Chapter Twelve
D ex was disappointed the only reply he received from Selah, after his last message regarding the reporter wanting to talk to her, was k, thx . He wasn’t sure what she was thanking him for or if this was an accidental message meant for someone else. Either way, it didn’t give him anything, and while his message hadn’t required a response, he’d wanted one, anyway.
The whole week had been odd. The news station in Bend wasn’t the only one, as he had received other requests from random media sources around the country, most of them being blogs or YouTube personalities. He hadn’t replied to those emails yet. Regardless, he needed to talk to Selah about the interview he did for the Colorado radio station. She may never come across it, but it seemed important to at least give her the heads-up on the off chance she did.
“What’s going on between you and the sexy hot-air balloon pilot? What’s her name? Sara? Are you guys hooking up or what?” the radio personality had asked him.
Dex had been caught off guard by the question. All he could do was release a nervous chuckle and reply, “It’s Selah and, uh, yeah... we’re just... you know... friends,” which didn’t sound convincing, even to his own ears. He’d been debating telling her ever since, even though nothing could be changed and—It was only the implication of it all.
Also, it didn’t help when his boss, Chris, pulled him aside at work to tell him she didn’t care what Dex was doing in his personal life, but maybe take care of it outside the park when he wasn’t wearing his uniform. He wasn’t sure what Chris had witnessed, but it worried him all the same. Dex should never doubt that his campaign-hat-wearing boss and fellow rangers were as perceptive as hell, and their eyes could be anywhere. The point was, he should know better than to try anything on park property, no matter how big—or, in this case, short—the temptation was.
It was a good thing Chris got a call from the Smith Rock nonprofit, congratulating her on a healthy amount of donations. Also, Chris’s wife was quite pleased with their new family photo, so it was more of a discussion than Dex getting written up. He tried to shrug the whole thing off.
After he got home that day from work, he took another chance and sent a text to Selah.
Got a new one if you’re interested.
He sent along a picture of a jigsaw puzzle he’d recently ordered online. It was a stylized image of a crow posing inside of a gothic library because Selah once mentioned it would be fun to do something different from landscape images.
She responded after a few minutes.
I haven’t had the best day.
He frowned, wondering how to follow up. After thinking and rethinking, causing several false starts which he deleted and then retyped, he came up with a response.
Oof, sorry. Today wasn’t great for me either. But if doing a puzzle and eating pizza sounds like something you can handle, you should come over.
It was after the message had been sent did he regret using the word “handle.” Shit. He should have picked a word that sounded less of a challenge.
Actually, that sounds pretty nice. Okay. :)
Suddenly, he had all kinds of things to do as he ordered the pizza and rushed to do the dirty dishes in his sink. He’d at least taken a shower to get the park dust and sweat off before he’d decided to text her. He was putting the last of the dishes in a small countertop drying rack when Harper cawed twice from the porch railing, as though she’d assigned herself guard bird duty. This notified him of the arrival of Selah’s dark-green pickup. He tapped a wet finger on the window above the sink, warning Harper to behave herself because lately she’d been in an ornery mood.
Grabbing a towel, he wiped his hands as he opened the front screen door.
“Hi.” Selah gave him a warm smile as she approached, and his heart stopped inside his chest. “Hey, Harp. I brought you something.” Reaching into her pocket, she removed a small trinket and dropped it onto the wooden railing. “It’s just a broken metal zipper tab I found on the ground today. Is that okay?”
“Oh, yeah. Should be fine.” He was just happy the bird didn’t attempt to snap at Selah. Instead, Harper cocked her head, studying the zipper tab, tapping it with the tip of her beak, before picking it up and hop-flapping away. “Where’s my broken zipper tab?” he asked with a grin.
“Here. I went to the dentist earlier this week and they let me pick out a sticker from the kid box. You said you’d never gotten a sticker gift before, so I picked this out for you.”
She handed him a small, round sticker featuring a cartoon hedgehog holding a yellow flower. He made plans to put it on his phone case as soon as she departed. The real gift would have been if she would have allowed Dex to wrap his arms around her petite, curvy frame, especially since he knew she had a rough day. Instead, he could only invite her inside. “Come on. Maybe Harper will be too occupied with her present and leave us alone this evening.”
