Cara
Iwoke up on Sunday morning with Paige’s elbow in my ribs.
We had migrated at some point from the couch to my bed—I had a vague memory of Paige announcing that her back was not going to survive another hour on those cushions and pulling me up by the wrist—and now she was on her stomach with one arm flung across my side and her hair in her mouth and the cats arranged around us like a small smug audience.
Knightley was between us. Wentworth was at my back. Darcy was at the foot of the bed, watching me with the composure of someone who had predicted all of this.
I lay still for a moment and looked at the ceiling.
Paige had stayed. Not because I’d asked her to—I hadn’t—but because she’d looked at me at some point in the evening, after the phone call, after I’d come back out of the bedroom with my face doing whatever my face had been doing, and she’d simply decided she wasn’t going anywhere.
She hadn’t made a thing of it. She’d just refilled her wine and asked if I had a spare toothbrush, and that had been that.
That was Paige. That had always been Paige—showing up without announcement, staying without being asked, loving people in the practical and unglamorous ways that actually mattered.
I looked at her now, hair everywhere, elbow still in my ribs, deeply unconscious, and felt a wave of affection for her so strong it was almost uncomfortable.
The whole day was mine. The shop was closed on Sundays, no obligations, nowhere to be, no one to perform functionality for. Which meant I was going to have to actually think about everything that had happened in the last forty-eight hours. The dinner. The stairwell. What he’d said after.
I want you to know exactly what you have done to me.
I pressed my face briefly into the pillow.
I was going to the cabin today. I wanted to see where he lived.
I wanted to sit at the kitchen table where he drank his coffee, look out the window at the river, and understand the place that had given him back to himself, because understanding that felt like understanding something essential about him, and I wanted that. I wanted all of it.
Paige stirred beside me, made a sound that was not a word, and pulled her elbow back without waking up.
I lay there in the Sunday morning quiet with the cats and my sleeping sister and let myself feel the warmth of having her here.
Then the excitement of what was to come.
And I didn’t try to talk myself into a more manageable version of how I felt.
Some things deserve to be felt at full size.
Paige made a sound into her pillow that was not a word. Then she lifted her head, squinted at the window, and put her head back down. “What time is it?” she said, into the pillow.
“Early enough that you can go back to sleep if you want to.”
She considered this with the seriousness it deserved. “Is there going to be coffee at some point in the near future?”
“Give me five minutes.”
Another sound, this one more satisfied, and she closed her eyes again.
I extracted myself carefully from under her arm—Knightley protesting, Wentworth not moving an inch, Darcy watching from the foot of the bed with the expression of someone above such things—and went to the kitchen and started the coffee.
I poured two cups and brought one back to the bedroom and set it on the nightstand, and Paige was already sitting up against the headboard with her hair everywhere, and her mascara migrated south, and both hands extended, and I put the mug into them and she held it under her chin and looked at me with the focus of someone not yet fully awake but paying attention anyway.
“You’re going to Jasper’s cabin today,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Good.” She took a long sip and seemed to arrive more fully into the morning. “You packed a bag yet?”
“I’m going to.”
She looked at me over the rim of the mug, taking in whatever my face was doing, which, based on her expression, was probably quite a lot. A slow smile spread across her face—warm and entirely knowing. “I love you so much,” she said. “You enormous, lovestruck sap. Look at you.”
“Thank you for staying last night,” I said.
She waved it off. “Where else would I be?” Not a question—just a statement of fact, simple and complete.
I sat on the edge of the bed, and we drank our coffee, the cats rearranging themselves with great ceremony.
She left an hour later with a hug at the door. I sent Jasper a text to let him know my plans, then I went to shower and get dressed.
The cats were doing their morning rounds.
Wentworth was on the kitchen counter, where he was not allowed to be, watching me with the serene confidence of a cat who knew the rules and had decided they did not apply to him.
Knightley was on the windowsill in the living room.
Darcy was on the floor next to my overnight bag, watching me with the expression of a cat who had opinions.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I told him.
He sniffed and looked away.
“I might not stay all night.”
He blinked once, slow and deliberate, then turned away with the dignified finality of a cat who had made his assessment and found me unconvincing.
I finished my coffee, rinsed the mug, and picked up the bag.
I gave the cats enough food and water for the night, locked the apartment behind me, went down the back stairs into the alley, and got in my car.
I sat for a second with my hands on the wheel, my heart turning somersaults in my chest, then started the engine, pulled out into the road, and headed for the river.
I had always loved the drive out of Honeybrook Hollow.
The road left town heading east and climbed gently through the trees, and within a few minutes, the buildings and the sidewalks and the familiar storefronts were gone, and it was just the road and the forest and the mountains in the distance.
The light came through the windshield in long pale shafts.
The air through the cracked window smelled like pine and cold water and the faint mineral tang of the river somewhere below the road.
Jasper had texted to take the east road out of town, turn right at the unmarked gravel drive just past the old green mailbox, and follow it down toward the water.
I found the mailbox. I found the gravel drive.
I turned onto it and felt the car dip as the road curved away from the main road and dropped gently toward the river.
The trees opened up, and the cabin came into view.
It was exactly what he had described at dinner.
Warm wood tones against the dark green of the riverbank.
It sat back from the water but close enough that I could hear the river before I had even cut the engine.
There was a porch across the front with a single wooden chair on it.
His truck was parked to the side. A thin curl of smoke from what I assumed was the stove, gray against the pale sky.
I pulled in next to his truck, cut the engine, and sat there for a second.
The river was the first thing I heard. Constant and steady, exactly as he had described it—the thing I fall asleep to and the thing I wake up to.
I understood it now. I understood why he had chosen this place.
The sound of the water was the sound of something that was going to keep going whether or not you figured yourself out, and there was a comfort in that I had not expected.
The front door opened.
Jasper came out onto the porch in jeans and a flannel shirt, sleeves rolled to his forearms, his hair a little damp. He had a mug of coffee in one hand that he set down on the porch railing when he saw me. He came down the steps—taking the first one carefully—and crossed the gravel toward my car.
I opened my door and got out.
And then I did not know what to do with my hands.
I had driven mindlessly, while rehearsing absolutely nothing, and now I was standing in a gravel drive in front of a man who had thoroughly kissed me, and my overnight bag was visible through the rear window of my car, and there was really no graceful way to address that, so I addressed it immediately and at full volume.
“I brought an overnight bag,” I blurted.
Jasper stopped. He was maybe six feet away from me, close enough that I could see the expression that moved across his face—a flicker of something warm and a little undone, quickly steadied. His eyes went to the bag in the back window and then came back to me.
“I see that,” he said.
The heat climbed straight up my neck. “I might not stay.”
“Okay.”
“I’m just saying.” I crossed my arms, which was not helping, and uncrossed them. “I brought it in case. It seemed practical. It’s not—I wasn’t assuming anything, I just thought in case the day ran long or—”
“Cara.”
“Oh god, what?”
He was looking at me with his whole face.
That was the only way I could describe it—he was not managing his expression or keeping any of it back, just looking at me the way he had on the landing, like I was someone he had been waiting a long time to see standing in his driveway with a bag in the backseat and color in her cheeks.
“Come inside,” he said.
He crossed the last few feet between us, opened the back door, picked up the bag, and slung it over his shoulder. He held out his other hand.
I took it.
His fingers closed around mine, and we walked across the gravel toward the cabin. I looked straight ahead and tried to look like a person who had not just announced her overnight arrangements to a man she was desperately falling for before he had even said hello.
Jasper’s thumb moved once across my knuckles.
I decided it had been worth it.
The porch creaked under our feet. He held the front door open, and I stepped inside and stopped.