Chapter Four
His first suggestion was the hospital. Though it wasn’t really a suggestion.
It was more just doing it, then fuming when she asked him not to. “I just can’t afford a trip right now,” she said, and oh, the look he gave her. She could practically see incredulous steam coming out of his ears.
“Since when do you have money worries, kid?” he asked.
As if he knew her. As if somehow they were buddies.
It even weirdly felt like it for a moment.
She almost answered him the same way she would answer a well-invested friend.
Well, I used every penny from my parents’ life insurance to buy the place after they died, and now the building seems to need every repair known to man while nobody wants to buy books , she imagined herself saying.
Then she remembered.
“I’m okay,” she said. “I just don’t want to pay a thousand dollars for nothing.”
“Yeah, I don’t know about nothing. That ankle is bruised and bleeding.”
“Honestly, it’s not so bad. I can put weight on it, it feels fine. Really, Mr. Jackson, you don’t have to worry. And considering the trouble I just put you through, I would really rather you didn’t.”
He made an irritated sound. “Okay, first of all, I told you. It’s Jack. Just call me Jack, please. Mr. Jackson makes me sound like a mean math teacher you hated in high school. And second of all—you didn’t cause me any trouble. Your car rolled .”
“Because I was going too fast down a dirt road.”
“Yeah, and why were you doing that?”
She saw him glance at her, one eyebrow raised.
But she managed to shrug in response. “I just wanted to get home.”
“Come on now. I scared the bejesus out of you, and we both know it.”
“You barely shouted at me. And even if you did, it’s not like I didn’t deserve it.
I did a bunch of stuff I shouldn’t have.
Stuff that shall remain nameless, of course, but that I would very much like to make it up to you for, even if it cannot be named.
Like with maybe a free hot chocolate every time you come into the store.
Or, you know, if you don’t really want to be in my store again I could just, like, buy you some donuts, and then leave them on your porch.
Unless your porch is too close to being in your space again, in which case we could come to some other arrangement.
A parcel in a secret place in town that only you and I know about, possibly, or, or—” she said, grasping excitedly for the next potential piece of this excellent plan.
Until she realized that he had gone very, very quiet.
And that she had been talking for a long, long time. Babbling, even, in a way that usually got her into trouble with actually chatty people. But he was not chatty at all. He was taciturn and emotionally closed off, and yet somehow she had still spewed a million words all over him.
No doubt he was on the verge of jumping out of the truck.
At the very least she expected extreme discomfort.
Those big hands of his tight on the wheel, his gaze fixed firmly and pointedly on the road, muscle ticking in his jaw.
Like that time they had sat next to each other, she thought.
Only when she finally dared to shoot a fearful glance at him, she got something even more disturbing.
He was looking right at her.
Fully staring, eyes wide, mouth hanging a little open. Like the road didn’t matter, where they were going didn’t matter, nothing mattered. The only important thing was being baffled by what she had said, and staring at her until it made sense.
She even thought she saw the moment it clicked for him.
His gaze slid inward, and then he looked back at the road with a kind of full-bodied weariness, one hand already palming over his face.
“Oh man, you’re not even kidding around.
You’re actually trying to say sorry to me.
You are trying to say sorry to me ,” he said.
As if the idea of things running in that direction was so preposterous he didn’t know how to handle it.
Even though it wasn’t preposterous at all.
“Well, yeah. Because that’s how things should be, based on what happened.”
“What happened was I fuck—I fudged up, and you were real nice about it.”
Did he just stop himself cursing in front of me , she thought automatically, wonderingly.
She couldn’t focus on that, however. She was too busy trying to grapple with the fact that he didn’t want to murder her for her crimes against his personal space.
That maybe he didn’t even think she’d done anything wrong at all.
He thought he had.
Even though men never thought that.
“I don’t think that can be true. I mean, I broke into your house,” she said.
But he just shrugged her off. He snorted. “You didn’t break in. I just don’t understand stuff like doors.”
“Okay, but then I dropped your lovely things.”