Selah took a seat on the couch, dropping a small, worn canvas bag on the ground as she studied the image on the puzzle box.
“The pizza isn’t here yet. You wanna talk about your bad day?” he asked, taking a seat beside her.
Her focus remained on the puzzle lid. “Not really.” There was a strange vibe coming from her, something cool and closed off. It was clear she wasn’t in a talkative mood, and he wasn’t going to force the issue.
“We can stream a movie or something if you want.”
“Sure. Okay.”
Movie. Pizza. Puzzle. Plus, hanging out with Selah. As far as Dex was concerned, this was a solid Friday night for him.
That was until he switched to a streaming platform and found himself faced with an impossible task—finding the perfect movie. It had to be one that didn’t have any sex scenes to prevent things from becoming awkward. Also, he probably shouldn’t choose anything too romantic, too dark, too heavy, too anything. He asked her if she wanted to watch anything in particular, and she replied with the dreaded, “No, you can pick whatever you want. I don’t mind.”
Heated beads of sweat popped along his neck as though this was some sort of test, and he was about to royally screw it up by choosing wrong. His insecurity at being out of touch when it came to good movie choices was putting him on edge.
Finally, he struck guaranteed gold, pushing the play icon. “Oh. Let’s watch Galaxy Quest .”
Her body stiffened, but her gaze remained downcast, focused on the puzzle.
“You don’t like it? I can pick something else,” he said, reaching for the controller again.
“It’s fine,” she replied, but she didn’t look fine. She appeared pale and uneasy. But she kept her head down and concentrated on gathering edge pieces from the box.
This was how it went for about ten minutes, with only the sound of the movie filling the space, until she hyper-focused on a single piece in her hand. She appeared frozen, except for her chest moving at a rate too fast for normal breathing. He was having trouble paying attention to anything else, certain something was wrong, but not knowing what. Dex opened his mouth to ask her, when she suddenly grabbed her bag, sprung to standing, knocking several puzzle pieces to the floor, and said, “I—Sorry, I need to go. I can’t—I need to go.”
Dex checked his phone. “The pizza should be here any minute. Why don’t we—” but he was cut off with the door slamming shut, leaving him confused. Worried about her unexcepted change in demeanor, he rushed from the house to see if he could catch her before she left. Maybe she had heard his Colorado radio interview and she was upset about—
Dex did a dead stop on his porch. Selah had made it to her truck, but she stood hunched over at the passenger side, bracing herself against it, her breathing heavy and approaching hyperventilation.
Seeing her like this made his blood run cold. It terrified him. He wasn’t used to handling whatever heavy emotion this was. Someone else would be better than him. Except there wasn’t anyone else, and this was Selah. He strode to her, taking her by the shoulders, and the large dark eyes that met his were filled with so much pain and sorrow. It didn’t come as a surprise when she burst into tears.
He pulled her into a tight embrace. Her face pressed into his chest as her whole body racked with sobs. It absolutely killed him, his own chest tightening with helplessness at not knowing what was wrong or how to fix things. All he could do was hold her and murmur, “It’s okay” over and over again.
After a while, her sobs lessened, though she remained in his arms, the fabric of his shirt clutched within her fists. “I’m sorry,” she said through tears, pulling back. She sounded small, as though every part of her was cracking apart like fragile glass.
He readjusted his arms to fully embrace her body again, settling his head on the top of hers. “You don’t need to be sorry.”
“I should go home.”
Dex hadn’t cried when Ava rejected him, or even when Rachel left. It was more of a dark, bitter pit of emptiness moving into his chest. At some point, this dark pit had moved out again. He hadn’t noticed when it happened, only that it had. What Selah was experiencing was something else entirely, and he didn’t feel great about her leaving until he knew she was okay. “I think you should stay... just for a little bit. Until you’re feeling okay. Wanna eat some food? Get something to drink?”
“Did the pizza come?”
In fact, the food delivery driver had shown up about five minutes after Selah had started crying. The woman had looked unsure at what she should do in such a situation, choosing to walk delicately to Dex’s porch, gently setting the pizza box down and then quietly getting back in her car.
