Chapter 15 #2
He nodded and moved to the next one. We worked in silence, side by side, the only sounds the brush strokes, the morning, and Arek’s presence on the step behind us, which I felt the way you feel the sun on your back.
Something about teaching Jules unlocked a door I’d been standing in front of for five years.
This. This was what I’d lost. Not just Boden, though, yes, always Boden.
But the act of showing someone younger how to do something with their hands.
The patience of it. The way you calibrated your instructions to the learner, watching their grip, their posture, their confidence build stroke by stroke.
I’d done this with Boden. Taught him to tie knots, to use a wrench, to cast a fishing line. Small, ordinary lessons that I hadn’t recognized as precious until they were gone.
Jules painted his fourth spindle and glanced at me for feedback. I checked it. Clean, even, no drips. “You’re a natural. Steady hands.”
“Thanks.” A beat. Then, quietly, almost to himself, “This is nice. It’s quiet work.”
“Yeah. Best kind.”
We painted. Side by side. Arek hadn’t moved from the step. I could feel him there, could feel the quality of his attention. I didn’t turn around. If I turned around and saw his face while his son and I painted his porch in the Sunday morning light, something would shift that I wasn’t ready for.
Too late. It was already moving.
Because the truth, the one I’d been circling for weeks, was right here in the paint, the morning, the boy beside me, and the man behind me.
It was in the color I’d so carefully chosen.
It was in my need for him that had dragged me off my mountain.
It was in the stew I’d made, the coffee I’d bought, and the chair I’d built in two days.
In the way my pace slowed on the trail so his breathing could keep up.
It was the fact that I noticed his breathing at all.
It was in my hand on his neck last night, the warmth of his skin under my palm, and the way my hand had known where to go before my brain had a say in it. Different from PTSD—the opposite of it. My body acting without permission, but toward gentleness rather than violence. Toward care. Toward Arek.
I painted a long, smooth stroke along the railing, listened to my own heartbeat, and let the thought finally come, without deflecting it, filing it, or putting up walls.
I had feelings for Arek Jacobson.
Not friendship. Not gratitude. Feelings, the kind that lived in my chest, my skin, the places I’d touched him, and the places I wanted to.
The kind that made me buy coffee and build chairs and drive down a mountain on a Sunday morning to paint a porch because the thought of him in a house that wasn’t cared for was intolerable.
The kind that made me stand in a parking lot and say things I’d never said to anyone because watching him disappear behind his own smile was something I could not bear.
The brush moved, steady and even. My hand didn’t shake. The revelation arrived like morning dawned on the mountain—gradually, inevitably, the light coming up in increments until you realized the darkness was gone and you could see.
I had feelings for a man. For this man. And I didn’t have a word for what that made me, but it didn’t matter.
The fact was that Arek Jacobson had walked into my life through a stuck bell in a grocery store.
He had sat on my porch, had listened to me and had given in return, had held my arm while I got stitches and when I sent a text to my ex-wife, and somewhere in the middle of all that, something had changed.
The compass needle that had been adjusting and spinning, refusing to settle, had found its bearing, and it was pointing at the man sitting on the step behind me, drinking coffee in his sweatpants with his hair a mess.
It was pointing at Arek. It had been pointing at Arek for a while now. I’d just been too stubborn to read it.
“Mr. Heald?” Jules’s voice, careful. “I think I went too thick on this one.”
I looked at the spindle. A small drip was forming at the base. “Catch it with the brush. Upward stroke, light pressure. There. Good.”
“Thanks.”
We kept painting. Inside the house, Kace was singing something off-key. Arek called out for him to keep it down, which made Kace sing louder. Jules shook his head with the exasperated fondness of a brother who’d made peace with the chaos.
I was forming a bond with a family that wasn’t mine.
No, I had feelings for Arek, and his family was part of him, inseparable from the person he was.
