Chapter 19 #2
I kicked him under the table. “He’s finishing his residency, and Joe offered to drive me down to surprise him.
My boyfriend. Only he wasn’t expecting me, and…
Well, anyway, we broke up. But it’s graduation weekend, right?
So I didn’t have anyplace to stay, and I had too much to drink, and Joe—being such a good friend—came and got me, and…
There’s only one bed—like, a sofa bed—so we, um… shared.”
I trailed off because, okay, that was a lot. I’d never met these people before. Joe’s friends. I was probably embarrassing him. Also myself.
James nodded. “Pity fuck.”
Elena bumped him with her shoulder. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
Heat swept from my chest to my hairline. I didn’t dare look at Joe. “More like a sympathy cuddle,” I said.
“Too bad,” Elena said. “We’ve been trying to get Joe back out there since the divorce.”
I did look at him then, which was a mistake, because he had the barest quirk at the corner of his mouth.
His brown hair was sticking up in all directions, as if he’d run his hands through it after taking off his construction hat, and his eyes…
You could fall into those eyes, dark and deep.
Something pulsed low and warm inside me.
I reached again blindly for my pizza. Chris and I had just broken up.
I could not be feeling feelings for Joe.
Anyway, if I did, I couldn’t act on them.
“Maybe he needs more time,” I said through a mouthful of crust.
“It’s been two years,” Kelsey pointed out.
I chewed. Swallowed. Honestly, I agreed with her. Two years was a long time to be alone. Why hadn’t Joe moved on? He’d never said he was over his ex-wife, only that they wanted different things. Was he still bitter? Hoping she’d come to her senses? Secretly nursing a broken heart?
“I’ve been busy,” he said.
“You could be busier,” Kelsey said, “if you took those commissions I keep offering you.”
He shook his head at her. There was a history, a subtext there I was totally missing.
“The problem, bro, is you have no game,” James said, equally clueless or simply better at diffusing tension.
“Joe doesn’t need game,” Elena said. “He’s hot.”
He smiled at her, wry and affectionate. “I live with my mom and my little sister on an island with a year-round population of six hundred people. I don’t get a lot of opportunities to play.”
“Dude. You’re a summer destination location. You could get so much vacation booty.”
“That’s not what he wants,” I said.
They all looked at me.
Elena cocked her head. “Okay. What does he want?”
A house. Children.
I opened my mouth. Shut it. Joe was always so contained. Private. It felt like a betrayal of confidence to blurt out stuff he’d said to me, even over pizza with his friends.
“Another beer,” Joe said. An answer? A question? Or maybe just an attempt to change the subject.
“Thanks.” His shoulder brushed mine as he reached for the pitcher, and a shiver ran up my arm. “So,” I said to Elena in a chipper voice, like I was totally unaffected by his closeness. “Tell me how you two met. Is there some dating app for carpenters? Like, Tinder for Timber?”
“There should be!” Elena said. She deepened her voice and intoned, “When you’re looking for wood…”
James guffawed.
“Speaking of carpentry,” Kelsey said, “we got some really good stuff today—Douglas fir joists, maple flooring, all virgin hardwood. Cured, hardened, super durable.”
Impossible not to think…what I was thinking. Joe’s mouth quirked. I looked away to keep from laughing.
“Joe made a sofa table,” I said. “Out of barn wood. It’s beautiful.”
“He could do a lot more if he’d make it a priority.”
“Gallagher’s is my priority. My bread-and-butter business,” Joe said evenly, but something in his voice—a roughness, a snag—made me look at him again in sudden doubt.
“Isn’t your last name Gallagher?” Kelsey asked me.
I cleared my throat. “That’s right. Rob Gallagher was my father.”
“Really,” Elena said in an interested voice.
Kelsey frowned. “I keep telling Joe he needs to start doing things for himself. Invest more on the design side. But…” She shrugged. “You know Joe. He’s stubborn.”
I nodded. Stubborn sounded right.
But know him? There was still so much that was a mystery to me. So much I wanted to learn.
—
“I like your friends,” I said when I finished brushing my teeth.
Kelsey had already disappeared into her bedroom, leaving Joe and me to take turns in the bathroom. It was weirdly intimate, this pseudo-domestic routine we’d fallen into. Like playing house.
He looked up from straightening the covers on the bed. Shoot. I should have made up the couch before I left the apartment.
“They liked you,” he said.
I felt my smile widen. “You think?”
