Chapter 20
RHETT
Iam standing on my porch, watching the rain hammer the yard as Sadie Collins climbs out of her truck and walks toward me like she has already made up her mind about something.
She doesn't run from the rain. She walks straight through it, boots splashing through the puddles forming in the drive, her hair soaked flat against her neck.
I should say something. Ask her why she's here.
I don't say any of it.
I just watch her come.
She stops at the bottom of the porch steps, water running off her jacket in a steady line. Lightning cracks somewhere over the East Vineyard, and for a second it lights up her whole face.
"You're soaked," I say.
"You noticed."
"Get up here."
She climbs the steps slow, like she could still turn around on any one of them. When she reaches the top she's finally out of the rain, the scent of it still clinging to her skin, and neither of us moves for a long moment.
Then I pull her in, one arm banking around her wet shoulders. She lets me, cheek against my chest, the rain hammering everything except this one dry patch of porch. She's the one who steps back first.
Rosa left an hour ago. The house behind us is dark except for the porch light and the faint glow spilling out from the kitchen window. No one is here to see this except the storm.
"I have wine," I say. "If you want to sit."
"I want to sit."
I go inside and come back before she can change her mind, towel over one arm, the bottle and two glasses in the other hand.
She takes the towel and scrubs it over her hair without a word, eyes tracking me the whole time.
Iron Oak Cabernet. I've never told her it's my favorite, but my hand going straight for it every time gives it away.
We settle into the two chairs at the far end of the porch, our knees almost touching. I pour, cutting my eyes toward the East Vineyard once out of habit, checking the storm's path before I let it go and look back at her. She takes the glass by the stem, in no hurry to drink.
"There's nothing better than riding out a storm from a porch instead of a truck cab," I say. "Used to drag a chair out here as a boy just to watch the lightning work its way across the valley."
"Bet your mother loved that."
"She always came looking. Found me every time wrapped in a horse blanket, refusing to come inside until the last rumble faded out over the hills."
She smiles at that, small, like she's picturing it herself.
"Rain like this," she says. "Reminds me of the summer my dad lost the east row to hail."
"I remember that summer."
"You would."
I pour myself a glass and set the bottle down between us. Rain drums steady against the tin roof, a sound I've heard my whole life and never once thought about the way I'm thinking about it now, with her sitting there in wet clothes and no plan to leave.
She finally lifts the glass, swirls it once without thinking, and breathes it in before she drinks. Even soaked to the skin on my porch at midnight, she can't help herself.
"Well?" I ask.
"Dark cherry. Tobacco. A little clove on the back end." She glances at me over the rim. "Same as always. You could pour this blind and I'd still know it was yours."
"Is that a compliment?"
"It's an observation."
"Sounded like a compliment."
"Don't let it go to your head."
She takes another sip, unhurried this time, and holds it on her tongue before swallowing.
"There's limestone in the finish," she says. "That mineral edge you only get from the east-facing rows. Your granite runs shallower up there than ours does at Collins Cellars. Changes everything about how the roots drink."
"You can taste dirt."
"I can taste your dirt. Every vineyard has a fingerprint. Yours just happens to be one I've had memorized since I was seventeen."
Something about the way she talks about land, reading dirt and roots like they're a story only she can translate, catches hard in my chest. She has no idea I've done the same thing for land that was never supposed to be mine to protect, the ground under her own family's winery, filed away in an LLC she's never heard of.
I keep my face still and let her keep talking. The alternative is telling her everything, and I'm not ready for that tonight.
Someday I'll tell her all of it. Just not with rain still dripping off her hair and a glass of my own wine still warm in her hand.
"Careful," I say instead. "Man could get used to a woman who knows his land that well."
"Don't get used to it."
Thunder rolls low over the hills, farther off now, less of a threat and more of a memory of one.
She tucks one leg under her in the chair, settling like she isn't planning on leaving anytime soon, and the tightness I've carried in my shoulders since I watched her drive away from the lake two hours ago finally lets go.
"My father used to sit out here after a storm," I say. "Never said much. Just watched the vines like he was checking on something that couldn't talk back."
"Sounds like every Beaumont man I've ever met."
