Chapter 7
September ended, October was more than halfway gone, and she was still here.
Noah didn’t really know what to do about that.
He kept waiting for her to say something. To indicate that she knew that it was time she got going. To start acting restless and talking about the road, because he knew she’d loved traveling around out there. He’d assumed it was only a matter of time before she started planning her next stop.
But that never seemed to happen.
“What’s next in your itinerary?” he asked one morning. She’d turned up in the diner for breakfast, at the tail end of the rush, which meant he could sit and have a cup of coffee with her once the place cleared out.
They’d done this so often now that he barely paid attention to the way the men were always watching. Or maybe they’d stopped, by this point. After all, there was nothing new here. There was nothing to tell their little jokes about.
“What itinerary?” she asked, her blue eyes wide and open and locked to his.
There were all kinds of things that he found confounding about Raemy Miller.
Like the fact that she gave him her full attention, always.
She had a cell phone, of course, like everyone.
His was in his back pocket most of the time and he turned off everything that he could, to keep it from bothering him, yet still notifications came through.
When Raemy was sitting alone, he would see her look at it sometimes, scrolling through whatever was on her screen.
But mostly she left it face down on the table.
And when he was sitting with her, she gave him her attention instead, unlike almost every other person he knew.
As if she wanted to drink in every single thing he said.
When she’d first come here, he’d thought that it was just because she wanted to take his measure and see if she thought the wrong man had died over there, the way he certainly did.
But now it had been weeks. Six weeks, if he wasn’t mistaken, and that meant November wasn’t far away. Everything had gone Halloween in town, and—against his wishes, like every year—the men had once again thrown up Halloween decorations all over the diner.
The cheesiest and most obnoxious Halloween decorations possible.
Raemy should have been somewhere far away from here by now. Santa Fe. Roanoke. Disney World. Instead, she was still here in tiny little Wild Rose Point.
And she was still gazing at him with her absolute full attention.
“What other places are on your list?” he asked her, because he was nothing if not determined to always, always belabor a point. “I thought you were exploring the whole country.”
“I’ve already explored a whole lot of the country,” she replied, and another thing about her was that she was so disarming.
Almost anyone else would immediately bristle and demand to know why he was asking that and did he want her to go…
It occurred to Noah that maybe that was exactly what he’d wanted her to do.
“And the really cool thing is that there’s still so much more to explore.
Why? Where would you go if you could go anywhere? ”
That wasn’t what he meant. And he couldn’t tell if she knew that wasn’t what he meant, or if she was simply answering him honestly.
There were a lot of things he couldn’t tell when it came to Raemy.
Like, as an example he plucked from nowhere, what she wanted from him.
Everything between them was actually better than it had been that very first night, and that should not have been possible. It kept getting better.
Every touch. Every kiss. Each one putting the one before to shame.
He spent every night with her despite the fact he kept telling himself that he had to pull back. That he had to create some space. He couldn’t sleep with her every single night and not expect her to catch some feelings, could he? That wasn’t fair.
And he wanted no feelings at all to be caught. He wanted feelings to sail above them and out into the ocean, with no catching whatsoever.
But that was another thing about Raemy. She was so herself, always. She was bright and funny. She was direct. She said things that he would never have said, and certainly not so openly, and he had a mouth on him that he’d earned in the Marines.
Raemy never seemed embarrassed, about anything.
Intensity, awkwardness, misunderstandings.
She was completely unselfconscious in all things, as far as he could tell.
Not in that way that some people were, so deliberately chill that it was clear they were performing a caricature. Raemy wasn’t like that.
She was just the most open person he’d ever met.
As far as he could tell, she’d never met a stranger. And more and more, locals would come into the diner to deliver full soliloquies and monologues to him and all the men and anyone who would listen about how wonderful she was. As if he didn’t know that.
More than a few of them were no doubt wondering why she was wasting her time on a grumpy bastard like him—because everyone in Wild Rose Point seemed to know entirely too much about Noah’s personal life, which was maybe easy as he’d never really had one to point to before—but he was glad no one actually asked him that outright. Because it wasn’t like he could answer.