“Calling my things lovely is a huge and very polite stretch. Not to mention discreet of you, considering we both know what it actually was. We both know it was a crocheted tea cozy. You don’t have to spare me the humiliation of acknowledging that, it’s fine.
I’m a grown and very normal man, I can take it. ”
“But I don’t want you to take anything. I just want you to be okay.”
She blurted the words out before she even knew she felt them. Then flushed at the way they sounded, and braced for his reaction. She imagined one big fist out, pulverizing such sickly and pitying sentiment into paste.
And sure enough, he shot another look at her.
A very suspicious and scrutinizing look, of the sort that made the skin under her arms prickle and her heart jolt in her chest and her hand want to reach for the door handle.
Maybe I can jump out of the car while it’s still moving before the mortification of being so soft with him kills me , she thought frantically.
But just as she did, his scowl seemed to soften. His eyes widened.
They even took on a kind of haunted sheen.
Like she’d said something that hit him hard in the heart somehow.
Too hard, maybe, because he turned back to the road without saying a thing.
He let the truck eat up the feet and then the miles, in complete silence.
All the way past Horner’s Grove, the farmers market, the gas station that did the good hot dogs on Highway 72.
Nothing, nothing, nothing, until she was just about bursting to speak.
She even thought he might have sensed it, because that was when he broke.
“Kid, I will be okay when you don’t think you’re at fault here.
When you don’t think you made me unhappy.
I made me unhappy, all right? I am always the one who makes myself unhappy, and I know it.
Come on, you’ve got to know I do. I screw shit up so badly, all the time, constantly, especially with a girl like you.
All nice and soft and sweet like you are, I don’t know what the fuck to do with that.
And that’s fine, I’ve made my peace with it, whatever.
Just don’t you ever say sorry to me, got it?
” he said, slow and rusty sounding at first, as if he had no idea how to talk like this at all.
But by the end the words were coming thick and fast, and his voice was so firm she couldn’t mount the denial she wanted to.
He’d practically drilled his sincerity into her.
Her heart was hammering under the weight of it.
All she could get out was a soft “Yeah, I got it.” Instead of the ten baffled questions she wanted to ask about why he thought she was sweet and soft now. How has that happened , she thought, as he carried on. He jabbed a finger at himself.
“ I say sorry to you ,” he said, while she trailed in his wake.
“Okay, if that’s really what you want.”
“It’s not about what I want. It’s just the way it’s gotta be.”
“And can it also be that you at least let me thank you for saving my life?”
“No, it absolutely cannot. I don’t want gratitude for not letting a girl burn to death in her own car. Or for letting myself be railroaded into driving her home, instead of taking her to the hospital like I should be doing. Like any decent human being would. Instead of, you know. Whatever I am.”
He gestured at himself in a way so clearly contemptuous that she almost did wade in this time.
The words whatever you are is undoubtedly better than anyone thinks shoved against her lips, and came close to breaking free.
She wrestled with them, unsure if praise would do more harm than good.
But that just meant he caught her struggle, and her confusion, and cut in before she could.
“Oh man. I’m scaring you again,” he said with a despairing groan.
Like the thought of her being fearful of him really did trouble his mind.
It troubled him so much that she had to correct that, at least.
“No. No, you’re not. That was all fine to say.”
He shook his head. Smacked the steering wheel with one hand, like damn it, I screwed up again . “Yeah, but I did it in a really terrifying way, didn’t I.”
“Well, to be fair, anything that comes out of a man as tall and square-jawed and hairy as you is probably going to be at least eighty percent naturally more terrifying than the same thing coming out of anyone else,” she said, intending it as a joke. Something lighthearted.
He didn’t laugh, however.
He just looked at her with open interest.
Stroked his face, consideringly. “So what you’re saying is I should shave.”
“ What? No, of course not. Not at all.”
“It’s okay, you can tell me things like that now.”
“But I don’t want to. I just want to be nice to you,” she said, so frustrated now that it came out fiercer than she intended. And she meant it, too. It didn’t even feel like something she was doing to head off his irritation at her soppiness.
He wasn’t even irritated at all, really.
Or, at least, not in the same way he had always seemed before now.