Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Wren had not planned to walk home with Freddie.
It had simply happened, the way things sometimes did in his company; without discussion, without decision.
One moment they were on the pavement outside the town hall, and the next they were walking in the same direction, and neither of them had said anything about it.
She didn't mind.
This was, she reflected, one of the more remarkable things about Freddie Gallagher: she didn't mind the quiet with him.
She had spent years of her life in quiet that felt like abandonment.
Preston's silences had always carried a quality of absence, of being in a room with someone who had already left it.
Freddie's quiet was different. It was inhabited. He was present in it, thinking in it. She could feel the thinking the way you could feel warmth from a fire without being told the fire was lit.
The main street was quiet around them, the shops dark and sealed, their reflections ghosted in the black windows. Wren was watching the pavement with the mild attention of a woman whose mind was elsewhere when Freddie said it.
"Glass."
His hand found her elbow, steering her two inches left.
She looked down. A broken bottle, spread across the stone in small bright pieces, she absolutely would not have seen.
He had simply seen it and moved her and continued walking, as though people worth protecting were always worth protecting and this required no commentary.
She was still thinking about this when the pavement narrowed at the old grain merchant's building, and she became aware, by the shift in the air beside her, that Freddie had changed position.
Half a step, nothing dramatic. But he was now between her and the road, the street side, and she looked at him and looked at the road and understood what he had done.
"If a car hops the curb, it has to go through me first."
She laughed. She couldn't help it. The laugh came from somewhere below decision-making, the genuine unguarded kind, the one that happened when something was both absurd and completely, entirely serious at the same time. The sound of it went up into the cold air and dispersed.
Freddie was looking ahead, his profile in the lamplight. The strong jaw, the neat beard, the particular quality of his attention that was always directed somewhere specific. Often at her, even when he wasn't looking directly at her, she knew she had his attention.
Wren stopped walking. She didn't decide to. Her feet simply declined to continue while she was processing this.
Freddie stopped a half-step later and turned to look at her.
She looked back, and she was suddenly doing the thing she'd been half-doing for weeks without acknowledging she was doing it; she was really looking at him. Not cataloguing him for the investigation, not noting him as a peripheral presence, not filing him under inexplicable. Just looking.
Freddie had shown up. That was the thing, the fundamental thing she had somehow not assembled into a single clear thought until this precise moment on this precise stretch of pavement.
He had shown up every single morning with her flat white made without being asked.
He had done the tasks on her list and then done the ones that weren't on her list because they needed doing.
He had noticed glass she would have walked through and said he'd stand between her and certain death.
Wren thought about the rain, about the umbrella. About how he went out of his way to walk her home, even with a limp.
The gratitude moved through her so quickly it became something else before she'd had time to name it.
She rose on her tiptoes.
She hadn't planned it. The impulse arrived, and she didn't question it. She leaned forward and up. Just slightly. The small wobble of it as her balance adjusted—
Freddie's hand came to her waist. Instant, unhesitating.
Not pulling her toward him. Just steadying.
His palm was warm even through the layers of her coat.
Because she had teetered and Freddie would never let her fall when he could prevent it And even this—even this small reflex—was so entirely him, so entirely the quality of attention she had been living next to for weeks without fully understanding what she was living next to, that she stopped thinking about it and she pressed her lips to his.
Freddie went very still.
For one second he was simply there—warm, solid, present—and she was kissing him and the night was cold around them and the lamplight was amber and the cobblestones gleamed and she was aware of all of this only distantly, through the more immediate awareness of his hand at her waist and the slight roughness of his beard and the fact that this was the least complicated she had felt in months.
Then he kissed her back.
His hand drew her closer. Not much. Just enough.
Just closing the last distance. And the other hand found her lapel without her seeing it move.
And he kissed her with the same quality he brought to everything: careful, completely attentive.
As though she were something worth paying attention to. As though she had always been.
She made a sound she hadn't planned. Her fingers found the front of his jacket.
The street remained quiet around them. Someone's chimney sent woodsmoke drifting past. The lamplight continued its patient work.
He pulled back first. Wren found that disappointing. She hadn't been ready to stop.
Her heels were on the pavement. His hand was still at her waist. The air between their faces was cold and close, and she was looking at him. At the gray eyes that gave away nothing and somehow everything. And her heart was doing something she didn't have immediate vocabulary for.
"I'm sorry," he said.
His voice was low. Not the controlled even register of the committee room—something under that, something that had not been smoothed.
Wren blinked. "You have nothing to apologize for."
"I—"
"Freddie." She waited until he looked at her directly. "I kissed you."
He looked at her. She looked at him. The information sat between them, accurate and undecorated.
Neither of them said anything.
She became aware, slowly, that she had no idea what came next.
That she was standing on a cold pavement having kissed the grumpy man from the coffee cart who had turned out to be the person she trusted most in Valor City, and she was also possibly in love with a man who put letters through her door, and these two facts were sitting side by side in her chest without any obvious resolution between them, and her brain, which was usually quite reliable, had apparently clocked out for the evening.
"It's getting late," she said finally. "I should head in."
Something moved across his face. It was too quick to catch; there and then rearranged into stillness. He nodded once. His hand dropped from her waist.
She looked at him for one more moment, at this man who had walked her home and moved to the street side and caught her when she wobbled, and then she leaned in and pressed her lips to his cheek.
The left one; the one closer to her. Brief and deliberate—and felt him go absolutely still again beneath it.
"Goodnight, Freddie," she said.
He looked at her. Just looked in that way he had, taking in more than he showed.
"Goodnight, Wren," he said.
She turned and walked the last stretch to Pages this was just a fact about her, and she did not look back.
The door opened. The warm darkness of the shop received her.
She locked the door behind her and leaned against it for a moment in the amber nightlight glow, with Heathcliff materializing from the armchair to wind around her ankles.
"Not now," she said. This was not unkind. He wound around her ankles once more and then departed, satisfied, to his shelf.
She went upstairs.
She washed her face and put on her pajamas and got into bed and pulled the blankets up and lay in the dark looking at the ceiling with her hands folded on her chest like a woman in a painting, except that the woman in the painting was presumably not thinking about the heat of a palm at her waist through two layers of wool.
She was not going to sleep. She knew this within approximately four minutes.
She lay there anyway. It seemed like the correct thing to do, the sensible thing, to be horizontal in the dark and allow the hour to pass.
She was very aware of her heart, which was behaving strangely.
Not badly. Nothing was wrong with it. It was simply beating in a way she could feel, a quick and slightly uneven rhythm, the kind that skipped occasionally on the upbeat the way a song did when the melody arrived somewhere unexpected.
She pressed two fingers to her pulse and felt it. Fast. Slightly uneven. Unmistakably, inconveniently alive.
She thought about the letters in the shoebox under the register—ten of them, folded in their tissue paper—and the man who had written them, and the fact that she still did not know who that was, and the further fact that at this precise moment, lying in the dark with her pulse doing its irregular work, she was thinking about neither the letters nor their author but about gray eyes in lamplight and a cheek under her lips and the specific stillness of a man who had not expected to be kissed and had kissed her back anyway.
She turned onto her side. She looked at the wall. Her heart continued its unsteady, quickened, entirely unreasonable work.
"Right," she said, to the dark and to no one.
Sleep did not come for a very long time.