Jasper #2
But not on this staircase. Not tonight, when she was still warm from dinner, and her hair was down, and her eyes were bright, and everything between us was new and unhardened. I was going to tell her. Soon. In person. With enough time to answer every question she needed to ask.
I looked at her for a long moment.
“I want you to know exactly what you have done to me,” I said.
“And I want you to know that I am going to walk back down these stairs because you deserve someone who comes to you with everything on the table. Not most of it.” I held her eyes.
“I’m not there yet. But I’m close. And I need you to trust me with that for a little longer. ”
Confusion crossed her face, and then something more careful, reading me, trying to understand what I wasn’t saying. She didn’t push. She just looked at me steadily and nodded once, and that quiet trust was almost harder to stand than anything else she could have done.
“Okay,” she said softly.
I pressed one more kiss to her forehead, slow and deliberate.
She made a small sound that was not quite a word.
“I’m going to kiss you one more time. Slowly. And then I am going to walk down those stairs. Do you understand me?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want me to kiss you?”
“Yes, Jasper. Please.”
“Put the book down and take off your glasses.”
She placed them both on the table, and I moved my hand from her cheek into her hair at the nape of her neck, slow enough that she could feel each finger settling there.
My other hand stayed on her jaw. I leaned in.
I kissed her the way a man kisses a woman when he knows he has to stop in two minutes and has decided to live his whole life inside those two minutes.
The kiss started slowly. My mouth on hers, warm and deliberate, the kind of kiss that took its time because there was nowhere else to be.
She made a small sound against my mouth that was almost a gasp and almost a sigh, and I felt it against my lips before I heard it, and something inside me that had been tightly wound for two weeks came loose.
I deepened the kiss. My mouth opened against hers, and she met me with a hunger that told me she had been thinking about this as much as I had, maybe more. She fisted the front of my jacket, pulling me closer. My hand tightened in her hair.
She made another small sound, and her knees gave slightly, and her back came to rest fully against the green door behind her, and her free hand let go of my jacket and found the doorframe beside her, and she grabbed the wood to keep herself steady.
I kissed her until I started to lose my mind.
I kissed her until the sound of the alley and the hum of the streetlight, and the wooden creak of the landing all disappeared, and the only thing left in the world was her mouth and her hand on the doorframe and the soft, sharp huff of her breath against my lips every time we pulled apart for half a second before going back in.
I was going to have to stop. I knew I was going to have to stop. I had promised myself. I had told her thirty seconds. It had been much longer than thirty seconds.
I pulled back slowly. A quarter inch at a time. Because I could not do it all at once. My forehead came back against hers. Both of us were breathing hard. Her hand was still braced against the doorframe. Her other hand was still pressed against my chest. Her eyes were closed.
“Cara.”
“Don’t say anything yet.”
We stood there, forehead to forehead, in the yellow light on her landing for a long moment, with our breath still mixed between us and neither of us moving, and the rosemary in its terracotta pot releasing its faint herbal smell into the cool evening air.
When she finally opened her eyes, her whole face had been undone in a way I was going to carry with me for the rest of my life.
She looked up at me from inches away with her pupils huge, and her mouth still warm from mine, and her hand still braced against the doorframe because she was not entirely sure her knees would hold her if she let go.
“Jasper.”
“Yeah.”
“I need you to go now. Right now. Because if you don’t go now, I am going to do something I said I wasn’t going to do tonight.”
“I’m going.”
“I mean it, Jasper.”
“I know you do. I’m going.”
I lifted my head off hers. I took a step back. It was the hardest step I had ever taken, and that was saying something. She stayed where she was, pressed against the door with her hand still on the doorframe.
I reached up and brushed my thumb along her cheekbone one more time.
“Goodnight, Cara.”
“Goodnight, Jasper.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“You better.”
I made myself turn. I forced myself to walk across the landing toward the stairs. At the top step, I paused and looked back at her over my shoulder. She was still standing against the door.