“Anne.” His voice was patient. I tried not to notice how much I liked it, the sound of my name in his voice. “Everybody likes you.”
“Because I’m friendly.”
“Because you see the best in people.”
It was a compliment. A good one. I flushed with pleasure.
“Thanks. But that’s not the same as having real, true friends.
It’s different on Mackinac. I mean, when there are only four girls your age in the entire school, you kind of have to be friends.
It’s hard when you’re new on campus and you don’t know anybody and you have no practice making friends.
Harder when you graduate and everybody you meet is working or paired up or both.
My housemates live in Colorado now. My best friend at work totally let me down. If it wasn’t for Daanis…”
I choked. Bad enough he knew my bed-making skills sucked. I didn’t need to tell him what a mess I’d made of things with my best friend.
“If it wasn’t for Daanis…” he prompted.
I pulled out my phone to see if she’d responded to my dinner text. Had she thought of me at all? Had Chris? “Dang. My battery’s gone.”
Joe held out his hand. “Let me charge that for you.”
“Thanks. You’re a useful guy to have around.” I surrendered my phone, my brain drifting back to something Kelsey had said. “Joe, why did you take the job this weekend?”
He plugged in my phone without answering.
I puffed out a breath. “You don’t give away much, do you? I noticed it at dinner. You don’t like to talk about yourself.”
He ran a hand through his thick hair, still matted from wearing a hard hat all day. “I don’t have that much to say.”
“Unlike me. I talk all the time.”
His mouth twitched in acknowledgment. “Makes it easier for me.”
“Because I don’t let you get a word in edgewise?”
“Because you ask questions. It’s easier for me to respond than to come up with stuff myself. Besides, I like listening to you. Seeing the way your mind works.”
His words sank into me, as warm as the sound of my name in his voice. I snorted. “Great. I have entertainment value.”
“You do. But also, you’re interesting. Smart.”
“So are you.”
He rubbed the back of his neck, as if there was a tension there. “I never went to college.”
It was another card laid down in this not-a-game we were playing, another opening into Joe. He’d always seemed so sure of himself, of his choices.
“Education doesn’t have anything to do with intelligence,” I said. Trying to ease the tension, to erase the furrow in his brow. “Did you…Do you want to go to college?”
He shook his head. “Makes no difference to me. Not now. But I guess it does for some people.”
“Who?” I demanded. “Not anyone whose opinion matters. Your friends like you. They respect you.”
“Because we work well together. But we don’t…I don’t open up with them. It’s all pretty much about the job. Surface-level stuff.”
My heart contracted and then swelled. Because this was not surface level. Joe—self-sufficient, self-assured—was in some ways as isolated as I was. But he’d opened up with me.
I swayed closer, mesmerized by the grains of sawdust caught in his beard. By his lips. By his eyes. “You know you have the power to change that, right? If you want to. Your friends would probably love to know you better.” I would love to know you better.
He gave me another of those near smiles, but there was no amusement in it, more of a wry self-recognition. “I figure the less people know, the less they can…” He hesitated.
“What? Tell me.”
“Be disappointed.”
My mouth jarred open. “That is a load of horse manure,” I said when my jaw was working again. “You’ve never disappointed anybody in your life. Everyone relies on you. Your sister. Your mother. Heck, my mother. And my dad.”
He shrugged. Unconvinced. And maybe using my words wasn’t enough, I thought, searching his face.
“Joe…” I set my palm against his cheek, learning his texture, and his gaze darkened. His jaw flexed.
He took a step back. “I should shower.”
The words dashed over me like cold water. “Okay.”
He cleared his throat. “It’s been a long day. For both of us.”
My brain scrambled. “Yeah, for sure.”
Hoo boy. I expelled my breath as he disappeared into the bathroom, carrying his kit.
I wasn’t a rejected seventeen-year-old anymore.
I was old enough now—wasn’t I?—to appreciate his restraint.
“Nothing wrong with a pity fuck,” his friends had said.
But I wasn’t looking for rebound sex. For almost three years, I’d believed Chris was the One, seeing only what I wanted to see, overlooking or ignoring any signs to the contrary.
I wasn’t about to make the same mistake with Joe.
Especially when I couldn’t be sure of his feelings.
It would be a long, awkward drive home if I got this wrong.
I started digging in my suitcase before I noticed my sleep shirt and shorts, neatly folded at the foot of the sofa bed. Joe. My face flamed at the thought of his big hands all over my pajamas.
The water hissed on in the bathroom. Hastily, I stripped and changed.
