Jasper
We did not talk much in the cab. The radio was off.
The dashboard was dim. Cara had put her hand on mine across the gear shift about thirty seconds after I had pulled out of the parking lot, and her fingers had laced through mine without either of us commenting on it, and now her thumb was moving in small, slow circles against the side of my hand in a way I was pretty sure she did not know she was doing.
I was aware of every single pass of it. I was aware of every single thing she was doing right now.
I let myself look at her when the road was straight enough to spare the attention.
She was looking out the windshield with the soft, undone expression she had been wearing since I told her about my father.
She was holding the book of poems in her lap with her free hand resting on the leather cover. She was perfectly still.
I thought about the dinner. I could not help it.
The whole evening was still sitting in my head, in pieces, refusing to be arranged into any sort of order.
Memories bright like a kaleidoscope swirled through my mind, and it was all I could do to keep my face neutral and not scare her away with my feelings.
I turned off the main road and onto the narrow back street that led behind the row of shops on Cara’s block. There was a single streetlight there, throwing a warm yellow pool onto the gravel. Cara’s small dark car was directly below the wooden staircase.
I pulled the truck in next to Cara’s car and cut the engine.
The quiet that followed was immediate and complete, just the tick of the cooling engine and the soft sound of the town settling into itself around us. Neither of us moved.
I didn’t look at her right away. I sat with my hands on the wheel and looked at the alley, and gave her whatever she needed to do with the moment.
We’d been quiet most of the drive back—not the uncomfortable kind, the kind that had something living inside it, warm and unresolved, and I hadn’t tried to fill it because it didn’t need filling. It needed to be what it was.
I heard her exhale slowly beside me.
I looked over then. She was still facing forward, her hands folded in her lap, the book of poems pressed against her.
Her bottom lip was caught between her teeth in the way it got when she was working something out, and she was very still, and I could see the moment she made her decision by the slight change in her posture.
I went still too. My hands tightened on the wheel without my permission, knuckles pulling pale, and I kept them there because I needed something to hold onto.
“I am about to do something I have been thinking about all night,” she whispered.
The words moved through me like a current. My heart was doing something loud and immediate in my chest, and I was aware of everything—the dark of the alley, the warmth of the truck cab, the small distance between us that had never felt smaller—and I made myself breathe before I answered.
“What’s that?” I whispered back.
“I am about to walk up those stairs.” She held my eyes in the dark. “And I am going to do it without apologizing for the fact that I want you to follow me up them.”
I did not say anything for a moment.
I just looked at her. Looked at her the way I’d been wanting to look at her all evening without anything between us, no restaurant, no table, no careful distance, just this—her face in the dark and her hands in her lap and everything she’d just said hanging in the air between us, honest and unguarded and entirely hers.
My throat was dry. My heart was somewhere it had no business being and showing no signs of returning.
“Cara.” My voice came out lower than I intended. “Are you sure?”
“Not to come inside.” A breath. “But—”
“I know,” I said quietly. “I know exactly what you want.” I let go of the steering wheel and turned toward her fully. “I want it too.”
She opened her door before I could come around to open it for her.
Not because she was rushing, but because she was trying very hard to be brave, and she did not want to give herself the chance to lose her nerve in the space between the passenger side and the front of the truck.
I got out on my side and came around and found her already standing by her car door with the book of poems still pressed against her chest and her small leather purse on a thin strap across her body, and her chin tilted up at me with shy determination.
I reached for her hand. She gave it to me without hesitating.
The wooden staircase climbed the back of the building from the alley up to the landing.
It was sturdy but old; it creaked a little under our weight.
I went up a step behind her so my knee would not slow her down, and so I could watch her climb ahead of me in the dark green dress, and so if she slipped on the old wood, I would be right there to catch her.
She did not slip. She climbed slowly, one hand on the railing, the other still in mine, her shoulders squared in a way that made me want to kiss the back of her neck.
