15. Juliette
— ? —
Juliette
The storm is gone, and the light is everywhere.
It pours through every window of my mother’s cottage like the sky is apologizing for last night, gilding the dust motes and the old wood floors and the man standing in my kitchen like he belongs there.
He doesn’t belong there.
But he’s making coffee anyway, moving through the space with a careful attention that suggests he’s memorized where everything is.
The percolator is already gurgling. He’s found the good mugs - the ones with the chipped handles that my mother refused to throw away - and set out two of them on the counter.
Like this is something we do now.
Through the window behind him, the yard is a war report - branches down everywhere, the lilac bent but holding, shingles from somebody’s roof planted in the grass like dropped playing cards.
“Your fence took a casualty,” he says, following my eyes. “Northeast corner. I’ll fix it.”
“You’ll supervise the fence.”
“I’ll fix the fence, Juliette. I’ve been watching tutorials.”
“When?”
“Nights.” He says it simply, no play in it at all. “The bed and breakfast has terrible reception and I have a lot of nights.”
“I can do that,” I say from the doorway.
He turns, and his face does something complicated when he sees me. I’m wearing my mother’s old nightgown, threadbare and too big, and my hair is a disaster and I probably have pillow creases on my face.
He looks at me like I’m the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.
Stop looking at me like that.
“I know you can,” he says. “But I wanted to.”
“You wanted to make me coffee.”
“I wanted to make you anything.” He turns back to the percolator. “I woke up at five. Watched the sunrise from the porch. And I thought about all the mornings I could have made you coffee, and didn’t.”
There’s evidence of the woke-up-early all over the kitchen - the fence pliers on the windowsill, wet boots by the door, my mother’s toolbox open and reorganized by someone with strong feelings about socket order.
He’s been outside. He fixed the fence before he made the coffee, and hasn’t mentioned the fence, and isn’t going to mention the fence, and the unclaimed credit sits in the room like a third person.
“That’s very poetic for six in the morning.”
“You should hear the drafts. There was one comparing you to the storm. I killed it in committee.”
“Smart committee.”
“Unanimous vote. The committee has learned what happens when I’m ambitious before coffee.”
“I’ve had time to think.” The percolator finishes. He pours carefully, not spilling a drop. “There’s not much else to do when you’re parked at the end of someone’s lane.”
He holds out a mug.
“There’s toast,” he says. “Or there was a plan for toast. Your bread and I had a disagreement.”
“About what?”
“Timing. Commitment. The usual.” He nudges the plate on the counter, where two slices sit at the exact brown of a man who stood over the toaster and refused to be beaten. “I won.”
“You made toast.”
“I made breakfast. Toast is breakfast if you say it with conviction.”
I should take the coffee and the toast and go sit on the porch alone, the way I’ve eaten every breakfast since the ferry. That’s the protocol. That’s the architecture of this arrangement: he orbits, I allow it, nobody lands.
I stay in the kitchen.
He notices - of course he notices, noticing is the one job he never quit - and he has the sense to say nothing, and we stand in my mother’s kitchen drinking coffee three feet apart while the light pours in, and the three feet get louder every second nobody crosses them.
I wash my mug when it’s empty. He hands me his to wash, and our fingers overlap on the handle for exactly as long as neither of us can justify, and then we both let go at once and the mug nearly dies between us.
“Careful,” he says.
“You’re the one who-”
“I know what I’m the one who.” He steps back. Puts the counter between us like a man putting a court between himself and an appeal. Smart, I think, and then, unhelpfully: coward.
I should stay in the doorway. I should take the coffee and retreat to a safe distance and maintain the boundaries I’ve been constructing since the ferry.
I cross the kitchen to take it.
The space between us shrinks with every step until I’m close enough to smell him - last night’s rain and this morning’s coffee and something underneath that’s just him. The particular scent I’ve been sleeping next to for six years and trying to forget for weeks.
He’s got a bruise coming up on his forearm from yesterday’s plywood, purple-green and unbandaged, and my hand gets halfway to it before I recall the hand and issue it a warning.
I don’t step back.
We shouldn’t.
“The jar labels,” I say instead. “You saved them.”
“They were getting damaged.”
“You saved them because you know what they mean to me.”
He’s quiet for a moment, fingers tight around his mug like it’s the only solid thing left in the room. “I’m trying to learn what everything means to you. I should have been learning it for six years instead of six weeks.”
