Chapter 31 #2
He raised a hand. I threw both arms over my head and waved back enthusiastically, tears springing to my eyes.
I’d missed him so much. I clattered down the ferry stairs.
But when I reached the ramp, I slowed, suddenly nervous.
Joe stood stiffly, watching me approach.
His hair was rumpled, his face unreadable.
Until I saw the warmth in his eyes.
I crouched down to greet Honey, who rushed to me with all the naked exuberance Joe didn’t show. I fussed over the dog, lavishing her with the attention I longed to give to Joe, and then straightened.
“Hi,” I said, my heart pounding.
“I brought the dray,” he said.
Not the words I’d driven more than four hundred miles to hear, but he was here. That had to mean something.
He cleared his throat. “Maddie told me you had some things. Thought you could use a hand.”
Everything inside me softened. He was so good at showing up. At helping out. But I wanted—needed—more. “Thanks.”
“Zack let me know you were on board. I wasn’t sure when you’d get in.”
“You could have texted me.”
He tucked his hands into his armpits, his brow furrowed. Trying to gauge my mood. “Didn’t think you’d want to hear from me.”
“You were wrong about that.”
A smile ghosted around his mouth. “I’ve been wrong about a couple things. But what I’ve got to say, I wanted to say in person.”
Our eyes met.
And, oh, that smile…That smile gave me hope. I wanted to launch myself at him. I was brimming with things I wanted to tell him, dying to share the feelings spilling out of me.
I dammed them up. Giving him time to make up his mind, to have his say. Desperately wanting him to take the first step, to make the first move. Not just for me, but for him. I knew my heart. I needed Joe to be sure of his.
He shifted his feet. Glanced at the crowds. At the wagon driver.
“Hey, Joe.”
“Zack.”
And before I could fling myself into Joe’s arms, he was pulling Zack into a one-armed man hug, complete with a slap on the back.
“Got your freight right here,” Zack said. To me? To Joe?
And after that it was all lifting and loading.
“Ride or walk?” Tom, the driver, asked when everything was on the dray.
“I’ll ride,” Joe said before I could answer.
I gave him an are-you-kidding-me? face.
He shrugged, almost apologetically. “Tom will help with the boxes.”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
Which is how we ended up three across on the carriage seat, Tom and Joe and me, with Honey panting on the load behind us.
The horse-drawn cart plodded slowly up the hill, my thigh touching Joe’s, his shoulder hard against mine, while my heart sped at a million miles an hour.
My head filled with the clop of hooves—Tell me, tell me—and the jingle of harness—Now, now.
“What I’ve got to say, I wanted to say in person.”
Probably not in front of Tom, though.
He pulled the wagon around back, close to the workshop. We off-loaded in the shelter of the overhang. Inside, I was dancing with impatience.
“Thank you!” I called.
Tom raised his hand in salute and flicked the reins.
Joe hefted a carton. “Where do you want these?”
“Oh. Inside. In the workshop. Did I thank you for cleaning up Dad’s mess?” I flushed. “Well, my mess, really. I was trying to—”
“You need to show me where this goes,” Joe said.
“Now?” I swallowed. “Don’t you have something you wanted to say first?”
“No, yeah.” He shifted the box in his arms. Ran a hand through his messy brown hair.
I held my breath.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You…What?”
“What you said the other night…I should’ve…” He looked away and then back, his eyes dark and direct. “You were right. When you told me I need to move on. I’m sorry.”
“Oh,” I said faintly.
He frowned. Not the reaction he was hoping for, apparently. Well, that made us even.
“I can grovel,” he said. “If you want.”
I gaped. “Sorry, what?”
His jaw set. “Hailey said you’d like it. Because of that book. It’s a—what did you call it?—romance trope.”
A smile bubbled up inside me. “Well, I do.” It sounded like a vow. I bit my lip. “Like it, I mean.”
“Anne, I…” He cleared his throat. Hefted the box in his arms. “I should get this inside.”
Like a man who’d lost his nerve or had something better to do. I sighed and followed him into my dad’s workshop, flipping on the lights.
