29. Buzz #2
“I hate that some part of me feels foolish now.” Her eyes squeezed shut. “I hate that my brain wants to go back and replay all of it like I should have known. Like I should have stayed. Like I should have opened the door again.”
“No.” I shook my head. “You saw what you saw. You came to me. You asked me. I’m the one who didn’t answer right. I’m the one who stopped fighting. You don’t get to carry my part because the facts changed.”
Lucy looked at me for a long time.
The quiet did something different then. It did not soften exactly. Nothing about the room felt soft. But the air shifted. Like something true had finally been set in the correct place.
She looked away first, toward the dark windows beyond me. From where she stood, she could probably see my reflection again. Maybe hers too. Two people separated by a kitchen island and a frozen lake and a history neither of us had known how to bury. “I left too,” she said.
My chest tightened. “Lucy.”
“I did.” Her voice stayed thin, but steady enough to scare me. “I saw something terrible and I ran. I didn’t answer your calls. I didn’t ask who she was. I didn’t let you explain at first.”
“You were hurt.”
“I know that.” She swallowed. “But I keep thinking maybe if I had just—”
“No.” The word came out before I could soften it.
Lucy’s eyes snapped back to mine.
I took a breath, slower this time. “No,” I said again, quieter. “I’m not letting you do that. Not because I’m trying to be noble. Not because I get to tell you how to feel. But because the part where I failed you is mine. I can own that without making you carry it.”
The tears spilled over then. She stood behind the island in my kitchen and cried like someone whose body had finally been given permission to admit the past had not stopped hurting.
I stayed still. It might have been the hardest thing I had ever done off the ice.
On the couch, Dottie lifted her head fully now. Her ears perked. She looked between us, then slid off the cushion with a heavy thump. She crossed to Lucy without hesitation, nails clicking against the wood floor, and pressed her body against Lucy’s leg.
I looked at them, and something warm and unbearable moved through me.
The dog had no idea what had happened eight years ago. No idea what Samantha’s name meant, or Fargo, or Aldenmere, or the way a sentence said on a porch could build itself into the architecture of a woman’s heart.
Dottie only knew Lucy was hurting. So she showed up.
The simplicity of it made my throat burn.
Lucy rested one hand on Dottie’s head. Her fingers sank into the fur behind one floppy ear. She breathed in. Out. Once. Twice. When she looked at me again, her eyes were red, her lashes wet, her face stripped of so much armor I almost looked away to protect her privacy.
“I don’t know what to do with this,” she said. “I don’t know how to reorganize eight years of thinking one thing and suddenly knowing another.”
“You don’t have to do it tonight.”
Her mouth tightened.
“I mean that.” I shifted my weight, then stopped again before the movement became a step.
“You don’t have to decide anything tonight.
You don’t have to forgive me because I finally told you something I should have said when we were eighteen.
You don’t have to make me feel better. You don’t have to tell me this changes anything. ”
She wiped beneath one lens carefully. “That sounds very mature.”
I huffed once, not quite a laugh. “Don’t sound so suspicious.”
“I am suspicious.”
I glanced down at my hands. They were shaking faintly. The leftover want. The fear. The grief. The awful, clean knowledge that one kiss had not fixed anything and one truth had not earned me the right to ask for another.
“When I asked if I could kiss you,” I said slowly, “you said yes.”
“I kissed you,” she said.
My eyes lifted.
Color moved into her face, faint and uneven. “You asked. I answered.”
“I know.” My voice almost broke on it. “That matters to me.”
Her hand stilled on Dottie’s head.
“So I’m going to keep doing that,” I said. “Asking. Waiting. Hearing the answer. If you say stop, I stop. If you say no, it’s no. If you say you need space, you get space.”
Lucy’s brows pulled together slightly.
I kept going before courage could leak out of me. “No pressure. No ambushing you. No trying to corner you into a conversation because I’m spiraling and I want relief. No asking you to decide before you’re ready.”
Her eyes searched mine.
“And at work,” I said, “I follow your lead.”
One eyebrow lifted a fraction. There she was, even wrecked. “At work.”
“Professionally,” I clarified, because apparently I still had some survival instinct. “No Shortcake at work. No flirting at work.”
Her eyebrow rose higher.
I winced. “Okay. No intentional flirting at work.”
“Ty.”
