Chapter 31 #2
Before my brain could even register the slip, Wes’s hand shot out. Fingers clamped around my forearm. He steadied and pulled. My body jolted forward into his chest instead of backward onto my ass, the cold replaced by the sudden, ridiculous warmth of being flush against him.
“Easy,” he said, voice low near my ear. “I’ve got you.”
My laugh puffed out white into the space between us. “You really are committed to this lawsuit-prevention bit.”
“You’re not allowed to break anything before your big debut,” he said. His hand slid from my arm down to my fingers, giving them a quick squeeze.
His palm was rough and warm, dwarfing mine, grounding me in a way that had nothing to do with ice and everything to do with the last few weeks in that house. I squeezed back, just once, then forced myself to release him before I got too attached to the feel of our hands fitting together.
Snow glittered around us, quiet and bright. The inn’s windows reflected a smaller version of us on the glass—two figures in the cold, moving in the same direction.
This, I thought, as we started walking again, notebook retrieved, fingers still tingling.
This was what it would be like if we were just . . . together. No lessons, no secrets, no rules on the fridge.
Just us, showing up places as an us.
The drive back from the farm was one long, contented hum.
My notebook sat open in my lap, full of scribbles and arrows and terrible sketches. Wes’s hand rested loose on the wheel, the other draped over the console, fingers drumming to some low classic rock station he’d turned on.
“Heading home?” he asked when the turn for Main Street came up. “Unless you need to stop anywhere.”
“Um, the Crooked Spine,” I said, chewing on my pen cap. “I wanted to grab a book. I can run in—”
“I’ll come in,” he said, like it was nothing as his shoulder lifted. “I could use coffee.”
I blinked at him.
Old Wes would have dropped me at the curb with a grunt and gone back to his solitude. This version of him turned on his blinker, eased us into a parking space in front of the bookshop, and killed the engine like willingly entering a crowded public space was no big deal.
Something warm and gooey swelled under my ribs.
Inside, the bell over the door jingled, and the Crooked Spine’s familiar moody vibes wrapped around us—shelves crammed with books, mismatched chairs, the hiss of the espresso machine, the smell of coffee and sugar and paper.
Selene was tucked into a corner with a paperback, Winnie curled beside her on a fat armchair, reading a picture book upside down and narrating absolutely none of the actual words.
Selene’s eyes flicked up. Her brows shot toward her hairline when she saw Wes behind me. “Well, well,” she murmured as I leaned in to kiss her cheek. “Look who left his cave.”
“Field trip,” I whispered back. “Try not to spook him.”
She smirked and squeezed my hand. “Give me five minutes later. We found something weird in the archives.”
“Ominous,” I said as a tingle raced up my spine. “I love it. Tell me now.”
Winnie lunged up to hug me around the waist. “Aunt Clara, Aunt Clara, Aunt Clara, I read three whole books today,” she announced.
“Upside down?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said proudly.
“Genius behavior,” I said solemnly. “I’m terrified of your superpowers.”
Wes peeled off toward the counter with a little salute, already pulling his wallet from his back pocket. I watched him long enough to see him order two coffees without looking at the floor or the door, then forced myself toward the back hallway.
Selene had a folder already on the table in the little reading nook—printer paper, copies of old records, the latest chapter in our ridiculous hobby.
“So,” she said, flipping to a new page. “Remember how we were hunting for Alma’s baby?”
“Very distinctly,” I said. “Mysterious small human, big scandal, all roads lead to Hayes looking like a cursed farmhand. What’s up?”
She tapped a highlighted line. “There was a mention of a Barker baby in a census,” she said. “But here’s the kicker . . . it’s not listed under Alma, but her brother.”
My face scrunched. “Her brother had a secret baby?”
“Maybe,” she said. “This mystery baby appears out of nowhere, but again . . . no mother and no birth record that I can find. So either he had a kid out of wedlock and we haven’t found the right records or .
. . something else happened that we haven’t put together yet. It’s thin, but it’s . . . weird.”
“Everything about this town is weird,” I muttered, scanning the photocopy. The black-and-white type blurred a little. “So the Lady wasn’t the only one with secrets.”
“Apparently not.” Selene sighed. “It’s probably nothing. Or everything. I don’t know yet.”
It pinged something uneasy and electric in my chest—lines on a family tree we still didn’t understand, legacies of shame and bad luck echoing forward.
Hayes. The curse. The farmhand’s face.
I shook it off, scribbled a note in the margin, and promised I’d look again at the photos later. Ghosts could wait.
Real life—with a very-much-alive man at the front of the store—was calling. I hugged Selene and playfully flipped the end of Winnie’s braid.
When I stepped back into the main room, I spotted him instantly.
Wes sat on a plush couch near a low shelf of oversize books, shoulders relaxed, glasses on. The frames had slid a little down his nose while he thumbed through a coffee-table book full of stormy landscapes and blurred, beautiful brides in long trains.
His thumb dragged slowly down the edge of a page, brows drawn in that intent way that meant he was actually interested, not just pretending. The sight of him—big, solid, a little rumpled from the day, wearing his reading glasses in my favorite place—made me fall even harder for him.
He glanced up as I neared and gave a small, crooked smile that hit me right in the knees. “They’ve got half your shot list in here,” he said, nodding at the open spread. “Look.”
He shifted sideways on the battered leather couch so I could sit, giving me that familiar little pocket of space that had somehow become mine without either of us agreeing to it. I sank down beside him and leaned in.
The photo he’d stopped on was a bride framed in a barn doorway—snow falling in a soft blur, twinkle lights behind her, the hem of her dress dusted in white.
“Okay, that’s rude,” I said. “That’s exactly what I saw in my head. Down to the weirdly impractical no-coat thing.”