"It was. He didn't know how to be anything else."
She's quiet for a second, turning the glass slow in her hands.
"My mother used to do the same thing," she says. "After everything happened. She'd sit on our porch and just stare at the vineyard like she was waiting for it to explain itself."
"Did it ever?"
"No. Nothing ever explained itself. We just had to keep living anyway."
I nod once. I know exactly what that costs, living anyway when nothing adds up.
"I used to think my father's silence was strength," I say. "Now I think it was just fear wearing a nicer coat."
She looks at me for a long moment, quiet, like she's letting the words settle.
"That's the first time you've ever said something like that to me without me having to drag it out of you."
I don't have an easy answer for that, so I don't try to find one.
Something almost like a smile crosses her face, there and gone.
"My mother still won't say his name in the same sentence as ours," she says. "Like if she doesn't say it out loud, none of it ever happened."
"Does it work?"
"No. It just means we never talk about it. We just carry it."
"That sounds familiar."
"I figured it would."
She looks out at the rain slowing over the drive, and for a second I see exactly what those years away did to her. Not hardened her. Taught her to hold everything closer to the chest, same as I learned under my own father's roof.
"I don't want us carrying it anymore," I say. "Not like that."
"Then don't go quiet on me again."
"I won't."
"You say that easy."
"I mean it hard."
Lightning flashes again, further off this time, the thunder slower to follow, but it's close enough that she flinches at the crack of it, her hand jerking toward the arm of the chair.
I catch her wrist before I think better of it. Just for a second. Just long enough to feel her pulse jump under my thumb before I let go.
"Sorry," I say.
"Don't be."
Neither of us moves to put the distance back. My hand stays closer to hers than it was a minute ago, the heat of her skin the only thing I can think about, and I have to look away toward the yard just to get a full breath back.
"I keep thinking about something you said at the lake," she says. "About how your silence cost my family everything."
My hand tightens around the glass before I set it down.
"I meant it."
"I know you did. That's the problem."
She sets her glass down on the small table between our chairs. When she speaks again her voice is steadier, like she's been building toward this the whole drive back.
"I got forty miles down that highway tonight," she says. "I had every reason lined up. Distance. History. The fact that trusting a Beaumont cost my family everything once already."
"And you turned around anyway."
Her eyes flick toward the drive once, toward her truck sitting there in the rain, the same old instinct checking the distance back to the highway even now. I watch her catch herself doing it and choose to stay anyway.
"I turned around because none of those reasons were honest. The honest one was that I didn't want to be that far away from you. That's the one I couldn't outrun."
Something in me pulls tight, sharp and unfamiliar.
"I'm not asking you to fix six years in one night," she says. "I just needed you to know I came back because I chose it. Not because the storm made the decision easier."
Rain slides off the porch roof in a silver curtain behind her. She sits there soaked and certain, and I think about every version of tonight where I let her drive away and said nothing to stop her.
She doesn't look away from me. Neither do I.
The rain has slowed enough now that I can hear her breathing over it, quick and shallow, nothing to do with the storm. Her eyes drop to my mouth for half a second before she catches herself and looks back up, and something low in me goes tight at just that much.
The porch light glows steady overhead, catching the damp shine at her collarbone where the rain never quite dried. She hasn't moved to leave. Neither have I.
Out past the rail, the storm peels back from the ridge, the worst of it already spent over the hills toward Collins land. What's left is steady rain, the two of us, and a bottle going warm between our chairs.
"Guess I should wait this out before I try driving anywhere," she says.
"You should."
"You're not exactly encouraging me to leave."
"No," I say. "I'm not."
She laughs under her breath, quiet, warmer than any wine could manage. She leans back in the chair, but it only brings her closer, no space left between us to talk ourselves out of anything.
My hand finds hers where it rests on the arm of the chair, and this time I don't stop to think about it first.
She doesn't pull back.
Our fingers lace together, slow, certain, like something settling into the place it was always supposed to be.
Neither of us says another word.
We don't have to. The storm is easing outside, the porch gone quiet except for the last of the rain and her breathing close beside mine, and I already know exactly where the rest of this night is going.