The words land. My chest tightens with the old familiar ache of everything we wasted.
“Zachary-”
“I know it’s too late.” He doesn’t look away. I don’t know where to put the honesty in his eyes.
“Do you?”
He sets down his mug. Slowly. Like whatever is happening between us might spook. The soft click of ceramic on the counter echoes too loud in the quiet kitchen.
“Juliette.” His voice is rough, scraped raw. “You’re looking at me.”
“I’m always looking at you.” I stay exactly where I am, pulse already climbing just from the way he says my name.
“Not like this.” He takes a step toward me. Stops himself cold, jaw flexing. Heat rolls off his body even from here. “Not like you’re thinking about-”
“Don’t tell me what I’m thinking about.” My voice comes out sharper than I intend. The push-pull is already crackling between us.
“Okay.” He stays exactly where he is. Waiting. The way he waited at the bottom of my porch steps for weeks, patient and wrecked. “Then tell me.”
I don’t tell him anything.
Instead I reach past him for the sugar bowl.
I don’t need sugar. I take my coffee black, always have, and he knows this.
But the sugar bowl is behind him, which means reaching for it puts me close enough to feel the heat radiating off his body.
My arm brushes his chest - solid, warm, rising too fast with his breathing - and neither of us moves. The contact burns.
“Jules.” His voice has dropped, dangerous and pleading. “We shouldn’t.”
“I know.” I don’t pull my arm back. His heart slams under my wrist.
“You want a divorce.”
“I know.” The reminder should cool me down. It doesn’t. It only twists the knife of want deeper.
“And I’m trying-” He takes a breath that shudders. “I’m trying to do this right. To not push. To let you set the pace.”
“Very noble of you.” I finally wrap my fingers around the sugar bowl but make no move to step away. My breasts nearly brush his chest with every inhale.
“It’s killing me.”
The admission hangs in the air between us, raw and bleeding. My throat goes tight.
“Good,” I say, and his eyes flash.
His jaw tightens. A muscle jumps. “That’s cruel.”
“Maybe I feel like being cruel.” I set the sugar bowl down without using it, still caging him against the counter with my body. The yearning to close the last inch puts a tremble in my hands.
“Maybe I deserve it.”
“You definitely deserve it.”
I should step back now. The point has been made. The power has been established. I should take my coffee and walk away and let him wonder what just happened.
I don’t step back.
We shouldn’t. We absolutely shouldn’t. The divorce papers sit signed in a drawer down the hall and every smart cell in my body is screaming to stop. But the stupid, starving parts of me that still love him are louder.
“The thing about deserving it,” I say quietly, “is that you don’t get to decide when you’ve had enough.”
“I know.” His hands clench into fists at his sides like he’s physically holding himself back. The restraint sends a fresh wave of heat between my thighs.
“I decide that.”
“I know.”
“And right now-” I move closer, not quite touching him, just close enough that I can feel the tension vibrating off his body in waves. My nightgown whispers against his trousers. “Right now I haven’t decided anything.”
“Juliette.” His voice cracks. “You’re going to have to tell me what you want. Because I can’t - I don’t trust myself to-”
“What don’t you trust yourself to do?” I tip my chin up, forcing the eye contact.
He doesn’t answer right away. Just looks at me with dark eyes and a jaw so tight I can see the muscle jumping under the skin.
“Tell me,” I say, softer now, almost gentle. The cruelty and the yearning tangle until I can’t tell them apart.
“If I touch you right now-” His voice cracks clean down the middle. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop. I’ve been dying for you for weeks. Longer. Six fucking years of half-measures and I’m so goddamn hard for you right now I can’t think straight.”
The confession shoots through me. My nipples tighten against the thin fabric of my nightgown. I am suddenly, embarrassingly wet.
Well. Fuck.
“Then don’t touch me,” I whisper, even as I close another fraction of an inch. Our chests brush with every breath. The light contact makes my knees weak.
“That’s not helping.” A ragged laugh escapes him. His eyes drop to my mouth and stay there.
“I’m not trying to help.”
I take another step. We’re inches apart now. I can see the pulse hammering in his throat, and the heat coming off him prickles my skin. My fingers itch to touch. I keep them fisted in my nightgown instead.
“We shouldn’t,” I say again, but the words come out different this time. Softer. Like a question instead of a statement. Like I’m begging him to disagree.