Chapter 11
ELEVEN
POWELL
I’d done my push-ups. I’d done my sit-ups. I’d even done extra time on the rower like some overachieving masochist.
Didn’t matter.
By the time I finished cool-down stretches on the bay floor, lungs burning, sweat cooling on the back of my neck, my brain still wasn’t on my form or my breathing or anything remotely useful.
It was back in that barn. More specifically, on Jess in that barn, with grease streaked up her forearm like war paint. Hair twisted back and already working itself free, curls frizzing at the edges.
Her mouth softened around the word “We.”
We did.
We got a lot done.
We.
My arms shook more than they should’ve as I pushed up from the mat. Yeah, I’d done more reps than usual, but not that many. My body wasn’t tired, but the rest of me felt like it had been through a structure fire.
“You gonna move, or are we painting around you?”
Moose’s voice echoed through the bay. I blinked and found him standing over me with a towel slung around his neck and a protein bar half-eaten in one hand. He wore gym shorts and a T-shirt that said Hose Me Down in big faded letters. Subtlety had never once darkened his door.
“I’m stretching,” I said.
“No, you were communing with the afterlife. Looked like you were about two seconds from astral projecting.”
I rolled to my feet, joints popping in protest I refused to acknowledge. “Just thinking.”
“Uh-huh. About floor plans or about Jess’s ass in those jeans?”
I glared at him. “You are not cleared to say those words in that order.”
He grinned, unrepentant. “So that’s a yes.”
I grabbed my towel from the step of the engine and wiped my face off, focusing on the distant whir of the industrial fan in the corner, the faint scent of diesel and strong coffee that lived permanently in the air.
Normal, safe things. Things that were not the way Jess had leaned back against my chest for half a second before she jerked away like she’d touched a live wire.
Except I was the one who’d felt electrocuted.
Meatball ambled out of the kitchen, his hair still damp from the shower and sticking up at weird angles. He held a shaker cup of something the color of pond scum. “Somebody say Jess?”
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” Moose said at the same time.
Meatball took one long look at my face and nodded. “That’s a Jess face.”
“I don’t have a Jess face.”
“You one hundred percent have a Jess face,” he said. “You had it when you came back from the barn last night, and you’ve had it every time your phone’s buzzed since.”
“I was checking the weather.” The protest would’ve sounded more convincing if this wasn’t climate-controlled building with three different digital displays telling us the exact humidity, wind speed, and chance of precipitation.
“Sure,” Moose said. “Checking the weather. Not checking if she texted to say, ‘Hey, Donkey, thanks for rewiring my entire future.’”
“She did say thank you.” The words escaped before my brain could tackle my mouth.
Both of them perked up, like bloodhounds scenting a trail.
Meatball’s eyebrows climbed. “She said thank you.”
“It was just—” I shrugged, trying to play it off, trying not to replay the way she’d said we again, like we were a team and not whatever we actually were. “We were talking layout. It’s not a big deal.”
Moose whistled. “Powell ‘Everything’s Fine’ Ferguson thinks something’s not a big deal? That means it’s a huge deal.”
I grabbed my T-shirt off the back of my chair and yanked it on, needing the small barrier between me and their attention. “Don’t you two have anything else to do?”
“Not until the next call.” Meatball took a swig of his sludge. “So. Tell us about the barn.”
“There was wiring,” I said flatly. “And outlets. And arguing about outlet height.”
“And?” Moose prompted.
“And a donkey.” I hung my towel on the locker hook.
“Esmerelda,” Meatball said reverently. “Queen of the Mountain.”
“She tried to shove Jess into my side and nearly took us both down.” It had seemed like chaos at the time and now, in retrospect, seemed suspiciously like divine intervention.
Moose sat on the bench and leaned his elbows on his knees.
“Let me get this straight. You and Jess are alone in a barn. You’re rebuilding her livelihood with your capable, manly hands.
The donkey of destiny literally body-checks her into you.
And you’re here, looking like you’ve been hit by a truck, saying nothing happened? ”
I opened my locker and pretended to be very interested in reorganizing its contents. “I didn’t say nothing happened.”
Meatball stilled. “Oh, this is getting good.”
I didn’t want to say it. I really didn’t.
But the image wouldn’t leave me—the way her breath had stuttered in her chest when I’d stepped in behind her to adjust the tape measure, the way her fingers had trembled for half a second under mine, the way she’d smelled like coffee and sugar and that floral shampoo she used.
“She—” I cleared my throat. “She didn’t bite my head off when I corrected her measurement.”
Moose waited.
“And for a second she… leaned. A little bit. Before she realized how close we were and jumped away.”
Moose’s grin held a downright evil curve. “Oh damn. We’ve got contact.”
“It was probably a reflex,” I said quickly. “She lost her balance.”
“Sure.” Meatball nodded. “I always lean back into people I hate when I lose my balance. Super normal.”
“She doesn’t hate me,” I said before I could stop myself.
Both of them went quiet. Not mocking this time. Just… watching.
I shut the locker a little too hard. “Not like she did,” I amended. “Not as much. It’s… better. A little.”
“What did she call you?” Moose asked.
“Powell,” I said. “Couple of, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Powell,’ and ‘You’re not putting my milk fridge there, Powell,’ but no jackass.”
“Progress,” Meatball said. “Soon you’ll be promoted to ‘you absolute menace’ and ‘oh my God, yes, right there.’”
I flipped him off on instinct, but my face heated anyway because my brain had absolutely no business supplying visuals to go with that last one.
The thing was, it wasn’t just about wanting her. Wanting was the easy part. I’d wanted Jess Donnegan since she’d marched into high school chemistry with a color-coded binder and proceeded to verbally eviscerate a football player for making fun of a kid in the back row.
