Chapter 8 #2
John is moving toward the back door. “I was going to check the generator. Since it kicked in, looks like it’s working.
” His eyes sweep the room. He rights Monster’s food bowl before his gaze lands on me.
“Hey, you okay? Shit, you’re not okay.” He walks over and wraps his arms around me, and I am immediately more than okay, and the longer he holds me, I’m pushing way past more than okay.
I lean into his warm, hard chest and breathe until he pulls away from me and meets my eyes. “What was that? Why were you shaking?”
“I’m embarrassed to admit that I’m a grown adult who’s afraid of the dark,” I say softly.
It’s true. After the accident, my sleepwalking and night terrors and my deathly fear of the dark—which I had thought I had outgrown like any respectable adult—kicked in again.
And every time I attempt to turn the bedroom light off when I’m going to bed, I hyperventilate until I have to get back up and stumble to the light and turn it back on.
“Let’s get this cottage lit up, then. Just in case the generator doesn’t stay on, you got any flashlights, more candles, and matches? We’ll make this place brighter than the sun.”
“A whole drawer full.” I reach over and open one of the cabinet drawers, looking away from his gaze.
He rummages around, then tosses me a pack of matches. “Maybe you should light those candles now.”
I surreptitiously watch him checking the flashlights. I’m not even going to attempt to stand and help. I might flop right down onto the floor. My legs are weak from my panic attack and swoony from the hug and his casual, sweet kindness.
He turns to me, catching me staring. “You were going to say something before the lights went out.”
“Um… was I?”
“We were talking about horse camp.”
“Oh.” I blink at the wall, trying to come up with anything.
Anything. “I was going to ask you…” I squelch a sigh of frustration.
The lie bank is depleted. No sense kicking at the topic and having something fly out.
There must have been, at the very least, one other Lucky Clover Ranch in existence twenty years ago.
Who know? Maybe hundreds. And at one of those other Lucky Clover Ranches that ran an overnight equine camp for kids, there might have been another John with red hair and light blue eyes and big hands and feet he still hadn’t completely grown into as well.
Because what are the odds that my first crush and first very awkward kiss is right here, sitting in the cottage with me after twenty years? One in a kajillion?
“I honestly have no idea what I was going to say,” I lie because evidently, there was one lie left.
He walks over to the coffeepot and pours himself a mug while my brain continues to whir.
But what if it was his family’s ranch? What if we met before?
What if he was my crush? I doubt I left an imprint on his memory, despite him being indelibly stamped onto my brain.
Bringing it up—however I did so—would be a quagmire of questions and lies I don’t want to wade through.
“It’s decaf,” I tell him. “Hope you don’t mind.”
He pulls out another coffee mug from the cabinet, fills it with coffee. “Come here.” I follow him out the front door. He nods to the front porch swing. “The wind isn’t blowing the rain this way. Sit, Tiny. Let’s watch the lightning.”
“Are you sure we’re completely safe here?” I squint out at the trees.
“We’re never completely safe anywhere.”
“Wow. That’s profound.”
“Thank you.”
He sits on the swing, and I move around the porch, lighting the candles on the little marble stool by the swing and the two side tables flanking the round, wicker barrel chairs.
I curl up on the other side of the swing, cradling my mug in my lap.
A burst of lightning flashes. John counts aloud. “One, two, three, four, five.” Thunder booms.
“It’s five miles away. Past the old Grader homestead.”
I remember teaching Trudi, when she was learning how to count, “When the lightning flashes, you count aloud until the thunder booms. That’s how many miles away the lightning is.” And we’d count together.
Another flash of lightning. It illuminates him. He’s looking at me, searching my face.
“What are you thinking?” he asks. “You look like you’re a million miles away.”
Monster scratches on the door, and I let him out to join us, silently thanking him for the disruption. Monster stares out at the night, then thumps to the floor next to the swing and stretches out.
“I was looking at your sketches on the coffee table,” John says.
I wince. “Hopefully not too closely. I just started sketching again after… after many years. It forces me to slow down and see details I would normally miss. I spend way too much time out here on the front porch sketching the birds or wild animals that are wandering past.”
“Has Gigi visited you yet?” he asks me.
“You, Ned, and Danni have been my only visitors.”
“Gigi may not have formally introduced herself. She doesn’t have the best manners. She’s a Florida Black bear.”
I laugh. “Oh! That’s Gigi. Yes, Monster and I saw her a couple nights ago. From the window, thankfully. She knocked over my trash can, pushed it all the way over to the tree there, and banged it up. The lock held, though. Monster barked his head off, but Gigi didn’t seem to mind.”
We sit in comfortable silence, the candles gently flickering while the rain taps out a steady rhythm on the tin roof of the porch.
I could get used to this. Which means, I should kick him out now.
I think of what Cat would tell me. Enjoy each small, good thing.
The sound of the rain.
The cool air after a hot day.
The way his eyes are roaming down your legs because he doesn’t think you’re looking.
He catches me catching him. “I’m trying to behave,” he says, “but I’m having a hell of a time concentrating with your legs right there.”
I crack a smile, and he grins.
“You should do that more often.”
“Look at your legs? Okay.”
“No. Smile. Like that. Your whole face lights up.”
“I don’t want people thinking I’m too nice.”
“I get that.” I shift in my seat so I’m facing him, making sure my legs are still stretched out, so he can enjoy them. Might as well give him a good, small thing as well. “I called you an ass this morning.”
“I remember that. You going to call me one again for looking at your legs?”
“No. I was just thinking. Either you changed a lot between this morning and right now, or… I was wrong.”
“I like a woman who can admit when she’s wrong.”
I roll my eyes, biting off a smile.
“There’s a chance… at some point during our interaction this morning, I acted like a jerk.”
I stretch my legs and stand. “Because I am sure that was very hard for you to admit, I’m going to share something with you, and it’s a really big deal. Wait right there.”
I run to the bathroom, lock the door and stare at myself in the mirror.
My hair is listlessly hugging my scalp, punishing me for smashing it under a hat for most of the day.
The concealer I so meticulously applied has disappeared, the bruises on my face obvious.
I dab on more concealer, then wilt against the counter. What am I doing?
I don’t even know him. It’s not like this is a date.
For all I know, Dot was wrong and he’s got a girlfriend.
But he doesn’t seem like the kind of man who would be here with me, sitting on the porch in a rainstorm, staring at another woman’s legs, while a girlfriend is waiting for him at home.
I dab on some more concealer, then swipe most of it back off again with a piece of toilet paper.
What’s the point? He’s already seen the bruising.
I might as well continue to look like a sick raccoon.
A sad, sick raccoon. I think about how he was looking at me, searching my face.
But not with pity. Maybe he’s trying to figure out what’s wrong, but he’s being too considerate to ask.
Maybe he doesn’t know why I have bruises on my face or why I’m here by myself, but he’s got to see that whatever is going on with me is probably not an ideal situation.
He’ll probably run fast and far the second it stops raining.
When I toss the piece of toilet paper in the trash, my eyes catch on the pregnancy test sitting on the bottom of the trash can. In full view, for anyone who has been in the bathroom to see.
I plop down on the toilet and cover my face with my hands and pray that John didn’t see it.