Chapter 17 #2
His mouth was warm. He tasted like the coffee he'd been drinking on the way over.
The arm at my waist was solid and certain, and the hand at my back drew me a half-step closer than performance required.
He wasn't performing. Whatever I had started, he had taken into his own hands inside of two seconds, and what was happening now was not a thing I had started.
I hadn't been kissed in months. Years, by anyone who'd wanted me kindly.
I had forgotten what a kiss could feel like when nobody in the room wanted to hurt anyone.
The shape of his mouth. The warmth of him.
The smell of him—soap, woodsmoke, something cedar from the house he'd been working on.
His hand at my back, holding without holding tight.
I forgot we were in a hardware store.
I forgot the woman.
I forgot the swatch wall, the bell over the door, the air conditioner running hard against the door cracked open, and Sean, somewhere behind us, watching this happen.
"Get a room!"
Sean's voice broke us apart. He'd been waiting to make that exact joke for months. It came across the shop now like a man finally handed his opening.
Cole pulled back a fraction. Not all the way. His hand was still at my back.
I opened my eyes.
He was looking at me.
His pupils were wide. I could feel his breath on my mouth. I could feel my own pulse in my throat, in my hands, and in three other places I didn't have words for.
In the corner of my eye, the woman in the heavy coat turned around and walked back out the way she had come in. The bell jingled. The door swung shut.
"I think it worked," I said.
My voice came out a little rough. I couldn't help it.
"Yeah," Cole said. "It did."
He kept looking at me.
I made myself unhook my arms from the back of his neck. He took his hand off my back. Slowly. He didn't step away.
After a beat, he turned and walked across the shop toward Sean and the counter and the nails he hadn't yet paid for. I stayed where I was. I put my hand on the swatch wall and waited for the air to come back into my lungs.
We didn't speak in the truck.
We pulled out of Sean's lot, and he turned right onto West Burnett. I sat in the passenger seat and tried to think about anything else. I could still feel the kiss on my lips. The hand at my back was still on me. I could feel my own pulse where his fingers had been.
I looked over at him.
He was driving the way he drove. Both hands on the wheel.
Eyes forward. The sleeves of his shirt were still pushed up from the work earlier, and his forearms looked the way I had not been letting myself notice his forearms looked for weeks.
The veins. The weight of his hand on the wheel.
The way his jaw moved a little, like he was thinking something through.
I didn't realize I was staring until he said, without looking, "What?"
Heat came up the back of my neck.
I pivoted.
"So you've really never been with a woman?"
He blew air out through his nose. The almost version of a laugh.
"Why does that sound so hard to believe?"
"Nothing. It's just—you're—"
Hot, I almost said. You're hot, Cole.
I caught the word in my teeth.
"I mean, why not?"
"I don't have the patience for dating," he said. "Haven't met anyone worth the trouble."
How about me?
The thought went through me before I'd checked it. I closed my eyes for a beat. Opened them. Stared at the road ahead like the road ahead had ever told me anything I wanted to hear.
"What about casual?" I said. "You can't tell me you haven't had options."
"Sure. But casual still asks for more than I want to give."
I sat with that.
I sat with the man I'd been married off to in my head a hundred times these last two weeks.
The man who picked Noah up from school on his off-shifts.
The man who'd kissed me back in a hardware store an hour ago, like he'd been waiting since the lawn at the fire.
I sat with the texture I hadn't had before.
For thirty-four years, this man had been alone on purpose.
He hadn't told me what for. I hadn't yet asked.
"Cole Weston."
"Yeah."
"Are you gay?"
He laughed. Not the almost version this time. A real laugh—short, low, surprised.
"I am very much not gay."
He said not like it didn't have a weight he didn't usually let it carry.
The heat hit my face all the way up.
I made myself look out the window.
"It's just," he said, quieter. "If I get into a relationship, I want to get into something real. Something like Sam and Jamie."
I didn't say anything.
I couldn't think of anything to say that wouldn't land.
He didn't seem to need anything said.
He drove.
The Ashford house sat at the end of a quiet street on a corner lot, the porch holding new boards Cole hadn't yet painted. He pulled into the gravel drive and put the truck in park.
He took the heavier paint cans. I took the bag of nails, the swatch he'd picked, and a small box of brushes from the floor of the cab. He unlocked the front door, held it open, and let me go in first.
The house smelled like fresh wood and turpentine.
A stretch of refinished oak ran from the front door into the living room—work that hadn't been there in the spring.
The walls were primed but not yet painted.
A sawhorse stood in one corner with a level laid across it.
The stairs went up to the second floor on my left.
Somewhere up there was the room Cole had been building for my son.
I didn't let myself go look. I was carrying enough already.
I walked through to the kitchen. The cabinets were new. The counters were unfinished butcher block, sanded smooth. I held the yellow swatch up to the wall by the window where the morning light would land.
It looked the way I'd thought it would.
"That's the one," I said.
"I figured."
He brought in the rest of the supplies. I helped him stack the cans against the wall. We worked in silence—the same silence we'd driven in for the last twenty minutes, the same silence we had worked in over the dishes the night before. It wasn't unfriendly.
When the truck was empty, I stayed in the kitchen for a moment longer.
If I get into a relationship, he had said in the cab, I want to get into something real.
The line had stayed in his voice in my head all the way over here. Like the line about my eyes had stayed in his voice in my head for two days last November, in the bakery before Thanksgiving, when neither of us had known what we were going to be to each other yet.
I had been telling myself, for two weeks, that what we were doing was an arrangement.
The word had been doing work. The word had let me sleep in the same room with him without thinking about what sleeping in the same room with him meant.
The word had let me kiss him in front of Sean an hour ago and tell myself, for an hour afterward, that it had been a performance.
The word had stopped being a word somewhere I hadn't been watching.
What I was wondering now, for the first time, here in his kitchen with a yellow swatch in my hand, was whether it had stopped being a word for him, too.
Whether he had been waiting for me.
Whether something real, something like Sam and Jamie, was the way he had been letting himself think about us when he was not letting himself think about us.
I set the swatch down on the counter.
I went back out to him.