Chapter Thirty-Three
Melanie
If irony had a thermostat, Reckless River just cranked it to one hundred.
I had come to this town to help my best friend move and start her dreams.
Now I was stuck in the community center with a guy that had a past showing up in his future, while a blizzard built a wall around us like the universe had a sense of humor and a mean streak.
The gym hummed with generator breath outside and the soft chorus of exhausted people pretending they weren’t afraid. Somewhere, a kid’s laughter pinged off the rafters like hope refusing to follow the rules. The air smelled like cocoa, wet wool, lemon cleaner, and winter.
And Drew kept being everywhere.
Not on purpose—just one of those logistics things.
Every time I turned around to hand out a blanket, he was there with a cot.
Every time I bent to fix a zipper on someone’s coat, he was there with hand warmers.
I reached for a lantern; he reached for the same one.
His fingers brushed mine and my traitor heart had the nerve to do that startled-dove thing in my chest.
I caught him looking at me more than once. Not the usual heat that made my knees unreliable. Something steadier. The kind of look that asks a question without pushing for an answer. It made it hard to stay mad. It made it harder to stay smart.
“Blankets?” I asked a woman shepherding two sleepy kids toward the corner.
She nodded, relief loosening her shoulders as I draped a thick navy one over each little body.
The gym lights flickered, steadied, went out, then came back as the generator kicked harder.
The room made that collective sound people make when they decide—in the same second—to be brave together.
“Need a hand?” came the voice I’d been trying not to catalog all night.
I looked up. Drew. Hair damp from snow, flannel sleeves shoved to his elbows, a smear of grease or soot on his forearm because of course he’d been fixing something that required getting dirty.
He held out a stack of quilts and that lopsided half-smile he wore when he wasn’t sure if he was allowed to smile at me.
“I’ve got it,” I said, meaning the quilts, not my life.
“Okay,” he said, and set them on the table anyway, close enough that the edge of one brushed my wrist. “There’s soup, if you want some.” He gestured to the far corner where Mrs. Santos had somehow conjured two slow cookers and enough bread to carb-load a football team.
“I’m good,” I lied. My stomach had been a clenched fist since The Rusty Stag.
He hesitated. “You staying here tonight?”
“I think that’s the definition of ‘blizzard shelter,’ yes.” I looked past him at the doors, frosted white from the outside. “Roads are closed. Your town is adorable and vindictive.”
He smiled at that, quick and faint. “We prefer unyielding.”
“For branding,” I said.
“For truth,” he said.
We worked. That was how we didn’t talk. He handed out hot packs.
I tied hats under small chins. He lifted, carried, fixed.
I soothed, fetched, folded. Lydia moved through us like a conductor—cocoa here, batteries there, humor everywhere.
Riley announced we were calling the generator Bruce because it sounded like a cranky uncle who nonetheless shows up with a snow shovel and a casserole.
The storm pressed its shoulder into the building and kept pushing.
Around ten, the gym softened. Conversations thinned to murmurs, then to the rustle of blankets and the occasional whistle-snores of someone who’d earned the right to be oblivious.
The lanterns turned everything sepia, a postcard of survival.
Lydia declared a truce with fatigue and curled up on a cot in her boots, arm flung over her eyes, the clipboard tucked under her shoulder like a teddy bear.
Riley yawned loud enough to qualify as a declaration of war and then immediately fell asleep sitting upright against a column, arms crossed, chin tucked, a cocoa cup still in her hand like a prop.
Drew materialized beside me again, which was either fate or the fact that the supply room door was behind me. He nodded toward it.
“Out of the frenzy back there,” he said. “If you need five minutes.”
“Five minutes sounds illegal,” I said, because humor keeps the ice from forming on the softest parts.
“Then we’ll break the law,” he said quietly.
He pushed the door open and I followed him into the narrow hallway.
It smelled like paper, dust, and the kind of institutional soap that never quite wins.
A string of old winter concert posters lined the wall—smiling kids in Santa hats frozen in time.
Fluorescent lights hummed low overhead. The HVAC clicked and sighed.
We slipped into the supply room—shelves of paper towels, stacks of bottled water, boxes labeled GLOVES, HATS, HOLIDAY LIGHTS (BAD). Someone had dragged an old space heater in there. It pinged and ticked, bravely sending out the kind of heat that might not warm you but tries.