I stopped. “Get your keys out and put your glasses on, sweetheart. I’m not leaving until you get inside.”
She huffed a laugh, put her glasses on, grabbed the book, fumbled in her small purse, and came up with her keys. She turned and unlocked the door. Before she stepped inside, she looked back at me one more time.
“Tonight was amazing. Thank you.”
I did not trust my voice to answer that. I just nodded once before she stepped inside.
I heard the deadbolt slide home and stood on the landing for one more second, then I turned and walked down the stairs and across the gravel of the alley to my truck.
I got in. I did not start the engine. I sat for a second with my hands on the wheel, and the cab of the truck dimmed around me, and my mouth was still warm, and my chest was still full in a way I had never felt before in my life.
I could smell rosemary on my jacket from where I had brushed past the plant on the landing.
I started the truck. I drove out of the alley. I took the long way home, not because I was in no hurry this time, but because I needed the extra ten minutes to land back in my body.
And then the secret came back.
It rose up in my chest on the long dark road out to the river, slow and cold.
I had just had the best night of my life with a woman I was falling for, and I had kissed her in a way that was going to live in me forever, and I had told her I was going to think about it for the rest of my life.
Every true thing I had said tonight was also a lie of omission.
Every warm moment I had given her was also a small theft.
I pulled into my gravel drive about fifteen minutes later. I cut the engine. I sat in the dark for a long moment with both hands on the wheel and the river audible through the closed window even here.
I got out of the truck. I walked to the cabin in the dark. I unlocked the door, went inside, and turned on one lamp.
I stood in the middle of my small, quiet cabin on the river and felt the warmth of the kiss still in my mouth and the weight of the secret still in my chest, and both of them were so real and so opposite that I was going to have to learn, tonight, how to carry them both at once.
I sat down on the couch in my jacket. I did not take it off for a long time. I could still smell the rosemary on it.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
CARA: I am standing in my kitchen with my back against the fridge, and I do not know how to move. I just wanted you to know that.
I closed my eyes for a second. Then I typed.
Me: Don’t move. I’m right here.
CARA: Goodnight, Jasper.
Me: Goodnight, Cara.
I set the phone face down on the arm of the couch.
I sat for a long time in the quiet, still in my jacket, the lamp throwing soft yellow light across the cabin, the river running outside the window, the woman I had just kissed three miles away on the other side of town with her back against a refrigerator and a book of poems still pressed against her chest.
I was carrying two things now that did not fit inside the same body. I was going to have to find a way.
The job.
I let myself think about it directly for the first time all evening.
I had been keeping it in my peripheral vision all night, the way you keep a bright light out of your line of sight, so it doesn’t ruin your vision in the dark.
But sitting here now, with the warmth of her mouth still on mine and her text still on my phone face-down on the arm of the couch, I could not keep it at an angle anymore.
It was not a complicated job, on paper. Private investigation work. I had done more dangerous things before breakfast on deployments that didn’t make it into any report. That was not the problem. The problem was sitting in a kitchen three miles away with her back against a refrigerator.
I leaned forward, put my elbows on my knees, and looked at the floor.
I had watched every relationship I had ever tried to build get slowly consumed by the demands of being the type of man I was.
There had been no single blow-up, no single moment of betrayal.
It had been slower than that. It had been the accumulated weight of missed calls and rescheduled plans and the look on a woman’s face when she realized, again, that something had come up.
It had been the version of myself that came back from a deployment that was not quite the version that had left, and the slow, quiet work of trying to explain that to someone who had been waiting. It had never worked. Not once.
I had stopped trying, eventually. Not consciously. I had not sat down one day and decided to be alone. It had just become the easier thing, and then the default thing, and then it was just my life.
And then I came back home for good, and there she was.
The rational part of my mind, the part that had been trained to assess situations without sentiment, knew I should tell her.
I’d been honest with her about everything else tonight.
I told her things I’d never told anyone else.
Cara was not fragile; she was not a woman who would shatter at the news that the man she was seeing had a job that might sometimes take him away.