Chapter 7
seven
Tessa
My bag is on the bed and it's half packed and I've been looking at it for forty minutes.
This is not a hard task. I pack it to come here.
I know how my things fit. The yellow shirt goes first, then the jeans, then the books I buy at the sale on Main Street — three of them, which I don't need and buy anyway because the woman running the table has a warm smile and it is a beautiful afternoon and I am not thinking about leaving.
I should be thinking about leaving. I'm thinking about Beckett Hale on a porch in the dark saying good that you came here in a voice like he means it past the surface of it.
I'm thinking about his hands on my face. I'm thinking about stay.
I sit on the edge of the bed.
The room is the same room it was when I arrived — the quilt, the wildflowers Maple replaces every two days, the mountain slice between the two spruce trees in the window. I've been here six days. Six days is not long enough to feel like a place is yours.
Except that I walk into Juniper's and Darlene has my tea ready before I sit down.
Except that Kaylee texts me this morning just to say the kids are asking about the fox.
Except that I know where the good rock is by the river and which trail behind the hotel turns golden at six in the evening, and Maple and I have four conversations about nothing in particular that feel like the beginning of a friendship.
I've been avoiding the real thought all morning.
Here it is: I don't want to leave. Not because of an afternoon in a shed or a kiss on a porch.
Because of who I am here. Because I walk into a library because of a sign and I sit on a floor because a little girl has an upside-down book and I spend a week being entirely, recognisably myself — the version of me who doesn't redirect or shrink or adjust herself into someone quieter.
I think about who I was before I left Vancouver. The careful, contained version who adjusts and redirects and tells herself wanting things is the same as being needy. I think about Daniel's face and the three years that lead to it. I think about the particular way I stop taking up space.
Then I think about Nora Hale, who is about to start kindergarten in eight weeks and who deserves someone in that classroom who already knows she's committed to the bit.
Someone like me.
My hands are steady on the wheel and the evening is gold and long, the sky still pale above the tree line at eight o'clock. His truck is in the drive. The porch light is on.
He's sitting in the cedar chair, coffee mug in hand, and he sees me pull up and his eyes go with with surprise.
I get out of the car.
"Nora asleep?" I say.
"An hour ago."
I come up the porch steps. He watches me and doesn't move. I sit in the other chair, the one I already think of as mine, which I find slightly embarrassing and not embarrassing at all, and look at the mountains in the last light.
"I'm not leaving," I say.
He's quiet.
"Not because of you," I say. "Or not only because of you.
I'm staying because this is where I want to be.
Because I'm a teacher and this town needs one and because Nora is about to start school and she should have someone who already knows her.
Because I was shrinking in Vancouver and I'm not shrinking here.
" I look at him as I rattle on and on. "You and Nora are the reason I figured that out. But the staying is mine."
He's looking at me. His jaw is tight. "You'd upend your whole life," he says.
"I'd redirect it. There's a difference." A beat. "I've been redirecting the wrong way for a long time. This is the right direction."
The mountains hold the last light. The river is down there below the tree line, steady and constant.
He sets his mug down. He leans forward, elbows on knees, looks at his hands for a long moment. Then he looks up at me.
"Nora cried when she realized you were really leaving," he says. "She's been through enough."
I hold his look, understanding the warning inside of it. The protective Uncle. The “Don’t you dare break her heart, Tessa”. "I'm not going anywhere, Beckett. That's the whole thing I'm telling you."
After a long silence, he nods and takes my hand.
His bedroom is at the back of the cabin, the window facing east toward the dark tree line. He leaves one lamp on and the room is warm and smells like him.
"Come here," he says.
I cross the room.
He kisses me slowly, one hand at my jaw, and I feel the difference immediately — no urgency, no edge. Just him paying attention, his thumb tracing my cheekbone, my hands finding the front of his shirt.
"Beckett."
"Yeah."
"I've been thinking about this since the porch."
"Which night."
"Both," I say.
He makes a low sound and his hands move to my waist and he walks me back toward the bed and I go, and when the backs of my knees hit the mattress I sit and look up at him standing in the lamplight and I reach for him just to have something to hold.
He comes down over me and the first thing he does is nothing.