“Thrilling venue,” I said.
“We get all the best dates,” he answered.
For a second, neither of us spoke. I folded my arms like I could corral the mess inside me into something manageable. He leaned against a shelf, head tipped back, eyes closed as if he were checking a prayer for typos before sending it.
“I didn’t do anything,” he said, eyes still closed. “With her.”
“I know,” I said automatically, because I hated clichés and I refused to use one. “I saw you not do anything. That wasn’t the problem.”
He looked at me then, and in the low light he looked older, softer, something like tired in the bones.
“I know my past makes good lies,” he said. “It’s on me that you can believe them.”
“That’s very noble,” I said. “I’m too grumpy for noble. I was jealous. Then I was humiliated at being jealous. Then I was angry at being humiliated. It’s a rich tapestry.”
He grumbled a breath that wanted to be a laugh but wasn’t. “I earned some of that.”
I stared at the shelf label that read EXTENSION CORDS and tried to arrange my mouth around the thing I didn’t want to say, because once you say it, you can’t unsay it, and a thousand small protections get ripped up and thrown away like wrapping paper.
“You… hurt me,” I heard myself say. It surprised me. I thought I’d swallowed it. “And not because of what happened this morning. Because what happened this morning let me pretend what I felt last night wasn’t real. Which is… easier. In the short term.”
His hand flexed on the edge of the shelf. “Mel.”
“I know,” I said quickly, because hearing my name in his voice was a loaded chamber. “It’s not fair. I’m not being fair.”
“You’re being honest,” he said. “I can take honest.”
We stood in the humming quiet, and I watched the way his throat worked when he swallowed.
I thought about last night and his laugh that was all breath and relief, the way he touched me like he was telling the truth with his hands, and the way his cabin had felt like a place that remembered how to keep me safe.
And this morning, the way the town startled me by feeling… possible.
“I stopped,” he said, and his voice had that steadied weight he used when he needed me to hear him past the noise.
“The day I met you, I stopped. Flirting. Seeing other people. Even pretending. I didn’t make an announcement about it, because I didn’t know if making it official would spook you or me.
But I stopped. I cleaned up inside. It took time.
Longer than it should have.” His mouth tugged into something wry.
“Turns out you can’t just retire from being careless.
You have to actually practice not being an idiot. ”
“Reps,” I said, because if I didn’t joke, I might cry.
“Reps,” he agreed. “I kept waiting for the moment it would pay off. For you to walk in and just know. And then you’d leave again—no shame, no guilt, just…
gone. And I’d tell myself to be patient, to hold the door.
I didn’t chase, because I didn’t want to turn what we had into something it wasn’t ready to be.
” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “And that’s on me too, because I let silence do the talking and you can hear anything you want in silence. ”
I leaned back against the opposite shelf, paper towels cushioning my shoulder blades. “At the coffee shop, Janey mentioned about how you like tradition,” I said. “Like you were a hymn she remembered the words to.”
“Janey liked knowing me when I wasn’t ready to know myself,” he said simply. “We were easy because neither of us asked for more. That’s not a virtue. It’s an arrangement. I don’t want arrangements anymore.”
Something in my chest uncoiled a fraction, as if a bird I’d locked up there needed to test a wing.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?” He sounded both careful and breathless.
“Okay,” I repeated. “That… helps.”
He nodded once, the kind of nod that cements a beam. “Good.”
I traced the seam of the box beside me with one finger.
“Distance,” I said finally, because the room smelled like honesty and it would be rude not to breathe it.
“We can’t… not talk about that. I live in a place where people ask what time zone you prefer for meetings like it’s a love language.
You live where the river sounds like a lullaby.
I keep telling myself those two lives don’t fit together unless one of us warps. ”
“Then we don’t warp,” he said. “We bend. We plan. We pick the next right thing and do it without promising each other the parts we can’t see yet.”
“That sounds suspiciously rational for a man who owns a jukebox that plays Elvis on a loop,” I said, because the alternative was throwing myself into his arms and letting the community center figure it out.
He smiled, small and real. “I can be rational when the power’s out.”
I looked toward the door, where the gym’s quiet breathed in and out.