He had no idea.
Tonight, he told himself every night. Tonight would be the night that he went back to his house, slept in his own bed, recalibrated, and got his fool head on straight again.
But that never happened.
This particular night, he found himself walking back to the inn with her even though it was raining outside, and cold.
She’d wanted to go and see a little bit of live music in the Tufted Puffin.
Raemy, naturally, somehow knew all the musicians in the band, because they were local.
She had told him, with great seriousness, that she’d been looking forward to listening to them, because she’d seen them play somewhere else.
Somewhere here, in Wild Rose Point.
Because she was apparently having a life that was all hers, right here in this town that was his, but without necessarily involving him.
A lot like the only person without boundaries or parameters is you, buddy, he told himself, harshly.
Something to think about as they trudged toward her hotel room.
Anyone would have expected that even sunshiny Raemy would complain about the wet, and the rain slapping into them, and the way the ocean made everything colder and more raw.
Noah had been expecting her to start finding the glumness of the weather a bit much, the way most people did.
Everyone loved the beach, but not everyone could handle the ten months of wet gray.
But instead, Raemy was wearing those pink rainboots of hers again. She was jumping in puddles to make them splash, and laughed at him when all he could seem to do was frown at her shenanigans.
“Careful,” she warned sweetly, when he scowled at her after she deliberately stamped in a puddle so that it would splash him.
“Your face might freeze that way. Some people think it already has. Did you know that?” His scowl deepened.
Her smile widened. “I think there’s a bet going in town as to when that scowl will take root, and you’ll be unable to look in a mirror ever again.
It’ll just be a scowly-faced man looking back at you.
” She shook her head. “The children will tell stories about you.”
“Good,” he growled at her. “I hope they do. I hope they’re terrified.”
“You need to grow some more grass in front of the diner,” she suggested, looking suspiciously innocent, “so you can tell everyone to get off of it.”
It wasn’t lost on him that she liked ribbing him almost as much as the men did.
Except when she did it, she was somehow so cute that he ended up wrapping his arm around her shoulders.
Then letting it slide so that really she was almost in a headlock—laughing so hard that she kept snorting, which only made her laugh harder—so he could steer her down the street into her hotel at last.
Where, once again, it was like everything exploded the moment they were alone.
The way it always did. The way he was starting to think it always would.
It was as if they’d never done this before. They were tearing off each other’s clothes. Peeling back the layers so they could get mouths and hands on each other.
So they could revel in the heat, the joy.
And their skin was damp and cold as they came together, there on that bed, but they heated up fast.
It wasn’t until they were both panting, spent, and dazed straight through, that he noticed the state of her room.
“You’re packed,” he said, and he didn’t really want to examine the way everything in him tumbled south, when this was what he’d wanted. Wasn’t it? “What are all these boxes?”
It seemed to take her a good long while to sit up and look around, as if she had no idea what was happening in her own bedroom. Or maybe she was that dazed from how many times he’d made her scream, something he normally took pride in, but this was different.
This was crawling right beneath his skin like some kind of poison.
“Oh,” was all she said. Then she snuggled back into his side, where he pretended she didn’t fit perfectly. “Those are just the things I had in storage.”
“Storage?” The nearest storage facility was a ways down the coast. Why would she have things stored there?
Raemy yawned. “Back in Missouri. When I went on my trip, I rented out my house and I put all my things in a storage facility. I had them ship it all out to me.”
Something cold and uneasy moved in him then. “Why would you do that?”
She clearly heard that tone, then. He felt her get significantly less soft and boneless against him. Then she moved, propping herself up on one elbow, and shoving all of her hair back out of her face.
“Why do you think I did that?” she asked. But she didn’t wait for him to answer. “You know I love it here, Noah.”
And something in him was spinning wild, gathering steam, and seeming to cut into him every time it turned.
He spent every day waiting for her to announce that she was leaving. Because it had to be soon. It had to be coming. He was prepared to lose her—that was what he told himself.