Just looks. One hand braced beside my head, the other tracing from my jaw down my throat, slow.
The lamp is low and amber and I can see his face clearly — the scar through his eyebrow, the particular set of his jaw, the expression that is open and unguarded and aimed entirely at me.
"Tell me what you want," he says, his mouth against my collarbone.
"Everything," I say. "Slowly."
He takes me at my word.
His mouth moves down my throat, my chest, lower, and he takes his time at every place he stops — thorough, unhurried. I get my hands in his hair when his mouth finds my stomach and I feel him almost smile against my skin.
"Good?" he says.
"Don't stop."
He doesn't stop. He works his way back up and gets my jeans off without rushing and when his mouth finds me I stop being articulate entirely.
I pull at his hair and he takes that as information and gives me more of exactly that, steady and focused, and I press the back of my hand to my mouth because Nora is down the hall and I cannot be loud about this even though I want to be loud about this.
"Beckett." His name in pieces.
He lifts his head just enough to look up at me. His eyes are dark and his expression is the open one, the real one. "Yeah," he says, and goes back, and I grip the pillow and breathe through my nose and let him.
When I come it's long and slow and deep — nothing like the shed's sharp urgency, it builds from somewhere low and spreads outward — and his hands hold my hips through it with the same steady certainty he brings to everything, and I lie there afterward with my chest heaving and his mouth pressed to the inside of my thigh like he's in no hurry at all to move.
"Come here," I manage.
He comes up over me. His shirt is gone — I don't remember when — and I run my palms over his chest and shoulders and he lets me, stays still, watching my face while I touch him.
I feel the scar along his ribs under my fingertips.
I feel the weight of him settling against me and the specific way he catches his breath when I reach down between us.
"Tessa."
"I've got you," I say.
His mouth curves. Just barely. Then he reaches for the nightstand.
When he pushes inside me it's slow — slow enough that I feel every inch of it, slow enough that I have to muffle the sound in his shoulder — and he stays still for a moment after, forehead to mine, both of us breathing.
"Okay?" he says.
"More than okay. Move."
He moves. Slowly at first, the way I ask for, and it is — the word that comes to me is devastating, which is not a word I associate with sex but here we are.
There's nowhere to be. There's no truck, no shed, no crew in the trees.
Just this room and this man and his mouth against my temple and his hands that already know me, that figure me out in a week the way some people never manage in years.
He finds a rhythm and I find it with him and my hands are on his back feeling the shift and pull of muscle and his breath in my ear gets uneven in degrees. I wrap my legs around him and he makes a low rough sound and his hips press deeper.
"Look at me," he says.
I do. He holds my gaze and keeps moving and I hold it because I want to see him — the one without the scowl or the wall, the one that's just Beckett, here, with me.
"Stay," he says. Not a question. Not a command. Just the word punched out of him like he can't help it.
"I'm staying." I pull him down closer. "I already told you."
"Tell me again."
"I'm staying, Beckett. I'm staying."
His forehead drops to mine. His hand slides between us and finds where I need it and I gasp and grip his shoulders and this time when it hits I go rigid and silent, face in his neck, and I feel him follow — the full-body shudder, his grip fierce on my hip, my name low and spent against my hair.
We lie tangled together after, the window open, tree frogs starting up outside. His arm is across my waist, heavy and warm. The lamp is still on. Neither of us moves to turn it off.
"Nora's going to want pancakes," he says eventually.
"I know how to make pancakes."
"Of course you do."
I turn my head to look at him. He's looking at the ceiling, the lamp still on, and in the amber light the scar through his eyebrow is visible and the lines of his face are at rest — not the scowl, not the careful, just him.
"Beckett."
"Yeah."
"I'm glad I came in."
He's quiet for a moment. His hand moves on my waist, once, back and forth.
"To the library," I say. "That first Tuesday. I'm glad I saw the sign."
"Me too," he says.
He turns off the lamp. The room goes dark and the tree frogs are loud and the river is somewhere below the tree line, steady and patient, and I lie in the dark in Beckett Hale's bed in a town I arrive in six days ago and feel, for the first time in a very long time, exactly like myself.