Jasper #2
She reached for the kettle without looking up, and I leaned against the counter beside her and watched her move around the small back space with the ease of someone who knew every inch of it, and I didn’t say anything, and neither did she.
She made two mugs and handed me one, and we took them to the reading nook at the back of the shop, two armchairs angled toward each other with a low table between them.
She tucked her feet beneath her and wrapped both hands around her mug, and I sat across from her with my elbows on my knees, and for a moment neither of us said anything. The shop had gone quiet, all shadow and warm light. It felt, unexpectedly, like the library at Sweetbriar High used to feel.
She’d taken her glasses off at some point and set them on the table, and without them her face was softer, more open.
She was beautiful. She’d always been beautiful, even at fifteen when she hadn’t seemed to know it—but it was beauty that came from more than her looks.
It was how she listened, making you feel like what you were saying was important to her.
The way she’d sat across from a difficult seventeen-year-old in a school library and treated his half-formed opinions about books like they were worth something.
That had always been the thing that got me.
I could have gotten used to her beauty, stunning as she was.
But I never forgot how she had made me feel.
“I’m glad you’re running this place,” I said.
I was looking at the shelves, because it was easier than looking at her directly while I said it.
“You used to talk about it. Back then. Not in a big way—just in passing. Something your grandfather had said, something you were going to change when it was yours.”
She looked at me with an expression I hadn’t seen from her yet tonight—something open and a little unguarded, like I’d surprised her. “You remember that?” A small laugh escaped her, warm and self-conscious. “God, I used to ramble on so much.”
“I remember everything.” I held her gaze when I said it, long enough that she understood I meant it, and watched the color rise slightly in her cheeks before she looked down at her mug.
She turned it slowly in her hands, and I watched her fingers move around the ceramic, saying nothing, giving her the quiet she was clearly using to figure out what to say, or how to feel.
“You were the first person who asked what I thought about something and actually waited for the answer,” I said eventually.
It came out quieter than I’d intended, and more honest, the way things do when you’ve been holding them in long enough that letting it out stops feeling like a choice.
“Not just about the books. About anything.” I looked at her—the downward tilt of her head, the loose strand of hair she’d stopped bothering to push back.
“I wasn’t used to that. Someone just—talking to me.
Listening. Like my answer actually mattered. ”
She looked up at that, and something in her expression moved in a way that made it hard to look at directly. “It did matter,” she said softly. “It always did.”
I nodded once and looked at the shelves, because I needed somewhere else to put my eyes for a second.
Cara looked up. “That shouldn’t be rare.”
“No,” I said. “But it was.”
She held my gaze for a second and then looked back down at her mug, and I watched the small crease form between her brows.
“I read now,” I said. “For fun. Have for years.” I looked at the shelves. “That started with you. You made me see stories differently, and it never quite wore off.” I glanced back at her. “I don’t think I ever told you that.”
She went still. “No,” she said quietly. “You didn’t.”
“Well.” I turned my mug between my palms. “It’s true.”
She was quiet for a long moment. Outside, Sycamore Street was empty and still.
“I had a crush on you.” She blurted it to her mug, then made herself look up, and her shyness—the effort it cost her to say it plainly—was one of the most Cara things I’d ever seen her do since we sat down back here.
“Back then. I convinced myself you liked me too, and then afterward I spent a long time deciding I’d made the whole thing up.
That I’d been fifteen and reading into things that weren’t there.
” A small, self-deprecating breath. “It took me an embarrassingly long time to talk myself out of it.”
I looked at her steadily. “You didn’t make it up.”
She stilled. “Jasper—”
“I knew,” I said. “And I liked you too.” I held her gaze because she deserved that much—the plain truth of it, said directly, not softened into something easier to dismiss.
“But you were fifteen, and I was almost eighteen, and I was leaving. Starting something with you when I already had one foot out the door—” I shook my head.
“That would have been the wrong thing to do. You know that. I would have hurt you. And myself too.”
She was quiet for a moment. Something moved across her face—relief, maybe, or the feeling of something you’d been carrying finally being set down somewhere solid. “Yeah,” she said. “I do know that. I just—” She stopped. “It would have been easier if I’d known at the time that I hadn’t imagined it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry for that part.”
She shook her head. “You don’t need to be sorry. You were right to go. I just needed—” She smiled, small and a little rueful. “I needed to know it was real.”
“It was real,” I confirmed.
She nodded once, and something settled between us that had been left open ended for way too long.
“The letter,” she said, after a moment.
“I wrote it three times,” I said. “Sent the safest version.” I looked at my mug.
“You didn’t write back.” The words were quiet.
No accusation in them—I hadn’t meant there to be—but they sat in the air between us, and I watched her go still again.
Her fingers tightened around her mug, and her eyes came up to mine, and I saw it there, the flash of something that looked like pain, the recognition that it had mattered to me more than the safe version of the letter had let on.
“Jasper,” she said, barely above a whisper. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said. And I meant it. I did. But there was an okay that still carried some hurt, and I think she could hear it.
She was quiet for a moment, her eyes dropping to her mug. “What would you have said?” she asked softly. “If I’d written back.”
I looked at her for a long moment. “More,” I said simply.
Something moved across her face at that—something soft and a little undone.
She turned her mug slowly in her hands, and when she spoke, her voice was careful, like she was setting something fragile down.
“I didn’t write back because I was afraid you wouldn’t reply,” she whispered.
“The letter was warm, and it was real, and I needed it to stay that way. If I wrote back and you didn’t answer, it would have become something else.
Something that would have broken my heart.
” She paused, her eyes bright. “I couldn’t do that to it. ”
“I would have answered,” I said.
“I know that now.” Her voice broke on the last word, just slightly, and she pressed her lips together and looked away for a second, collecting herself with the quiet dignity she brought to everything.
We sat with that. It wasn’t grief exactly, what sat between us. It was something more bittersweet—the acknowledgment that something real had existed, and that the timing had been wrong, and that neither of us had done anything wrong, and that it had cost us both something anyway.
The hardest kind of loss. The kind with no villain.
“Are you actually staying?” she asked eventually. “This time.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I am.”
She looked at me carefully. “What changed?”
I set my mug down and inhaled a deep breath. Everyone in town knew about the knee—that wasn’t a secret, Honeybrook Hollow being the small town it was. But the rest of it I’d kept close.