Jasper #3
The irrational part of my mind, which was louder tonight than it had any right to be, said: you just kissed her for the first time.
You just had the best night of your life.
You told her you were going to think about it every night until you die, and you meant every word of it.
You are not ready to watch her face change.
I was afraid of her face changing.
I had watched it all night. I had watched every feeling she had move through her, honest and unguarded, the most transparent face I had ever seen on a grown woman.
I had watched it go soft and bright and laughing and still and undone.
I had watched it look at me like I was something worth looking at.
I was not ready to watch it shut down. I was not ready to be the reason it shut down.
But keeping it from her was not a solution.
I knew that. I had known it the moment I stood at her front door.
Keeping it from her was not protection. It was just a delayed version of the same problem, with interest accrued.
Every day I didn’t tell her was a day I was choosing to let her build something on the ground I hadn’t fully shown her.
And she deserved better than that. She deserved the full topography.
I had told her tonight that I was going to tell her true things. I had told her I was a man who kept his promises.
I picked up my phone. Turned it face up. The screen was dark.
I was not going to text her tonight. It was late, and she was standing in her kitchen, coming down from our dinner, and this was not a text message conversation.
This was the kind of conversation you had in person, with her coffee going cold between her hands and enough time to ask every question she needed to ask.
I was going to call her tomorrow. And when I saw her next, I was going to tell her about the job.
The job was not easy to explain to someone who had never needed a mission to feel like themselves.
Before the Corps, I had been a boy in a house where nothing was reliable, and nothing was asked of me except to stay out of the way.
The Marines had handed me something I hadn’t known I was starving for—structure, purpose, the dignity of being useful in ways that mattered.
I had been good at it. Not just competent.
Good, in the bone-deep way that tells you you’ve found the thing you were built for.
And then the knee had taken it, and I had come home and spent months trying to locate that feeling in other things—the cabin, the bar, the runs I pushed too hard because moving felt like the closest thing to having a direction.
The job Emmett was offering wasn’t the Corps.
But it was the nearest thing to it I’d ever find in civilian life.
Work that required the same set of skills, the same controlled attention, the same willingness to walk into uncertain situations and stay useful inside them.
Work that asked something real of me. I had spent enough time in Honeybrook Hollow to know that I loved it here, that it was home in a way I’d stopped believing a place could be, but I also knew what I became when I had nothing to point myself at.
I’d seen it in the months after the discharge, the restlessness that had nothing to do with where I was and everything to do with who I was without a purpose underneath me.
I did not want to become that man in front of Cara.
I did not want her to watch me hollow out.
The work Emmett was describing included travel. Risk that was probably manageable but was still real. It was not the life of a man who stayed in one place and tended things. It was not the life of a man with mallards, a cabin, and a woman who left books on his doorstep.
And yet.
I was going to tell her about all of it—the work, the travel, the risk.
I was going to tell her about the deployments and the relationships that hadn’t survived them, and what kind of man that had made me.
I was going to put it all on the table the way she had put herself on the table tonight, without apology and without armor, and I was going to let her decide what she wanted to do with it.
She might decide it was too much. That was a real possibility I had to face.
I finally took my jacket off. Folded it over the arm of the couch. The rosemary smell rose faintly into the quiet room.
That was the thing about love. It didn’t announce itself.
It just waited until you were tired of the alternative, and then it stood there in a green dress in a doorway and made every carefully maintained reason feel thin and unconvincing.
I was falling for her. I had probably been falling for her since I walked into her bookshop and watched her push her glasses up and talk about Agatha Christie, and maybe longer than that, maybe since I was seventeen years old sitting across from her in a school library, pretending I was only there to pass English.
But I also knew what happened when a man with no sense of direction tried to make a person his purpose.
I had watched it happen to people I’d served with.
The relationship became the mission, and that was too much to ask of anyone, especially someone as quietly careful with her own heart as Cara was with hers.
I needed to be someone before I could be someone to her. The job was part of that. The complication was that she was already part of it too, and I wasn’t sure yet how to hold both things without one of them costing the other.
I was going to have to figure that out. Soon, and honestly, and in person.
But not tonight.
Tonight I sat on the thirty-dollar couch in the quiet of the cabin and listened to the river and thought about her laugh, and let myself have that much, and left the rest for tomorrow.