over my waist. My sundress is on the chair.
My boots are nowhere. There’s a pleasant ache in muscles I forgot I was issued.
Souvenirs of a tailgate. Then his bed. Then, at some ungodly hour, his bed again.
When I’d gotten up to leave, he’d said, sleepy and certain, “stay.” I’d stayed.
Staying had turned into a fourth round that neither of us had the stamina to be proud of.
Which means I slept here. All night. Forty yards from my parents’ porch.
The anxiety arrives on schedule, punctual as Maggie’s Jeep. What did we do, what happens now, what if it’s different in daylight, what if he’s lying there awake regretting?
“You’re thinking loud,” Ben says, into my hair. Voice full of gravel and sleep. “It’s rattling the windows.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Mm.” His arm tightens. He presses his mouth to the back of my neck, unhurried, like a man with nowhere to be. “Your shoulders are up around your ears. In a minute you’re going to say something about the linen delivery.”
“The linen comes at nine.”
“There it is.”
I twist around in his arms to face him and find I can’t bear the thought of getting up. Because Ben Callahan in the morning is quite something. Hair wrecked. Sheet at his waist. His eyes half open and warm, looking at me like I’m the news he was hoping for.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“You panicking?”
“A little.”
“About which part?” He tucks a strand of hair off my face, thumb grazing my ear. “The part where we’re adults, the part where I can’t get enough of you, or the part where you have to walk past your mother’s kitchen window in last night’s dress?”
“The third one. Mostly the third one.”
“That’s fair. May misses nothing.” He kisses my forehead and rolls out of bed in one motion, entirely unbothered, and I get a view that improves my morning considerably. “Coffee first. Escape logistics second.”
The cabin’s too small for two people to make coffee, which is the best thing about it.
He fills the kettle; I’m in his way. I get the mugs down; he’s in mine.
He hands me his flannel shirt off the hook without being asked, because the morning’s cool, and buttons the middle button for me himself, which involves his knuckles brushing my sternum, and I forget to breathe for a second.
“For the record,” he says at the counter, pouring. “No regrets on my end. In case that was on the panic list.”
“It was item two.”
“Anything else on there we can retire?”
“Item four was whether it’d be strange this morning.”
He hands me my coffee, then stands there in the small kitchen light, looking at me in his shirt with an expression that starts a low hum somewhere under my ribs.
“Is it strange?”
“No.” It comes out sure. “If anything’s strange, it’s that it isn’t strange at all.”
“Good.” He clinks his mug against mine. “Then get over here and drink your whole cup for once. Both halves.”
We take the coffee to the little porch step, because the sunrise insists. Dolly appears, gives us one long look of profound understanding, and lies down across both our feet.
“She knew before we did,” I say.
“She’s known since the creek. She’s been herding us for a month.”
“She sat on our feet in that storm on purpose.”
“No,” Ben says. “That was sabotage. Even good hands make mistakes.”
I laugh into my coffee, and he watches me do it, his shoulder warm against mine.
“So,” I say, because one of us was always going to be the one who says so, and it was never going to be him. “What’s the story? For public consumption.”
“There has to be a story?”
“You’ve met this town. There’s going to be a story by lunch, whether we write it or Maggie does. I’d rather we hold the pen.”
He considers it over his mug like a man pricing lumber. “Option one. We tell nobody, sneak around all summer, and enjoy watching Rose lose her mind trying to prove it.”
“Tempting. Rose deserves it.”
“Option two. I walk up to the big house right now, shirtless, and let events unfold.”
“You’re not funny.”
“Option three.” He turns his head, and under the joke his eyes have gone steady. “I take you to dinner in town Friday. Somewhere with tablecloths. We walk down Main Street in daylight, I hold your hand past the Gazette office, and Earl can set whatever he likes.”
The hum under my ribs turns over like an engine. “That’s a big option.”
“I’m done with pretending, Ella.” He drinks. “But it goes at your speed. You’ve got a business, a family, and a town watching. I’ve got a headline with my name still warm in it. If you want quiet for a while, we’ll have the best-kept secret since Naomi’s lemonades.”
“Everyone knew about the lemonades.”
“Everyone’s going to know about this too,” he says, casual as ever. “May took one look at me asking for biscuit ingredients and had it solved. I’d just rather they knew because we told them.”
Friday. Tablecloths. Main Street in daylight. I test the idea for panic and find none, which is its own small miracle.
“Friday,” I say. “But I’m telling my sisters first. If Beth finds out from town gossip, she’ll rope me at a family dinner.”
“Deal.”
We sit there while the light comes up like we’ve done it a thousand mornings. Like we’ll do it a thousand more.
He walks me as far as the gate, which is the agreed limit of plausible deniability. At the corner he catches my hand, pulls me back, and kisses me one more time, slow and thorough.
“Tonight,” he says against my mouth. Not a question.
“I have the napkin man this afternoon.”
“After the napkin man.”
“After the napkin man,” I agree, and leave him there grinning. I walk up the hill in yesterday’s sundress and his flannel, boots in one hand, wet grass cold on my bare feet, feeling eighteen, brand new, slightly criminal.
I’m halfway up the yard when the main house screen door claps.
I drop behind the woodpile like incoming fire.
Boots on the porch boards. The scrape of the rocker. My father, up with the sun as always, settling in with his coffee not thirty feet from where his eldest daughter is crouched behind a cord of firewood in a man’s flannel with her boots in her hand.
Dolly trots over to the woodpile and looks at me. Tail going. Delighted.
Go away, I mouth.
She sits down. Companionably. In plain view, staring at the woodpile with her ears up, a living arrow pointing at exactly me.
An eternity passes. The rocker creaks. Then Daddy’s voice, pitched just loud enough to carry across the yard:
“Coffee’s fresh inside when you’re done with the lumber inventory, El.”
I stand up from behind the woodpile with as much dignity as the situation allows, which is none. He doesn’t look over. He looks at his mountains, at his coffee steam rising, and there is a full grin under that hat brim.
“Morning, Daddy.”
“Fine morning.” A sip. “Tell Ben the north gate’s sticking again. Whenever he’s up.”
I make it past the kitchen window. Blinds still down, thank you, Lord, though the Lord and I both know it no longer matters. I make it past the porch. I’m ten feet from the side door with the clean getaway in sight when I hear hooves.
Beth comes around the barn on her mare, up early for Gatlinburg training, hat back, reins loose.
She sees me. She takes in the whole exhibit: the dress, the man’s flannel, the boots in my hand, the hair that has clearly been through weather no forecast mentioned.
I’m arriving home at six in the morning from the direction of the guest cabin.
She doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t slow the mare.
She just raises one eyebrow, slow and deliberate as a flag going up a pole, holds it there the entire time it takes to ride past me, and continues on toward the arena, already reaching for her phone.
I stand in the yard in his shirt with my boots in my hand.
The group chat is going to be biblical.
But I don’t care. I close my eyes and feel the warm morning against my skin, happier than I’ve got any right to be.
Any right. There’s the splinter, right on schedule. What I knew in June didn’t leave when the wedding did. It’s been keeping house under all this happiness like damp under good paint.
The secret keeps.