Because he deserved it, that was for sure.
And if he wasn’t entirely sure how he was going to live without all this brightness he was used to now, that was a problem for later. For the real winter, dark and gloomy and endless.
After she left. After this was done.
That meant he really had to make sure that he was understanding what the hell she was saying. “Are you...?”
Noah couldn’t finish that question. Because he wasn’t even sure what he was asking. Or maybe, if he was being fully honest, he did know what he was asking, but what he really wanted to avoid was her answer.
“Did I not tell you this?” Raemy wrinkled up her nose in that way that had bothered him since she appeared in his diner.
It was too cute. It was too disarming, when obviously it was one of her most potent weapons and really should have been treated as such.
“I meant to tell you. It all happened fast. I decided I wanted to look at rentals and then one just fell in my lap. I was talking to the ladies at the desk here and one of them has a little cottage, just here on the beach. So I’m moving in. ”
Noah stared back at her. He knew he should say something, but he felt... stricken. Like he was some kind of stone statue.
Like he might never move a muscle again.
She blinked. “Do you not know the cottage I’m talking about?
It’s the one with all those roses. It’s very cute.
” She waved her hand toward the boxes. “I’ll have to go through what I have, because I don’t really remember, but I’m thinking I’ll have to throw out anything that isn’t sufficiently beachy enough.
I mean, who gets to live on a beach? I would be selling myself short if I didn’t lean into all the sea glass ornaments, blue and white furnishings, and sand dollar motifs available, don’t you think? ”
His heart was pounding so hard he was a little bit afraid it might burst. Straight out of his chest like a monster in one of those movies Tank loved so much, because he claimed it was soothing to see fictional people die horribly.
Not that this was the time to explore his friend’s psychological issues.
“Raemy,” he managed to say, biting her name out, and sitting up so there could be no mistake. “You can’t be serious.”
“I signed the lease this afternoon.” Her brows went up. “Maybe you don’t consider that serious, but I do. There are now legal penalties if I change my mind. Which I’m not going to do. Because as I’ve told you before, I love it here.”
“You can’t.” He said it sharp and hard.
But Raemy, being Raemy, didn’t react to that the way anyone else would have. She didn’t recoil, or seem remotely intimidated. Or snap right back at him the way he probably would have if their positions were reversed here.
“Not only can I, I did,” she replied, and smiled at him.
Smiled at him. At a time like this.
“You can’t live here, Raemy,” he threw at her. “This can’t be permanent. You’re leaving. That’s the only reason—”
“Oh,” she said. And Noah noticed, through the haze of panic inside him, that she didn’t seem particularly surprised.
Her voice was quiet, but not hurt. “Is that what’s been happening?
I guess that makes sense. I knew there was no possible way that you were this okay with it. You thought it was temporary.”
“It is temporary,” he retorted, that panic inside him picking up weight and force. “It’s never been anything but temporary.” He threw his hand out at all the boxes. “You have to pack these in your car and leave. You can’t stay here. That’s the only thing that makes sense.”
Raemy only smiled at him. There was a look in her eyes that he wasn’t sure he liked, particularly because it seemed to stick a little too hard to him. Like she was rearranging things inside of him with all of that blue, and he hated it. Not that it stopped her.
If anything, her eyes looked bluer than ever. And his chest ached so much he was starting to think that she, herself, was a mortal wound.
Then, worse still, she leaned forward and kissed him. On his cheek.
“No,” she said. “I’m not leaving. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t sound sorry,” was the only thing he could come up with, as a fully grown man who had served in the goddamned Marines for twelve years. Not a whiny kid.
And yet.
“Because I’m not sorry about staying,” she agreed, and if he wasn’t mistaken, her smile only got more fond. She was killing him. “I’m sorry that you can’t be as happy about it as I am, that’s all.”
And then she rolled over, got out of the bed, and wandered off towards the shower like she hadn’t heard a single word he’d said.
Or had no intention of listening to him, even if she had.
Noah didn’t know which was worse.