25. Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Five
ELLA
The relaunch photos are Rose’s idea, which means they’re a good idea with a deadline attached.
“You’ve got a booked venue and a dead website,” she said over Sunday dishes. “Fix one with the other.”
So Tuesday afternoon finds the exterior of Something Blue dressed to be photographed.
Bunting along the new rail. Table linens and a styled tablescape on the decking.
Otto’s lanterns are staged down the creek path, forty paper luminaries lined up like a runway, waiting on dusk and Cassie’s good camera.
But the mountains have other plans.
I feel it before I see it, that green-tinged stillness, the birds going quiet.
Then I look west. The sky over the ridge line has gone the color of a fresh bruise, thunderclouds stacking up, ready to charge.
The first cold gust comes down the valley and lifts every linen on the deck at once, as if the tablescape is trying to leave.
“Ben!” He’s already out of the barn, reading the same sky. “Storm!”
“Big one.” A fork of lightning walks along the far ridge, and the thunder that follows takes its time and arrives with authority. “Ten minutes. Maybe less.”
“The luminaries. Fuck. The linens.”
“Linens. Go.”
The rain beats the forecast. It comes up the valley in a gray wall, hissing across the pasture, and we’re still mid-scramble when it hits, fat warm drops and then all of it at once like a tipped-over bucket.
I’m stripping the tablescape with both arms while the bunting whips overhead.
Ben takes the creek path at a dead run, gathering luminaries six at a time against his chest like a man rescuing chickens.
“Leave the far ones!”
“I’ve got the far ones!”
“Ben, you idiot, leave the far ones.”
He doesn’t leave the far ones. He comes back up the path through the downpour with the last dozen stacked to his chin, soaked black, grinning like Dolly with a stolen list. The sight of him, drenched, laughing, rescuing forty dollars of paper lanterns like they’re livestock, undoes something inside me.
We crash through the barn doors together, arms full, and haul them shut behind us.
And then it’s just the storm and us.
Rain on a tin roof isn’t subtle. It roars.
The whole barn drums with it, water sheeting off the eaves past the windows, thunder rolling around the valley like God moving furniture.
We stand in the middle of the swept floor in the storm-green light, dripping, breathing hard, surrounded by rescued linens and stacked paper lanterns.
I look at him, which is a very bad idea.
His shirt is plastered to him, and I can see everything I’ve spent two weeks not letting myself notice: the working shoulders, the forearms, the flat plane of his stomach, the drop of rainwater tracking down the side of his neck that I want to… That I want…
Fuck.
“You’re soaked,” he says. His voice comes out lower than the thunder.
“Storm’ll do that.” Mine comes out wrong altogether.
Because he’s looking at me too. And I know what I look like.
Hair flattened and dripping. Mascara relocated.
Sundress for the photos stuck to every inch God gave me, and He was generous.
I wait on reflex for the old feeling, the big-boned girl at the pool party, the urge to cross my arms over myself and apologize for taking up space.
It doesn’t come.
Because Ben Callahan is looking at me the way a starving man looks at a locked bakery.
Slow and helpless, down and back up. When his eyes reach mine, he doesn’t pretend, doesn’t cough and find a chore.
He just stands there in the drumming dark being caught, and lets me see it.
The air between us goes so thick you could card it like wool.
“Ella.” Gravel again.
“Don’t say something sensible.” I’m done being sensible. I’ve had a lifetime of it. “I swear to God, Ben, if you say one fucking sensible thing right now…”
“Wasn’t going to.”
He crosses the floor.
His boots are loud under the rain-roar, giving me every chance in the world to step back, watching my face for the smallest no. I don’t have one. I’ve never had one, not since a man lifted two boxes off my stack and asked where I wanted them.
He stops close enough that I can feel the rain-cold coming off his shirt and the heat coming off him under it. His hand comes up. His thumb lands at my cheekbone, the mud-wipe spot, the same slow pass, except there’s no mud and neither of us pretends there is.
“Been thinking about the creek,” he says. “The day the dogs got out.”
“You laughed.”
“You leaned.”
“You leaned first.”
“I know I did.” His other hand finds my waist, barely, a heat through wet cotton, and my breath goes ragged enough to hear.
His forehead comes down and rests against mine, rain dripping off both of us onto the floor between our boots.
We stand there breathing each other in the drum of the storm, one inch left between us. He starts to close it.
The sky detonates.
Lightning hits close enough that the crack and the flash come at once. The barn goes white-blue. Before either of us can move, the side door bursts inward, and forty pounds of soaked heeler comes through it like a fired shell.
Dolly does not pause to read the room.
She skids between us at speed, shaking from her ears to her tail.
She climbs me to the hip, ricochets off Ben’s knees, then wedges herself into the inches of space between our boots.
She sits on both our feet at once, pressed hard against our shins, trembling, drenched, certain that this, right here, is the designated survival location.
The inch becomes a yard. The yard becomes the whole barn.
“Dolly,” Ben says, in the voice of a ruined man.
She looks up at him, shivering, tail thumping once against my ankle. Lightning cracks again, farther off, and she presses harder into our legs with a sound like a kettle coming untuned.
I start laughing. I can’t help it. It comes up through me the way it did on the creek bank, unstoppable, half hysteria and half heartbreak.
After a second, Ben’s laughing too, both of us soaked to the skin in a drumming barn, wanting each other so badly it aches, with a traumatized cattle dog seated firmly on our feet like a chaperone.
“She planned this,” I manage.
“Her timing’s impeccable.”
“It’s what she does.”
We towel her with a rescued linen, which Mom can never know about.
We sit against the stall-door bar with the dog packed between us, her chin on Ben’s knee, her back pressed to my thigh, and watch the storm wear itself out through the high windows.
Every few minutes his eyes come over to me above her damp head, and mine go to him.
There’s unfinished business between us, and we both know it.
The rain passes. We open the doors on a washed world, silver light under the last clouds, every leaf dripping, the beds beaten down but standing. He walks me to the yard. At the fork where his path goes down and mine goes up, we stop.
“Goodnight, Ella.” I don’t think I’m imagining the regret in his voice.
“Goodnight, Ben.”
Neither of us moves for three full seconds. Then Dolly shoulders between us, herding, officious, and escorts me up the hill.
I lie awake a long time that night. The storm’s gone through, the air’s rinsed and cool, the house asleep around me. Through my window I can see the guest cabin across the dark.
His light’s on till two.
I know, because mine is too.