And there, illuminated in the light from the windows, was a desk. A new desk. My father’s bench top with my name carved into one leg, but resized, reimagined, repurposed into a graceful sweep of finished wood with a curve to hold a computer and drawers supporting one side.
I let my hands drift over the polished surface, as if to prove to myself it was real. Touched the place where Dad had carved my name. anne.
It was everything I wanted. But it was better, more, because of Joe. Tears blurred my eyes and thickened my throat. “How did you know?” I whispered.
He shrugged and set down the box of my books on the floor. “You’re a writer.”
“Not much of a writer yet.”
He tucked his hands under his arms. “You’ve got to have the right tools. You told me you needed a desk. Your own space. Enough room.”
My mind flashed back to Chicago, to whispered confidences in the dark, when I’d told Joe there was no space for me in Chris’s life. That we only fit together as long as I didn’t take up too much room.
And Joe remembered. He’d listened. My heart swelled.
I touched the desk again, unable to resist. “It’s perfect.”
“When you leave, you can take it with you. A piece of your father. He would have been so proud of you.”
The tears spilled over. I shook my head. “It’s not just my dad. It’s you.” My father’s bench, my father’s love, carved into the wood, given new shape by Joe’s work, Joe’s hands, Joe’s heart.
“You have a piece of me already.”
“Do I?” I asked breathlessly.
Joe took my hand and held it over his chest. “Here.” His heart thudded, strong and steady, against my palm. “You take it wherever you go.”
My fingers curled into his shirt. I pulled myself up, standing on tiptoe to kiss him. His mouth was warm and sure on mine as his arms came around me.
“I’d have a hard time moving that in Mom’s car,” I said. His lips quirked. “The desk,” I clarified.
“It comes apart.”
I grinned. “Of course it does.”
Because that was Joe. He was good at making things fit, at making things work. But I was a smart girl. I could figure out how to make things work, too.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I told him. “Not for the next nine months. Maybe longer. Beverly Powell is planning to retire in another year. They’ll be looking for a new English teacher. If everything works out, maybe they’ll want me.”
Joe’s deep brown gaze fixed on mine. “Is that what you want?”
“Maybe.” I swallowed. “I think so. I’m sorry.”
He frowned. “Why? You haven’t done anything to be sorry for.”
“Because I can’t give you what you want.”
“Anne…You are what I want.”
A relieved sob escaped me. But even as we kissed again, my brain would not be silenced.
“No, see, you asked me, ‘Then what?’ ” I said as our lips pulled apart. “And the truth is, I don’t know. I thought I knew. I had all these dreams, and nothing has turned out exactly the way I planned.”
“I like your dreams. I like you. I love you. And if you love me for the rest of the school year or the rest of our lives, I will never be sorry. You make my whole world bigger, brighter. You make me a better man. But, Anne…I want that lifetime. I want that with you.”
I swallowed, hardly daring to believe. “Are you sure? What if I’m not enough? Or I’m too much?”
A corner of his mouth lifted. “You are never too much. And I can’t get enough of you.
” He ran a finger gently under my eyes, catching my tears.
“You said Rob taught you to love. Well, you taught me. With your whole heart, you said. Without holding back. And that’s how I love you, body, heart, and soul, with everything that’s in me, wherever you decide to go, whatever you decide to do.
” He cradled my face in his hands. “I love you, Anne. Maybe I always have. I know I always will. Maybe it’s taken me a while to get there.
It might take longer for me to figure some things out, but I’m here for all of it. I’m here for you.”
“I love that about you, the way you always show up,” I said. “I love you. You make me better, too. Even when I couldn’t count on anything else, I could always count on you.”
“On us.”
I touched his face. “Stalwart Joe.”
His lips quirked. “Fearless Anne.”
I smiled against his mouth. “A new nickname. I think I like it better than the Pest.”
He kissed me again, warm and real and solid, and all our past and all our future was in his kiss, as if we were alone on a hill under the stars or on a lumpy sofa bed in a stranger’s apartment or in a church in front of our family and friends.
We kissed as though we were at the beginning of our story.
Anne of a different island.
Home at last.