Should I stand around in my little shorts or get into bed?
I felt stupid lurking, waiting for him. I got under the blanket, leaving on the lamp on his side.
And then flopped around, listening to the sound of the water.
Imagining him reaching for the soap, washing his hair… whatever he was doing in there naked.
He came out of the bathroom, silhouetted against the night-light, wearing boxers and a T-shirt that hugged his chest and stomach. Bare feet. Hairy thighs. I tried not to ogle as he flipped back the covers and got in beside me. The mattress dipped under his weight.
It would be so easy to roll toward him.
I lay on my back, staring up at the ceiling as he turned off the lamp. My brain whirred. I should go to sleep. I could pretend to sleep.
He smelled like soap. I resisted the urge to bury my nose in his neck, chasing his scent. Friends, he’d said at dinner. We were friends.
“Well.” I exhaled. “This is awkward.”
“The only-one-bed trope.”
He remembered!
“Exactly.” Leading to embarrassment and unresolved sexual tension. I shifted my legs restlessly. “I haven’t had a sleepover since college.”
There was a weighted silence. “You and Dr. Dick didn’t…”
“Well, obviously we did. Sleep together. But it’s different when you’re having sex with someone.”
“It would be,” he agreed.
A thought occurred to me. “It’s not that I’m worried you’ll try anything. I mean, you didn’t last night.”
“Last night, you’d been drinking.”
“I’m sober tonight.” I bit my lip. Did that sound like an invitation? Was it one?
“That’s good.”
My breath stuttered. “Yeah?”
“No hangover,” he explained. “And you won’t snore.”
“I did not snore! I don’t. Do I?” The bed shook slightly. I raised on one elbow. “Are you laughing at me?”
His eyes glinted in the dark. His hair gleamed from his shower. I wanted to touch it. His mouth curved. “Maybe. A little.”
“Humph.” I flung myself back down on my pillow.
“I told you, I like listening to you.”
A long silence, steeped in intimacy.
“So, are you going to kiss me good night or what?” I closed my eyes. Stupid, stupid, stupid…
His voice grated in his throat. “Bad idea.”
I nodded. Not that it was going to take me two years to get over my breakup, but it had only been twenty-four hours. Much too soon / too complicated for me to be throwing myself at my childhood nemesis/crush.
I wriggled under the covers, trying to get comfortable, the texture of the sheets chafing my bare legs.
“Do you want me to kiss you?” Joe asked.
Yes. “Only if you want to.”
His gravelly laugh scraped something deep inside me.
The mattress springs squeaked under his weight as he turned and raised himself over me.
His head bent over mine. His big hand pushed back my hair, cradling the side of my face.
His palms were slightly calloused, his breath warm, his beard rough.
Softly, he kissed my forehead, my nose, my cheek and—finally!
finally!—my mouth. Gently. No tongue, only lips and breath and warmth.
My brain went blessedly quiet as I sank into the moment, feeling, not thinking, absorbing his flavor, mint toothpaste and Joe.
Heaven. His hand hovered at the side of my breast. Stopped.
He rolled away, but not before I felt it, felt him, a hot brush, a press against my thigh. “Good night,” he said in a husky voice.
I sighed, at once revved up and relaxed, reluctant to let the kiss and the moment go. “Did I make things weird?”
His chest surged. “Not weird. Just…”
“Hard?” I suggested.
“Go to sleep, Anne,” he said firmly, but amusement shook his voice.
I grinned, relieved, turning on my side toward him.
He’d rested one forearm across his brow, watching me from under its shadow, but I could see him smiling, even in the dark.
I waggled my eyebrows. He shook his head.
For some reason, we both started laughing, silently, and the more we tried to stop, the worse it got, until I was snorting and the bed creaked with our suppressed hilarity.
“Can you keep it down?” Kelsey yelled from her bedroom.
We froze like guilty children caught playing with the lights out, and then I snickered. “Can you?”
Which set us off again, the awkwardness dissolving into laughter. When we stopped, the tension was transmuted, the silence no less full but infinitely deeper.
“Good night,” I whispered.
I’d always thought I knew exactly what I wanted. I’d seen my path shining straight and unbroken in front of me. But what if I’d been wrong about my destination all along?
Why couldn’t I simply accept where I was? Why was I still yearning? Not for the island, not for Chicago or Colorado or Paris, but for someplace I’d only visited in dreams or between the pages of a book. My Neverland. My Narnia. The place where I would, at last, belong.