“The driver left it on the porch. It’s probably cold by now, but I can heat up some slices for us. Come on.” He led her back to his house, one of his arms still wrapped around her shoulder, not wanting to let go yet. It was amazing how holding her felt entirely natural.
“Oh God. Really? So, the delivery driver saw me being a mess too?” She rubbed a hand across her cheeks.
“I shielded your body. She probably thought it was me.”
She released a stuffed-up, watery laugh at this. “God. Sorry.”
Dex had to let go to pick up the pizza box and opened the door for her. He immediately turned off the movie and got her situated on his couch again. As he heated a plate of slices in the microwave, he brought her a glass of water, and she downed half of it. He pushed the puzzle in progress to one end of the coffee table—they hadn’t gotten far, anyway—and put down the heated slices with some napkins. They each grabbed a slice, and she didn’t fight him when he relaxed against one end and brought her with him. In fact, her head settled right on his chest and his free hand rubbed along her bicep as they each ate with one hand.
“You wanna talk?” he asked carefully.
“I’ve just had a really bad day.”
“Apparently. Must have been a real doozy. Was it even worse than tipping the basket over and landing on one of your passengers?”
“Oh God. Are you ever going to forget that?”
“Nope. Your website promised a once-in-a-lifetime experience and, boy, did you deliver.” He’d probably never forget anything relating to her. Every memory was being locked inside a special chest in his brain.
He took a huge bite from his slice and thought it over. “If you’re not going to give me details, I’ll just have to guess. Let’s see. Some big VIP, let’s say the governor of Oregon, booked an important flight for some kind of PR thing and you didn’t have the balloon completely hooked in. So just as you were about to take off, the balloon detached from the basket and you all had to watch it swirling about like a helium balloon losing air.” He demonstrated this using his pizza crust as a stand in for the balloon in this story.
She laughed and lowered his hand with hers to stop the pizza crust from continuing to make wild loop-de-loops. “Come on. I don’t even think that’s possible unless you’re talking about cartoon physics.”
“Okay, then. Maybe this is about a flock of birds with a bad case of diarrhea and they flew over the balloon and—”
“Stop! I’m eating! I don’t want this to even have a chance to enter my imagination.”
“I’m just going to keep guessing until—”
Selah sat up and he instantly missed the warmth of her body pressed against his, but at least her mood was improving. “Okay, fine, I’ll tell you. During the tour today, this old lady passenger was taking pictures with her phone, and she put it over the edge of the basket and...” She whistled as one of her hands demonstrated a death spiral downwards.
“What? Why would she even risk that?”
“You work with the public too. You tell me. And then she was like Well? And I said Well, what? She actually expected me to immediately land the balloon, so she could go get her phone.”
“Are you kidding? That phone had to be toast, anyway.”
“Right? And I’m just going to randomly land a balloon somewhere with no ground crew? No, I don’t think so.”
Dex couldn’t help grinning at how animated she was getting in retelling this story. It was a completely different side of her. She was lively, full of energy, and hilarious.
“And she was yelling at me because why didn’t the basket have smaller baskets on the outside to catch things? Because this kind of thing must happen all the time. Then she came up with some wild theory that I probably had some side hustle in collecting people’s dropped items and making money off of it by selling them. She kept saying, My pictures! What about my pictures? Apparently, that phone had three years’ worth of pictures on it and she hadn’t downloaded it to her computer yet or put it on the flashy thing her son gave her.”
“Come on!” Dex was laughing hard, and Selah was as well. Every additional sentence made the story more ridiculous and funny. “Did she call it a ‘flashy thing’?”
Selah wiped a tear away from the corner of her eye. “Yes! And she kept yelling at me that now she no longer has the photos of her third grandson’s birth and unless I’m going to make her kids have another baby, I’ve just ruined her whole lifetime of memories.”
Dex almost choked on his pizza. “Stop.”
“So, yeah, anyway, I’m expecting to hear from her lawyer any day now and need to start practicing for my deposition.”
“She’s not really going to sue you, is she?”
Selah wiped her hands with a napkin, not appearing the least bit worried. “She can try, but the form we have everyone sign pre-flight is very extensive, especially in regards to these kinds of accidents.”