At the top, the landing opened up into a small square wooden porch. I had time to notice exactly three things before Cara turned to face me.
First, the door. Warm dark green. It was pretty.
Second, a small wooden bistro table and chair set pushed against the wall to the left of the door, with a paperback left open on the seat and a ribbon bookmark trailing over the edge.
She had been reading out here recently. Probably last night, or the night before. Hopefully, while thinking about me.
Third, a terracotta pot next to the chair with a small rosemary bush in it, still green against the cold October air. Its faint herbal scent rose into the space between us as Cara brushed past it on her way to the door.
A single wrought-iron sconce next to the door threw soft yellow light across the landing.
Cara reached the door and turned around to face me.
She was standing with her back almost against the green door, the book of poems still clutched against her chest in both hands, the sconce catching the side of her face in a way that made her small silver earrings glow warm against her hair.
I was standing about two feet in front of her on the landing.
The alley below was quiet. The only sound was the faint, distant hum of the streetlight at the end of the alley and the soft, small give of the wooden landing under our feet.
She looked up at me with the same unguarded attention she had been giving me all night, but something had shifted in the last minute. Something about the stairs, or the landing, or the green door behind her. Her eyes were a little wider. Her breath was shallow.
“Jasper, I don’t know what to say next.”
“You don’t have to say anything.”
“I kind of do. I feel like I have to say something or I am going to combust on my own landing.”
I took one step closer. Not close enough to touch her yet. Just close enough to make the next step the one that mattered. She did not move back. The book pressed tighter against her chest.
“I have spent every day since we set this date trying not to kiss you. I am not going to spend another one.”
Her whole face went still.
“Jasper.”
“Tell me to stop, and I’ll stop.”
“Don’t stop.”
I lifted my hand and brushed two fingers along the edge of her jaw. She closed her eyes. I leaned the rest of the way in.
The first press of my mouth against hers was warm and slow and soft, a question rather than an answer, a first kiss that was almost chaste if you did not know how long the two people involved had been building toward it.
Her mouth was warm. Her breath caught. She did not move.
I held the kiss, then I pulled back just enough to put a half-inch of space between our mouths.
She opened her eyes. They were wet around the edges and huge in the yellow light.
“Cara.”
“Yeah.”
“I am going to walk down those stairs in about thirty seconds.”
“Don’t.”
“I need to. I promised myself I would walk you to your door tonight and not come inside. I am a man who keeps his promises. I am going to keep that one. But I need you to understand something before I go.”
“What?”
“I need you to understand that I don’t want to. I don’t want to walk down those stairs. I am doing it because it is the right thing to do and because you said out loud that you are not inviting me inside, and I am not going to be the kind of man who pretends he didn’t hear you. I am going to go.”
“Jasper.”
“But I need you to understand one more thing.” I lifted my other hand and cupped the side of her face so that both my hands were on her now, one on each side, and I rested my forehead lightly against hers the way I had in her shop, except everything about it was different now.
“I am going to think about this kiss every night for the rest of my life.”
Her breath hitched.
“Jasper.”
“I mean that literally, Cara. I am not being romantic. I am going to go home to my cabin, and I am going to lie in bed, and I am going to think about what your mouth felt like against mine for the first time, and I am going to do that tonight and tomorrow night and the night after that.”
I stopped.
Because underneath all of it—the warmth of the stairwell, the way she was looking at me, the taste of her still in my mouth, and the fact of her right there—something had been sitting in my chest all evening, and it was sitting there now, heavier for the perfection of the last few hours.
I had let tonight be everything it was. I had let myself have it fully and without apology.
And she had given me everything she had to give tonight—and I had not given her the same in return.
Not entirely. Not yet.
She deserved to know about the job before this went any further. She deserved to make her choices with the full picture. I was waiting for the right moment to tell her, but there was no right moment. The longer I waited, the worse it became, and I knew that. I was going to have to fix it.