“I thought so,” he said. “See the way the light’s behind her? You could fake that with your fairy lights and a couple of heaters. Just don’t let Cal plug everything into one outlet or he’ll blow half the county.”
I laughed. “Noted. Divide and conquer the power strip.”
We flipped to another page. This one was all golden fields and storm skies, the kind of moody drama Elodie secretly loved.
“I want the farm shoot to feel like this,” I said, tapping a photo where the bride looked like she was about to walk into a hurricane and grin her way through it.
“Then it will,” he said, like weather and budgets and logistics weren’t a thing. “You’ll have the barn, the inn, all those trees. It’ll look better than this by the time you’re done with it.”
The certainty in his voice did that thing to my chest again, like someone was slowly turning a crank and stretching it wider. He didn’t say if. He didn’t say try. He said it confidently like it was a fact.
I shifted, turning so my knee bumped his thigh, the book balanced across both our laps.
“Someday I’d love a space that looks like this,” I heard myself say.
“Big windows, white walls, racks of dresses. A corner for lookbooks. A storage area where I pretend I don’t shove everything into one closet before clients come over. ”
“You need a studio,” he said.
“Yeah.” My cheeks heated, like I’d said something outlandish instead of the most basic creative dream. “Somewhere that’s all mine. Not somebody’s garage or borrowed barn. I won’t always be in front of the camera.”
He watched me for a beat, eyes softer behind the black frames. “You’ll have it,” he said simply.
The words landed like a stone dropped into deep water—small and quiet at the surface, ripples spreading everywhere underneath.
You’ll have it.
He didn’t try to temper it or joke it away. Just set it between us like a promise he didn’t even realize he was making.
Ridiculous questions pressed at the back of my throat. Will you be there? Will you help me pick paint colors? Will you build impractical storage cabinets and complain about them the whole time?
I swallowed all of them down and smiled instead. “From your mouth to the universe’s ears,” I said lightly. “Maybe if I post enough behind-the-scenes shots, a studio will manifest itself.”
“I’ll build it,” he said. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Warmth fizzed through me as my throat tightened. “Deal.”
Time slipped away.
We drifted from bridal spreads to travel books to a collection of vintage ads that made us both snort-laugh.
He told me about the Nerd Night campaign—how their horses kept nearly dying and Brody kept looting cursed objects—and I offered my very serious professional opinion that their characters needed more capes and tighter leather pants.
Winnie barreled over at one point, backpack on, Selene shrugging into her coat behind her.
“Are you and Wes on a date?” she asked, blunt as only a kid can be, eyes flicking between us and our shared book and the two empty coffee cups on the table.
“Kind of.”
“Uh, no,” I said, my words stumbling over his, entirely too fast. Heat shot into my cheeks so fast it was dizzying. “We’re just hanging out.”
Wes smiled into his last sip of coffee as Selene’s eyes widened.
Winnie considered this, then nodded sagely. “Okay. It just looks like a date,” she said. “Bye!”
She skipped away before I could respond. Selene mouthed We’ll talk later and waggled her eyebrows as she herded her daughter toward the door.
I stared at the page in front of me without seeing any of it.
Kind of? What does that even mean?
We look like a couple.
We felt like one too—sharing a couch, trading quiet jokes, him refilling my coffee when I got distracted, his thigh pressed along mine like it lived there.
Dangerous. It was all so dangerously easy.
When I checked the time on my phone, I nearly dropped it. “We’ve been here an hour,” I groaned. “This was supposed to be a ten-minute stop.”
“Guess we got distracted,” Wes said, bumping my shoulder with his.
My eyes narrowed on him. “What did you mean by kind of?”
Wes’s eyes sparkled with a playful glint. “Caught that, did you?”
I bit back a smile. He was frustrating when he was moody, but when he was playful? Downright infuriating.
“We should talk about this.” I crossed my arms, pouting because I was reeling and he was smiling at me with that cocky grin that melted my insides.
He snorted as he stood and held out my coat. “Whenever you’re ready, Duchess.”
I shook my head and stood. We pulled on our coats and stepped back out into Star Harbor.
Dusk had slid in while we weren’t watching. The snowbanks along the street glowed blue in the fading light, streetlamps flicking on one by one, little halos of gold fuzzing the edges of our breath as it puffed into the air.
Wes automatically eased to the outside of the sidewalk, between me and the street, just like he had once before. Some old reflex of his—protective and unthinking.
This time I didn’t joke about it.
I just slid my hand into the crook of his arm, fingers hooking lightly around his biceps. He glanced down, then back up, a warm smile flickering across his face. Whatever he saw in mine seemed to answer it. His arm relaxed a fraction, his hand brushing against my hip with every step.
My throat went tight. If this is what our ordinary looks like, I want it. I want Tuesday coffee runs and farm visits and him walking me down Main Street like it’s the most normal thing in the world.
Inside the truck, our hands collided over the center console when I reached for the heater. My instinct was to pull back or make a joke, but Wes did neither.
He turned his palm instead, catching my fingers and lacing them with his. His warm, wide hand, calluses against my knuckles, and his thumb pressing once against my pulse like he was testing it.
He held on for a beat, eyes on the windshield, then let go to put the truck in drive.
The engine rumbled to life. Snow crunched under the tires as we pulled away from the curb. The cab filled with that easy, humming quiet that settled in only when you were full—of food, of coffee, of words, of feelings you weren’t quite ready to unwrap.
I leaned my head back against the seat and watched Main Street slide by in soft blurs of light, the ghost of his touch still tingling in my fingers.
We were just running errands and drinking coffee and talking about nothing.
My whole body knew better.
This wasn’t practice anymore. It was a life, threaded through a Tuesday in a half-empty bookstore, and for one blindingly stupid, beautiful day, I let myself believe it might actually be ours.