Chapter 33 Jack
THIRTY-THREE
JACK
I’m fighting a losing battle here.
The pump is fine. I knew that after the first five minutes, but I keep taking it apart anyway. Unscrew, check the gasket, reseat the valve, screw it back in. Anything to keep my hands busy. Anything so I’m not walking back into the kitchen and seeing that look on Isla’s face again.
She was accusatory and mean, but she was hurt, too. Braced for impact.
The thing is, I’ve never minded her edges. I like that she’s prickly. I like that she feels everything so strongly, that she doesn’t know how to do anything halfway, not anger, not work, not love of that orchard.
Isla is not easy, but easy has never been the point.
I know she doesn’t trust quickly. I know being let into her good graces is something a person earns inch by inch, usually while they’re getting yelled at along the way. That’s part of what makes it matter.
Which is also why it cuts so much deeper when I can feel her trying to shove me back into the other category, the simple one. Safe or unsafe. Good or bad. Someone she can lean on, or someone she has to defend herself from.
That’s what’s eating at me most. Not that she was angry. She’s allowed that. It’s the idea that after everything, she could still look at me and decide I belong with the people who would hurt her.
I tighten the last bolt and sit back on my heels.
She thinks I want to use her. That I see Luxe as a tool the way Roland does. That I’m just waiting for a good story to stretch my sense of justice over. That I’m already halfway out the door.
I scrub a hand over my face. The skin under my eyes aches.
You can only tell someone you’re not going to abandon them so many times before the words stop feeling like anything but a noise in the air. Still, I should have known that pushing her might bring out the claws.
Scared animal instincts. She’s always had those.
“Dipshit,” I tell the pump.
It gurgles back at me, offended.
By the time I walk up from the lower block, the cottage has its evening lights on. The kitchen window glows. I can see her shape moving inside, small and sharp against the lamplight.
I should give her more time. I shouldn’t go in there with anger still prickling under my skin. But I’ve never been one to leave well enough alone, so I push the back door open.
The warm air hits me first, then the smell of freshly brewed coffee. There’s a plate on the counter with a half-eaten sandwich, which means she at least put something in her stomach and isn’t just surviving off rage and caffeine.
Isla sits at the table with her laptop closed, one hand flat on the cover. She’s staring at the grain of the wood. She looks up when I clear my throat.
“It’s hot as hell out there,” I say because I’m a coward.
“Yeah, late spring will do that.”
Silence stretches. My heartbeat keeps a dull, guilty rhythm.
“I’m sorry,” we say at the same time.
A breath of a laugh escapes her. Something loosens in my chest.
“I was going to come find you in a few minutes,” she says. “I just . . . I needed to get all my thoughts together.”
“How’s that going for you?”
She winces. “Not well.”
I pull out the chair across from her and sit.
“I shouldn’t have gone straight to war plans without asking what you actually wanted,” I say.
“I saw that email, and my brain did the thing it always does, which is ‘find the leak, patch the leak.’ Only this time, the leak is a man I deeply want to punch, and I forgot that the pipe he was rattling is you.”
“I know you were trying to protect me. But you made me feel like you were lining me up on a witness stand.” She looks down at her hand on the laptop.
Her thumb moves against the plastic, a small restless slide.
“I shouldn’t have said you’d wake up one day and resent me.
That was cruel. Even if part of me believes it, it was still cruel. ”
My chest pulls. “Part of you believes it?”
She huffs out a breath. “I feel like every time I need somebody, I lose them. It’s not just my mom walking out on us that wired me this way.
Before you came to town, I was dating this guy for a while.
Years, actually. His name was Sam, an out-of-towner who passed through during the off-season.
Turns out he was engaged the whole time. ”
Something ugly and immediate flares in my chest. Rage, sure, but under that, grief. Not for the guy, who sounds like human garbage, but for the version of Isla who got handed that kind of shame and decided she should be the one to carry it.
“What a fucking loser.”
“Humiliation has a long shelf life,” she murmurs. “You were the first person to ask me out after everything went down with Sam. And I was actually excited to go out with you back then. I thought you were arrogant and far too cocky for your own good, but you were hot, so I let it go.”
I grimace. “I’m so sorry for standing you up that night. I wasn’t thinking straight. It’s no excuse, but I thought that if I kept things light, then I would be able to blow through this town like I did everything else.”