“Dropping things is on the form?”
“Seriously? You didn’t read it? Why doesn’t anyone read?” she asked.
“Why doesn’t anyone stay on the path?” he asked, equally exasperated.
She threw her used napkin at him. “I’ll have you know that I’m very good at staying on the path. That was an extenuating circumstance.”
“Oh, sure. It’s always extenuating circumstances for you, but not for little old ladies who drop their electronic photo album with the only known pictures of their grandson’s birth on it.”
Selah did a cute little snort laugh. “Stop. It’s not like I got away with it either. You were an asshole, and one step away from pulling out your ranger cuffs and throwing me in ranger jail.”
“I wasn’t being an asshole. I was in professional park ranger mode.” Although, imagining her in handcuffs in his bedroom was a new fantasy unlocked.
“You called me ma’am ! And you were very stern.” She was obviously offended by the first part, but the second part intrigued him because her gaze flicked over him in a flirty manner. It was a look that made his blood heat.
“Se—”
“I should probably be getting home,” she said, interrupting him. “I’m feeling okay now. I hope I didn’t completely ruin your Friday night.”
Dex didn’t want her to leave, but he had no excuse to hold her. He was beginning to understand her, to unlock what made her tick, and, yet, he had many questions remaining. While he had no doubt that Selah did have a terrible day with a ridiculously difficult passenger, this didn’t feel like enough of an explanation for everything that had happened tonight. Something like that wouldn’t have caused such a big crack, to change her from a person who was unflappable to completely vulnerable. He wanted to know more, but was afraid to push.
“All right,” he said as she grabbed her bag from the floor. “Let me just walk you out.”
She didn’t fight him as they walked the short distance from his house to where her truck was parked. Even with her keys in hand, Selah didn’t make a move to get in once they arrived. “Thank you for, you know, everything.”
He took a chance, opening his arms, and she instantly fell into them. Maybe he was becoming a hugger, after all. He liked it, especially because hers were warm, fully invested hugs. She made him not want to half-ass it or pull away too quickly. They could sit with the hug, enjoy it. She released the longest, deepest sigh within this one, like she could live here, and this was now home. Or perhaps that was wishful thinking on his part.
When they did pull back, he noticed a light blue fuzz sticking to one of her curls, probably from the blanket thrown haphazardly on the back of his couch. Dex couldn’t resist pulling it out, her hair like silk between the pads of his fingers. “You going to be okay? You can always call me or text me later?”
“It’s getting late. I’m sure you don’t want me calling you in the middle of the night?”
Except... he did. “If you need to.” That beautiful gaze of hers rose to him. Though there was a clear height difference between them, tonight it felt less significant. His hand continued to lightly touch the ends of her hair. The air around them grew heavy, enveloping them in this bubble of tension.
A hazy memory reminded him that nothing was ever going to happen between them. In fact, she had once said it was impossible . Many of the reasons given then sounded silly now. These same reasons transformed into unwarranted excuses as her own eyes softened and drifted toward his mouth. His fingers secured themselves to the delicate skin of her jawline.
Impossible.
Except the word applied more to inaction rather than action. To keep doing nothing? That was impossible. To not close this confounding distance between them and kiss the hell out of this woman? Yeah, that was impossible too. A need was building inside of him, his own breaths becoming shallower as he trailed his fingers from her jawline to the nape of her neck, those dark wavy strands brushing the back of his hand, setting his nerve endings on fire.
Something was going to snap this tension between them, and he was afraid it was going to be him. Dex worried he wouldn’t hold anything back and completely devour her in heat and fire, if given the opportunity.
Before he could do anything rash, Selah slid her hand up his shirt, grabbed the neckline, pulled him down as she lifted on her tiptoes, and planted a solid kiss on his lips. It took him by surprise. It didn’t last nearly enough time, especially not enough for him to react and kiss her properly in return. In a flash, she let go, got in her truck, and left. Dex remained there, dumbfounded and dazed.
She’d kissed him. She had kissed him . His bewilderment was promptly replaced by a goofy grin as he made his way back to his home, hopeful at what else might be possible.