Chapter 5 #2
There was nothing in his tone to suggest she should read more into it.
Which made the gesture sharper, somehow, than if he'd offered it with warmth.
He was helping because the house needed it.
Because he was the kind of man who did what needed doing even when history made the doing complicated, and who did not require the person asking to perform gratitude or guilt or any of the other currencies Grant would have expected in exchange.
The drive back was short and quiet. Jaxon followed in his truck, keeping enough distance that she could not mistake it for closeness. When they reached the house he parked behind her and got out with the flashlight and a small black tool bag.
Adelaide led him up the path, suddenly aware of the state of the place in a way she hadn't been when she was the only one seeing it. The overgrown bushes. The chipped paint on the blue door. The faint neglect clinging to everything she had once decided to leave behind.
The dimness seemed more pronounced now that she'd brought someone else into it.
Jaxon paused just beyond the threshold, his gaze moving once over the front hall, the staircase.
His expression didn't change, but she could feel the weight of his seeing it, this house that had contained versions of both of them years ago.
He had stood in this hallway at seventeen, leaning against the banister while she came down the stairs, and her mother had liked him in the immediate, uncomplicated way she liked people who showed up when they said they would, and didn't need to be told twice to take their boots off at the door.
The memory surfaced and Adelaide pushed it aside, gesturing toward the back of the house.
"The panel's in the mudroom."
He followed her down the hall without comment, the flashlight cutting a clean path through the dimness. At the panel, Jaxon crouched and set the tool bag beside him and went to work. He checked the breakers first, then the line, then unscrewed the plate with quick, efficient movements.
Adelaide stood a few feet back with her arms folded, trying not to hover and equally unable to leave.
She watched his hands despite herself. They were broader than she remembered, rougher too, marked by the kind of work that left permanent evidence.
She thought of those hands pulling her onto the tailgate of his truck at the Fourth of July bonfire the summer she turned twenty-two, the casual strength of it, the way he'd handed her a beer and sat beside her, said nothing for ten full minutes because he understood that sometimes company didn't require conversation.
But that wasn't the memory her body was reaching for, standing behind him in the dim mudroom with his hands moving inside the panel box.
The memory her body wanted was later that same night.
The bonfire had burned down to embers and the crowd had thinned and they'd driven back to his uncle's place in the truck with the windows down.
His uncle was away for the weekend. The house was empty.
She'd been wearing his flannel shirt over her tank top because the night had cooled, and when they got inside he'd turned on one lamp in the living room, she'd sat on the arm of the couch.
He'd stood in front of her and slid his hands beneath the flannel, his palms flat against her waist, and the contact had sent a current through her so immediate and so total that her breath had left her in a sound she hadn't planned to make.
He'd pulled the flannel off her shoulders and kissed the curve of her neck. She'd wrapped her legs around him and pulled him closer, and they'd moved from the couch to the floor because the bedroom felt too far away and the wanting had gone past the point where geography mattered.
She remembered the floor. The braided rug beneath her back.
The lamp throwing amber light across his shoulders.
The way he'd pushed her tank top up and kissed her stomach, slowly, his mouth tracing a line from her navel to the edge of her shorts, and the slowness had been its own kind of heat, unhurried and deliberate, his hands holding her hips steady while his mouth took its time.
She remembered the sound she'd made when he finally touched her where she needed him to, a sound that had nothing composed in it.
She remembered pulling him up to her and feeling him hard against her thigh, reaching between them and hearing his breath catch, that low, broken intake that meant he was close to the edge of his control.
She remembered saying now, and meaning it, and the way he'd looked at her before he pushed inside, his eyes on hers, that pale blue gone dark in the lamplight, checking, always checking, even when his body was shaking with the effort of holding back.
He had moved slowly at first. Then not slowly.
She remembered the sound of them together in the empty house, the creak of the floorboards and his breathing and hers.
She remembered coming apart beneath him with her nails in his back and her face pressed against his shoulder, and the way he'd followed her over the edge a moment later, and the sound he'd made, raw and unguarded, and afterward the two of them lying on the braided rug with their legs tangled and their breathing ragged and the lamp still burning and the whole house quiet around them.
She'd put her hand on his chest and felt his heart hammering and he'd turned his head and kissed her temple and said, "Stay," and she'd said, "I'm right here," and he'd said, "No.
I mean stay. Don't leave Clarington. Stay with me.
" And she had lain there in the golden light with his heartbeat slowing beneath her palm and known, already, that she was going to leave anyway.
Adelaide blinked. The mudroom came back. The flashlight beam. The sound of Jaxon's wrench against metal. His hands, those same hands, broader now and rougher, working inside the panel box with a competence that made her chest ache for reasons she could not afford to examine in his presence.
"It's old," he said, pulling her back into the present.
"I gathered that."
His mouth shifted. Not a smile, but the architecture of one. "That's not the problem. The connection's loose. Looks like it's been that way a while."
He worked in silence for another minute, then he tightened the last screw and pushed the breaker back into place, and the house came awake all at once.
The overhead light in the mudroom blinked on.
The refrigerator resumed its hum in the kitchen.
The restored sound of ordinary function moved through the house like breath returning to a body that had been holding it too long.
Adelaide let out a breath of her own. "Thank you."
Jaxon rose, wiping his hands on a rag from the back pocket of his jeans. "You'll probably need the whole panel replaced before long." This time the corner of his mouth lifted, briefly enough that she might have imagined it. "You always did wait until things were fully broken."
The words were light on the surface. Underneath they carried the weight of a decade, and they both knew it.
Adelaide looked at him with the gratitude in her chest already tangling with the sharper awareness that nothing between them could remain entirely practical for long.
"That sounds like more than home repair advice. "
Jaxon met her gaze, held it, then looked away first, toward the open back door where the late afternoon light had begun to lean gold at the edges. "Maybe it is."
The quiet that followed was not comfortable, but it was not empty either. It held too much in suspension: the repaired power, the house around them, the years neither of them could step around cleanly no matter how ordinary the task that had brought him here.
Adelaide became aware, suddenly and uncomfortably, of how near he was. Near enough that the air between them carried the charge of proximity that has been earned by history and not yet discharged by resolution.
"You didn't have to come yourself," she said.
He bent to pick up the flashlight and tool bag. "If it goes out again, call the store. I'll send someone."
The distinction did not escape either of them. I'll send someone. Not I'll come. A boundary drawn, and Adelaide felt it land with more weight than a refusal would have, because it wasn't a refusal. It was a man who had already been left once deciding how close he was willing to stand this time.
"Okay," she said.
Jaxon moved toward the front door, and she followed him through the hall that was brighter now, more ordinary, and therefore more exposed.
At the threshold he stopped and turned back.
"Take care of the house," he said, and the words sounded practical in the way that everything Jaxon said sounded practical until you listened to what he wasn't saying.
Adelaide held his gaze. "I'm trying."
Trying was all she had. She wasn't sure it was enough. Standing in this doorway with the light returning and his presence already withdrawing was harder than she'd expected it to be.
Jaxon looked away from her, nodded once, and stepped out into the fading afternoon.