12. Jessica #2
It was after eight by the time the planning session wrapped, and the community hall parking lot had emptied out one car at a time until it was just my Audi and Hunter's truck under the lot lights and the hum of the highway in the distance.
I was loading boxes into my car. Hunter was helping because Hunter always helped.
He had shown up an hour before the session to set up chairs, and he had stayed an hour after to stack them against the wall and sweep the floor without being asked, and now he was carrying boxes for me, two to my one, and not commenting on the ratio.
The evening air was warm, and the moths were circling the lot lights, and the only sounds were our footsteps on the asphalt. My arms were burning, and I knew his weren’t. The unfairness of his build was a subject I had addressed privately and at length and wasn't raising in public.
We reached for the same box.
Our hands collided on the cardboard. His fingers covered mine — warm, rough, the calluses pressing into the soft skin between my knuckles. The contact was sudden and full, and I looked up.
He was right there.
Close. Closer than the arrangement required.
Closer than anything fake justified. The parking lot light was behind him, and his face was half in shadow and half lit gold.
His eyes were on mine, and they weren’t steady.
For the first time since I'd been home — since I knew him, really — Hunter Blackwood's eyes were not steady. Something was moving behind them — dark and present and completely unguarded, a heat he’d never let me see, directed at me with an intensity that emptied my lungs.
My hand was still on the box. His hand was still on mine. His thumb shifted — one movement across my knuckle, slow, deliberate — and the contact sent a current up my arm and into my belly. My lips parted on an exhale I couldn't control.
His gaze dropped to my mouth — just for a second, a flicker, but I caught it, and my whole body went liquid. His jaw was tight, and a muscle jumped in his cheek. Restraint.
The distance between his mouth and mine was shrinking.
Neither of us was stopping it. It was gravity — the pull, the tilt, the whole universe narrowing to the space between his bottom lip and mine.
My fingers curled against the cardboard.
His breath touched my mouth — warm, close, the ghost of contact.
He stepped back.
One step. Clean. Decisive. His hand lifted off mine, and my hand sat on the box alone and empty and aching.
He picked up the box with both hands. Put it in my car. Closed the trunk. His jaw was set. His shoulders were rigid. He wasn't looking at me.
"Drive safe, Jess.” His voice wasn't safe. His voice was low and rough and frayed at the edges, and the three words carried the weight of everything he'd just pulled himself back from.
I took a step towards him. “Hunt —"
"Drive safe."
I got in the car. Started the engine. My hands were shaking on the wheel.
I pulled out of the lot, and his shape got smaller in the rearview mirror — standing under the parking lot light, hands at his sides, not moving, watching me leave.
The posture of a man holding himself very, very still because the alternative was moving toward something he'd decided he couldn't have.
The apartment was dark when I let myself in, and I left it dark.
I made a coffee and stood with my back against the kitchen wall.
My eyes closed, the near-miss was still on my skin.
Hunter’s fingers on mine, his breath on my mouth, the unsteady unguarded thing in his eyes that wasn't fake and wasn't part of any arrangement. My hand was still tingling where his thumb had crossed my knuckle. My mouth was still aching for the kiss that hadn’t happened.
The whole length of me was vibrating at the frequency of the almost.
I opened my eyes. The streetlight had laid its stripe across the counter the way it always did, and the coffee was sitting where I had set it, going cold.
I was enjoying myself for the first time in years.
The work and the town and June Parker's cautious respect across the rim of a coffee cup and Clara Mae's brilliant ridiculous maps and Dorothy Sullivan's grudging nod at the last committee meeting were all part of it.
ut the heart of it was the Blackwood kitchen on Sundays, where Maisie saved me a seat, and Louisa pressed a plate in front of me before I'd taken my coat off, and Owen asked about the festival with the quiet attention of a man who actually cared about the answer.
I had a table to belong to now. I had a family that had closed ranks around me and not let go.
And I had Hunter. The man whose hands I couldn’t stop watching, who had looked at me tonight with something in his eyes that my whole body had recognized before my brain caught up, and who had then stepped back.
Because he was Hunter. Because he would always step back rather than take something I hadn’t offered.
Because the man who had agreed to fake this without hesitating would never, not once, blur the line unless I did it first.
I wasn't performing anymore. I hadn't been for weeks.
The fake girlfriend had become something real.
It had happened so gradually, so completely, that I couldn't point to the moment it turned.
It was June Parker's coffee. It was Clara Mae's map.
It was Maisie's saved seat. It was his hand on my back and the way my body leaned into it without permission.
It was tonight — his breath on my mouth and the restraint it had cost him to step away and the roughness in his voice when he said drive safe like the words were being dragged out of him by something he couldn't control.
The wall between fake and real wasn't thinning anymore. It was gone. I just hadn't said it out loud yet.
And standing in my dark kitchen with his almost-kiss still burning on my lips, I was more terrified than Garrett Calloway had ever made me.
Because Garrett was a problem I could solve.
Garrett was a pattern I could recognize and a threat I could manage and a man I could keep on the other side of a boundary.
Hunter Blackwood wasn't a boundary. Hunter was the place where all my boundaries ended, and something bigger began, and the wanting of him — the real wanting, the kind that lived in my bones — was the one thing I had no strategy for.