Wanting was familiar. I understood how to live with that.
This was worse.
This was hope.
Hope that maybe, finally, after ten years of frostbite, she’d started thawing.
Hope that the way she’d looked at me yesterday—uncertain and a little soft, like she was reassessing all her data—wasn’t my imagination desperate for scraps.
And hope was a hell of a lot more dangerous than lust.
I dropped onto the bench beside Moose and flipped the Twelve Stops notebook open in my lap.
It gave my hands something to do, if nothing else.
The pages were a mess of our scribbles now—my blocky all caps, her looping script, little arrows and stars and exclamation points where she’d gotten excited about an idea.
She’d drawn a candy cane border around the Cocoa Flight section. I knew because my idiot brain had memorized the shape of her handwriting.
“We’re here.” Moose tapped his knuckles lightly against my shoulder. “Waiting for you to ask us a deeply vulnerable, feelings-based question you’re going to pretend is about logistics.”
“I’m not asking you anything,” I said.
“Sure,” Meatball put in. “So what’s with the frown wrinkle? You’re thinking hard enough to leave skid marks.”
I stared at the list of activities, trying to focus on something besides the fact that Jess had smudged her thumb over the edge of the page and left a little ghost of a print.
“We’re not ready,” I said finally.
“For what?” Moose asked. “Armageddon? The parade? Santa’s judgment?”
“For the event.” I tapped the notebook. “Half these challenges are untested. We don’t know how long they’ll take, if they’re going to create bottlenecks, if Granny Mae’s hip is going to survive candy cane limbo.”
Moose peered down at the page. “Spin-to-win wheel thing, cookie decorating, cocoa flight, selfie station, terrible sweater contest—these are pretty straightforward.”
“Straightforward is how you get lines down the sidewalk and angry church ladies,” I said. “If every family takes ten minutes at each stop, we’re going to have people backed up all the way to the highway.”
Meatball squinted at the list. “How long does a cocoa flight take?”
“That’s the point,” I said. “We don’t know. Not really. We have estimates. We need data.”
Moose leaned back, folding his big arms behind his head. “You want to run drills for Christmas games.”
“Yes,” I said. “Exactly.”
“Of course you do.” His tone held more fondness than exasperation.
“It makes sense,” I argued. “If we’re going to roll this out for the whole town, we should test run a couple stations. See how they flow. Adjust the rules if we need to.”
“We could do that here,” Meatball suggested. “Throw some tables up in the bay, rope in a few of the guys, promise them cookies.”
The image popped into my head—Jess in the station bay, trying not to smile while Moose and Meatball acted like idiots, holiday music echoing off the concrete, engine lights reflecting off tinsel someone would absolutely put on the truck.
It… wasn’t terrible.
But it wasn’t right.
“Too public,” I said slowly. “Too many people. Too much noise. We’d spend the whole time putting out fires instead of actually tracking how the activities work.”
Moose snorted. “You say that like it isn’t our job.”
“We don’t need a crowd. We only need… one family. Two people. Enough to see what breaks.”
Moose eyed me, catching up. “Two people like, say, you and Jess.”
I kept my gaze on the page. “She and I already know the plan. We’d take it seriously. Time it. Talk through the kinks. It makes sense.”
“It does,” Meatball agreed, because he was the worst kind of enabler. “What are you thinking? Community center? Church basement?”
I thought about the community center—terrible lighting, echo chamber acoustics, the lingering odor of floor wax and old coffee. Then I thought about my kitchen—warm, familiar, good knives, space to spread out ingredients and supplies, music I could control.
The idea slotted into place with a quiet click.
My kitchen.
My territory.
Her and me and a pile of supplies and a couple hours of focused, low-key chaos.
It would be work.
But it would also be… time. With her. Outside the barn. Outside the forced proximity of co-chair duty. Just us, no onlookers, no town watching for sparks like it was prime entertainment.
My stomach did a slow, anticipatory roll.
“It’s not a date,” I said, more to myself than to them. “It’s a planning session.”
“It’s absolutely not a date,” Meatball agreed solemnly. “You are definitely not going to put on that one shirt that makes your shoulders look huge.”
“I don’t have a shirt that—”
“You know the one,” Moose cut in. “You wore it to that baby shower, and three women dropped their cupcakes.”
“Cupcakes are unstable,” I muttered. “Top-heavy.”
“Uh-huh,” Moose said. “And their eyes were up here, right?”
I scrubbed a hand over my face. “Would you two stop breathing near this conversation?”
“Never,” Meatball said, grinning.
The thing was, they weren’t wrong. The little ember of want in my chest, stubborn and bright, tried to flare into something more every time I pictured her in my space—standing at my stove, perched on my counter, laughing at my playlist, licking frosting off her thumb.
Dangerous.
So damn dangerous.
“I’ll keep it simple,” I said, more firmly. “We need to test a few stations. I’ll offer my kitchen. If she says no, she says no.”
“And if she says yes?” Moose asked.
If she says yes, we spend an evening shoulder to shoulder, building something together.
If she says yes, I get to see if the sparks I felt in the barn survive under softer light.
If she says yes, I get one more chance to show her I’m not the guy she decided I was in high school.
“If she says yes,” I said slowly, “we get the data we need. And the Twelve Stops doesn’t crash and burn.”
“Uh-huh,” Meatball said, clearly hearing everything I didn’t say.
I stood, closing the notebook and tucking it under my arm. “I’m going to grab coffee. Then I’m heading out to the barn.”
Moose saluted with his protein bar. “Good luck with your very serious, not at all romantic logistics meeting.”
“Yeah,” Meatball said. “May your timing be accurate and your cocoa not scald anyone.”
I flipped them both off as I headed toward the kitchen.