“I’m being honest.” I held up one hand. “I can promise no Shortcake. I can promise no corners, no ambushes, no making your job harder on purpose. I can promise I will try very hard not to look at you like an idiot when you do that thing where you push your glasses up and destroy my life.”
A shocked little laugh escaped her. Tiny. Frayed at the edges. Beautiful enough to make the room tilt.
I let myself smile for half a second, then sobered because this was not a place to charm my way through. “But if I slip, you call me on it. You tell me to knock it off, and I do.”
Lucy looked down, her mouth pressed tight like she did not know what to do with the laugh now that it had betrayed her.
“You can add rules,” I said. “Tomorrow. Next week. Six months from now. Whenever. I’ll follow them.”
She looked back up at me. “You don’t get points for basic decency.”
“I know.” I breathed in through my nose. “This isn’t me trying to get points.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s me trying to learn how to show up without asking you to trust me first,” I explained in a rapid-fire rush.
“Words aren’t enough,” I continued. “They weren’t enough then.
They’re not enough now. I can explain. I can apologize.
I can tell you I regret that morning more than anything I’ve ever done.
All of that is true.” My throat tightened.
“But the thing that broke us was me not acting when it mattered. So the only way I know how to ask for trust is to prove I know how to stay present now.”
The fire behind me gave a low crackle. Outside, snow skittered against the window, lifted by wind off the roofline. The lake remained dark beyond the glass, wide and frozen and silent.
“I’m not asking for an answer tonight,” I said. “I’m not asking you to stay. I’m not asking you to forgive me because I finally stopped being a coward out loud. I’m not asking you to pretend one kiss fixed something I spent eight years not fixing.”
Her hand curled gently into Dottie’s fur.
“I want to,” I admitted.
Lucy’s breath caught.
I looked at her because she deserved the truth, even when the truth made me less impressive.
Especially then. “I want to ask. I want to ask for everything. I want to ask you to stay here tonight. I want to kiss you again. I want to take back every mile Betsy drove away from your house and every call you didn’t answer and every day I let you think I had chosen someone else over you.
” My voice went rough. “I want things I don’t have the right to want yet. ”
Lucy’s face crumpled softly. She closed her eyes.
For a second, neither of us moved.
The house held us in place. The fire burned lower. Dottie leaned against Lucy’s leg like a living anchor. My bourbon sat untouched on the table behind me, and hers beside it, one cube melted down to almost nothing.
Lucy opened her eyes again. “You still make it hard to breathe.” Her lips trembled. “That’s the problem.”
“I know.”
“I need time.”
I nodded once. “Then take however much.”
Her gaze sharpened through the tears. “You say that now.”
“I mean it now.”
“Now isn’t hard.”
That landed exactly where she intended. She needed to know she could hit and I would stay upright. Not because I was tough. Because the room had finally stopped being about my pain first.
“You’re right,” I said. “Now is easy compared to later.”
She looked startled again.
I let out a slow breath. “Later is the work. Tomorrow. At the arena. On road trips. When you’re mad. When you’re quiet. When I want to push because I’m scared you’re slipping away again. That’s where I have to do it differently.”
Lucy’s hand moved over Dottie’s ear. Back and forth. Slow. Grounding. “I should go,” she whispered.
Every selfish part of me wanted to say no. I nodded instead. “Okay.”
Lucy’s expression flickered. Maybe she had expected me to make it harder. Maybe some part of her had wanted me to.
That was the cruelest part of growth. Sometimes doing the right thing still hurt the person in front of you because they were braced for the old version and the new one had not earned trust yet.
She clipped Dottie’s leash back on with hands that shook less than before. Dottie looked between us again, clearly not understanding why any reasonable person would leave a couch she had just claimed.
I walked to the entry closet before Lucy reached it.
Her coat hung beside mine.
For one second, I just looked at it there. Her wool coat tucked between my winter jacket and the old Burns Heating & Air hoodie I kept by the door because my dad still acted like brand loyalty was a family sacrament.
It looked too right, like something that belonged in my house.
I took it off the hanger and turned toward her.
Lucy stopped a few feet away from me. Her eyes dropped to the coat in my hands. For a second, I thought she might take it herself.
I stepped closer carefully.
Her gaze lifted to mine.
There was a question there. Maybe not whether she trusted me. Maybe only whether she trusted this one small kindness not to become a request.
I kept still.
Lucy turned.
I eased the coat over her shoulders.