26. Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Six
BEN
Midnight, and the cabin’s too small for what I’m feeling.
The storm’s long gone through. The night’s rinsed clean, cool coming off the creek through the cracked window, the whole ranch asleep except the bugs and me.
I’ve showered, cold, on purpose, jerked off like a teenager, and my cock’s still straining against my pants.
I’ve made the bed I’m not in. I’ve drunk one coffee I had no business making at this hour, and I’m standing at the counter contemplating a second because sleep is not gonna happen tonight.
And every time I close my eyes, I’m back in that barn.
Rain on tin. Storm-green light. Ella soaked to the skin in that yellow sundress, her chin coming up while I looked, daring me to keep looking.
The smell of rain and almond. Her breath going ragged at one touch of my thumb, and the sound of it doing more to me than entire nights with other women ever managed.
One inch. I had one inch left, a whole dog’s worth of interruption, and I’ve been vibrating like a struck fence wire ever since.
This has to get handled. That’s what a list is for.
I sit down at the little table with the notebook and a pencil. Clean page. Line down the middle. At the top of the left column I write, in good block letters,
REASONS TO GO HOME.
The month’s up in a week.
She deserves better than a rebound.
Three weeks ago I stood at an altar with another woman. Any man who moves that fast is either a liar or a fool. I’ve been called worse for less, and so would Ella. This town reads.
The Gazette already put her name under one scandal.
Groom flees wedding, takes up with wedding planner, would sell out two print runs and cost her countless bookings. I’d be handing Earl Fisk a sequel.
Caleb’s question.
You know the difference between staying somewhere and hiding somewhere. Do I? Still? Honestly?
Carla.
Unfinished business is unfinished business, and a man should have his ledger clean before he so much as looks at…
I stop writing. The ledger can go to hell.
Start again.
My whole life is two hours north. Family. Work.
I sit back and read the left column. Six items. Every one of them true, weighed, dated. It’s a good list. The best case any sensible man ever assembled against his own heart.
But it isn’t enough.
I read reasons one through six. The month’s up in a week.
So what, says something under my ribs. Arrangements renew.
She deserves better than a rebound. She does.
So be better than a rebound. Take the time.
Do it right. Nobody’s asking you to kiss her tomorrow, just don’t get in a truck and leave her carrying that place alone, don’t be one more person who…
I put the pencil down and rub my face with both hands.
The right column’s REASONS TO STAY, but I leave it blank. Instead, I flip back through the notebook, because a man in my condition at one in the morning makes poor decisions, and I look at what’s already in there.
Page after page. The annex kitchen, drawn to code. The bridal suite with the west dormer. The pole barn. The four-phase creek path with costs against each phase. Winter garland. A second bathroom block. Sketch after sketch in my own careful hand.
There is no version of that bridal suite where she isn’t standing in it, telling me the dormer needs to be four inches wider, being wrong about it, arguing.
There is no version of the creek path where I’m not walking it behind her with a coffee in each hand.
There’s no version of any of it, not one page, not one plan, where I finish the work, shake hands, and drive north.
I’ve drawn myself into every corner of this place.
The five-year plan has her laugh in it. The five-year plan has Sunday dinners in it.
Dolly gone gray at my heel. A bench under a window with her grandmother’s flowers grown wild around it.
I drew the whole thing sober, in daylight, whistling.
The left column never stood a chance.
I get up. Walk the three steps the cabin allows.
At the window, across the dark yard, there’s a light on in the main house.
Second floor, east corner. Her window. Gone one in the morning, and Ella Lockhart’s awake too.
Knowing she’s awake settles me. For one long, unsupervised minute, I think about walking over there.
I get as far as the door. Hand on the latch. Boots already on, because apparently my body’s been planning this without my mind’s say-so.
I stand there, forehead against the doorframe, and make myself think about what I’d be carrying over there at one in the morning.
A man three weeks out of a burned-down wedding, no plan, no patience, nothing settled, wanting her so hard I can’t sleep in a bed I made twice.
She’d open that door. That’s the trouble.
I think she’d open it, and she deserves a man who knocks in daylight with his ledger clean and his intentions written out longhand, not a storm-wrecked idiot who couldn’t hold one inch of discipline past midnight.
Do it right. Take the time. Be better than a rebound.
I take my hand off the latch. It costs me more than the fucking cold shower did.
Back at the table, the notebook’s sitting open to the ruined list, six good reasons lying there like tools nobody wants.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” I tell the cabin. The cabin doesn’t argue, and neither, anymore, do I.
Because the truth is, I’m falling for Ella Lockhart.
I hate that I’m a man who could be ready to marry one woman in June and fall for another by July.
But that’s what’s happened. If I’m being kind to myself, I’d say my relationship with Carla was a fantasy, not real.
I’d say it was wrong from the start, and I shoved my fucking head in the sand not to see it.
But it’s Ella who deserves kindness, not me.
She deserves a better man, someone who’s got his shit together.
She deserves more than I can give, but I can’t walk away.
I pick up the pencil.
Under REASONS TO STAY, I write one word.
Ella.
No strike-through. No second thoughts underneath. Just her name.
I close the notebook and turn off the lamp. Across the dark, up the hill, her light burns on another minute, then goes out, like she felt mine.
A week left in the arrangement.
I’m not going anywhere.