“I’m sure you did.” Her cheeks go pink. “You know, I wore my best dress that night. I sat at the bar for hours, waiting for you. Everyone was staring at me, and I pretended I was there alone on purpose.”
“Fucking hell.”
I didn’t know all that. I knew she was pissed I didn’t show up—she made that quite clear—but I didn’t realize how much history there was behind it. I didn’t realize she had waited up for me for hours, hopeful and upbeat.
I never would have blown her off.
She blinks. “It was so long ago, I know that. But it was also a big hit to my already fragile ego. You blatantly flirted with me for years after that, and it messed with my head. It’s hard to reconcile the man you were then with the one you’ve become.”
“I get it,” I say, scrubbing my temple. “I hope you know how much I regret it because you are the single most important thing in my life. I’d go back if I could. I’d rewrite our story.”
“Thank you for saying that,” she replies solemnly. “Because for years, I’ve been telling myself I’m better off if nobody gets all the way in. That way, when they leave, I get to pretend it was never really my choice.”
My fingers curl around the edge of the table. “I’m not going to leave you,” I say gruffly. “I’m not going to hurt you again.”
“I keep treating you like you’re on probation. I know it isn’t fair.” Her shoulders slump. “When you started trying to solve the problem while I was still sitting in the shock of it, I panicked, and I lashed out. I hate that you have to save me all the time.”
“I like being there for you, but I know what you mean.” I rub my thumb over the edge of the table. “I should have started with ‘are you okay’ and ‘what do you want,’ not with ‘how do we gut him?’”
Something in her face shifts, a small easing. “You’re allowed to want to gut him. I want to gut him, too. I just . . . want the knife in my own hand this time.”
“I can work with that.”
She snorts, surprised. It’s a small sound, but it feels like an entire weather system moving. I like that I can always make her laugh.
“I shouldn’t have made it sound like you only love me when there’s something to fix,” she says. “I know the difference between wanting to be useful and wanting to be the hero.”
I think about all the jobs I’ve taken since I rolled into Blue Willow. All the things I’ve patched because nobody else had the time or the tools. I think about how good it feels when something that was broken starts running again.
Not because anyone will write my name on a plaque, but because the noise stops. The leak stops. The person who called me can sleep.
With Isla, it’s never felt like a project. I think I was halfway to loving her the first time she told me to get off her property and then stayed to argue with me for twenty minutes more.
“I love you,” I tell her. “Not because you’re in trouble, or because I get off on being needed. I love you because you’re fierce and funny and impossible, and because every version of my life that feels real has you standing in the middle of it.”
“I love you, too, Jack. So much.” She looks wrecked and honest and more open than I think I’ve ever seen her. “I love you, and I hate that fear keeps getting there first. You don’t deserve to be measured against every bad thing that happened before you.”
She reaches for me first, and that nearly undoes me. I catch her hand, come around the table, and kiss her with all the things I’m still too clumsy to say right. She tastes like coffee and cherry ChapStick.
Something bright and fragile hits me then, the kind of hope that makes a man foolish enough to believe in forever. I bury my face in her hair and hold on. For once, neither of us seems in a hurry to ruin it by speaking too soon.
“Jack?” she finally whispers.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t want to sleep alone tonight.”
My heart gives a painful kick. “I can sleep on the floor,” I say automatically. “Or I can take the chair in your room. I’ve slept in worse spots. Trucks. Half-finished attics. Nico’s guest bed that one time—”
“That’s not what I meant. I mean I don’t want to sleep without you anymore. I want you in my room, in the bed with me. If you still want to.”
I hold out my free hand. “Of course I do. Show me where you want me.”
She lets me pull her to her feet, and we go down the hall together, fingers laced. She stops at the threshold and says, “I’m still a little angry.”
“Me too.”
“I’m also still a little scared. But I’m not mad at you.” Her throat moves as she swallows. “I don’t want to be scared of you, either.”
I tuck a loose piece of hair behind her ear. “I want you to be messy and honest and bossy and whatever else you feel like being, and then I want you to let me stay anyway.”
Her hands come up to rest on my chest, palms hot through my shirt. “That sounds like a lot of work.”
“Good thing you’re the hardest worker I know.”
She huffs out a laugh against my collarbone, and I tip my head down to kiss her.