Chapter 39
BECK
“What time you heading out?”
Cole sat at the kitchen island, drinking coffee, looking every bit like the history professor from Columbia that he was.
“About an hour.”
“You should stay. Classes are over for the semester, right?”
“Technically, yes. But I have some things to wrap up. I’m also co-authoring a paper and am meeting with a colleague about it Wednesday morning. It’s a big one, so I want to be there in person.”
“Any word on tenure?”
Making tenure at an Ivy League school, like his father, had been Cole’s goal as long as I could remember.
His family had moved from Cedar Falls to New Haven when we were twelve when his dad was offered a job at Yale.
Not long after that, Cole started talking about doing the same when the rest of us were still toilet papering houses on Halloween.
I poured myself a coffee.
“Not yet,” he said, tapping his mug. “But the committee’s reviewing my file this summer. This paper could tip the scales.”
“Do you ever wish you could stay?”
We’d asked him before. It was a question Cole typically evaded.
He rubbed the back of his neck. “Sometimes I wonder what it would’ve been like if I’d stayed here. Opened a history tour business or something ridiculous like that. But then I remember I’m two publications away from tenure…” He trailed off.
Someone must have spiked his coffee. It was the most I’d gotten from him in a long time, and it felt… important.
“Why is a history tour business ridiculous?”
He pushed his glasses up, as if needing to see to answer.
“In a place like Cedar Falls?”
“Or anywhere.”
Cole shrugged. “I don’t have any desire to move… anywhere.”
“But you would come back here?” I pressed.
Sighing, as if the conversation bored him, even though that was just one of his tactics that signaled he was uncomfortable with the conversation, he didn’t answer.
That was more like it.
For a second I thought I’d fallen down the rabbit hole and would see a tiny door appear any second. Maybe I was the one whose coffee was spiked. After last night, I didn’t know up from down.
“I get why people move out. But for me, this town has everything I could need,” I pitched. “The guys. Good beer. Good fishing. Good place to raise a family.”
Cole’s head popped up.
“What the hell has gotten into you?”
It was true that raising a family had never really been on my radar.
“Mae,” I said. “This is going to sound like some Hallmark movie—”
“Oh, man, you’ve got the wrong guy to spill your guts to.”
I forged ahead, not giving a shit if Cole wanted to hear it or not. “But I want to be a better man for her. That there’s any possibility to be with her… she’s just worth it.”
He sighed, loudly.
“What the hell do I know?” he said finally. “Mason and Parker both seem happy.”
“They are happy,” I confirmed. I should know, living at the inn. Although Parker spent less time here now that he was with Delaney, and the renovations were almost done.
Cole stood and headed to the coffee pot, pouring it. Black. Like his soul.
I chuckled.
“What?” he demanded, his sport coat and crisp shirt so very… Cole.
“I was just thinking your coffee is black like your soul.”
“Thanks.”
Chuckling, I tried again. “Or what you want everyone around you to believe, anyway. Though for the life of me, I don’t know why. Let other people see the fun Cole who would give his life for his friend.”
Literally. Not figuratively. I should know.
“I’m good.”
Biting back a smile, I sipped my coffee, thinking about… what else? Mae. And lunch. What she would say. What I would say.
“I’m not trying to be an asshole about the whole Mae thing,” he said, quite unexpectedly.
“No? Could have fooled me.”
“You’re looking at me like I said Julius Caesar destroyed the Library of Alexandria.”
Cole’s lips hinted at a smile, but then apparently changed their mind.
“My parents were happy.”
He said it so quietly, I almost didn’t hear him. Cole stared into his coffee mug.
“Growing up, I can remember murmured voices when I went to bed. They talked, went to dinner, took me to the park. I don’t know when it happened, exactly, but sometime between middle school and when I went to college, it just…
eroded. They don’t sleep in the same room.
I don’t even think they like each other.
” He looked up. “The idea of a bachelor pact, for me, was a reminder not to repeat their mistake.”
I was pretty sure Cole had just used up his monthly allotment of words. At least, ones on a serious topic, about himself.
“I get it. Look at mine. They’re a total shitshow. I agreed, we all did, for a reason. Our own reasons. But then we grew up.” I grinned. “Some of us more recently. And took the blinders off to see… some relationships work. Some marriages work.”
“And you think you and Mae would be one of them?”
I was about to say “yes” but paused. I would love that woman until the day I died. And would try like hell to make her happy. But could she be? Living here?
“What the hell do I know?” I echoed his earlier question.
“Apparently not who destroyed the Library of Alexandria.”
“It wasn’t Julius Caesar.” But now I doubted my memory. “Right?”
“Right. It’s a common misconception. The most widely believed cause was the destruction of the Serapeum and the actions of Coptic Christian Archbishop Theophilus.”
Cole’s master’s thesis was on the subject, so I knew way more than I wanted to about the topic. But before he began nerding out on me, I stopped him.
“Appreciate the history lesson, but I don’t have learning about Archbishop Theophilus on my to-do list today.”
“No?”
“No,” I said emphatically, eliciting a smile from him.
“Too bad. It was going to be a thrilling monologue.” He smirked. “Despite what you think, I hope you don’t get destroyed trying to work things out with Mae.”
“Thanks. But that might be the worst pep talk in history.”
Hopefully, it wasn’t a sign of things to come.