You couldn’t be with Arek without appreciating the noise of Kace and the quiet of Jules and the messy kitchen and the basketball games and the books on every surface and the house that smelled like home.
It was a package deal, and I wanted the whole package with an intensity that should’ve terrified me.
Well, to be fair, it did terrify me. Not because Arek was a man. That part, strangely, was the least complicated. I’d spent twenty years in the Army around men I’d have died for, men I’d loved with a ferocity that had no name, and the line between that and this was thinner than I would’ve thought.
My feelings for Arek were built on the same foundation of loyalty, trust, and the bone-deep recognition of someone who made you better.
Yes, with an added dimension that was physical, romantic, and new, but not foreign.
Not wrong. Just…expanded. Like a room I’d always lived in that turned out to have a door I’d never opened.
What terrified me was the rest of it. The damage I carried.
The episodes that turned me into someone else in the dark.
The knowledge that getting close to me was a risk no one should take.
If I reached for Arek, I was asking him to take that risk.
Asking him to bring that risk into a house with two boys who’d already survived more than any kid should have to.
But I was tired of the mountain. Tired of the silence.
Tired of the single mug and the single chair and the cabin occupied by one.
And the man on the step behind me had looked at me last night on those bleachers with eyes that held nothing back, and I’d told him he mattered, and I’d meant it with every cell in my body, and I couldn’t un-mean it now.
I finished the section I was working on and set the brush across the paint can. “Take a break?” I asked Jules.
He set his brush down with care. “Okay.”
Jules disappeared inside, and I turned around. Arek was on the step with his legs stretched out and paint on his cheekbone. A small smear of warm slate gray, probably from when he’d grazed his face after touching the railing earlier, before I’d banished him to the step.
“You’ve got paint on your face,” I said.
“Where?”
I should’ve pointed. I should’ve indicated his left cheek and let him clean it himself.
Instead, I stepped forward and wiped it with my thumb.
His cheekbone under the pad of my thumb.
Warm skin, a faint roughness of stubble near the edge, the paint smearing before it came away.
My hand, steady as it had been on the brush all morning, on his face.
On Arek’s face. Two inches from his mouth.
Time thickened. The morning sounds went dense and slow: the church bell’s echo, a car in the distance, Kace’s muffled singing inside.
Arek’s eyes, green and wide and absolutely still, looked up at me from the step.
My thumb on his cheekbone, the paint gone now, but my hand not moving because my hand had decided, independently and without authorization, that it was staying.
A half-second. Maybe a full one. The length of a heartbeat.
Then I pulled back, wiping my thumb on my jeans. “Got it.”
“Thanks,” Arek said. His voice was as rough as mine.
Jules came back out, and I picked up the brush and went back to work, even though my heart hammered against my ribs. The compass needle held steady, and I accepted it. I was done fighting it. Whatever came next, I’d face it with eyes wide open.
By lunch time, the first coat was done. The porch looked better than it had in years, the warm gray giving the old craftsman back some of its dignity. Jules had done half the spindles himself and they looked good. Better than good.
“Nice work,” I told him.
“Thanks for showing me.” He paused. “We could do the second coat next weekend, maybe?”
Next weekend. A plan. “Yeah, next weekend works.”
Jules nodded and went inside with his book. Kace appeared long enough to declare the new color “sick”—which I gathered was approval—and vanished again.
Arek walked me to the truck. “Thank you, Mac. For the porch. And for Jules. He doesn’t… He doesn’t let many people in.”
“He’s a good kid. Reminds me of someone.”
“Who?”
I looked at him. “Me.”
Something moved across Arek’s face, complex and layered. He opened his mouth, then closed it, and nodded.
I drove up the mountain with the smell of paint on my hands, Arek’s skin still imprinted on my thumb, and the memory of green eyes looking up at me from a porch step. I let myself feel all of it. The fear, the want, the grief, the hope. Everything at once.
The compass needle held steady.
And for the first time in twelve years, so did I.