Chapter Two- Ivy #2
We hop down the street to the bookstore, where the air tastes like paper and hope.
Bailey’s pride and joy. I trail my fingers over spines, whisper hello to the section where my music sits in glossy coffee table collections I pretend not to notice, and end up in front of a shelf of essayists.
I pick up a book about living slower and laugh under my breath.
Bailey appears at my elbow like a well-meaning ghost. “That one made me cry on a Tuesday and then bake bread.”
“High praise.”
“You a paperback or hardcover girl?” she asks, already reaching.
“Paperback,” I say, then lower my voice like I’m confessing. “And I dog-ear.”
“To jail with you,” she says, solemn. “But I’ll visit.”
I add two books to the stack—one about beekeeping because I’m a chameleon now, apparently, and one about small towns because I want to see if it gets this right—and hand Rowan the bag when it’s time to check out. He takes it like he was waiting to have a reason to carry something for me.
We make it three storefronts before Bailey hooks her thumb over her shoulder. “Surprise,” she says to me. “No telling.”
“I’m right here,” Rowan notes, dry as a pasture in August.
“Then stop having ears,” she shoots back, and links her arm through mine. “Come on. He can survive twenty minutes without us.”
We duck into a shop that is absolutely not for him—linen dresses and sun-faded straw hats and a rack of swimsuits that make me break out in hives just looking at them—but Bailey beelines to the corner where a vintage record player sits atop an antique dresser.
She drops the needle on Fleetwood Mac and tilts her chin toward my tote.
“Tell me you have a love of records like me.”
I blink. “How did you—”
“Because I am prescient.” She pulls a little card from behind the player and holds it up. Loaner Program. “Pick a player and five records. Keep them for a week. Trade for another.”
“Is that legal?”
She shrugs. “It’s Coral Bell legal.”
I choose a player, the color of sea glass with an arrangement of blue grass and classic rock records, Bailey scribbles my name on the card, and I walk out with a kind of fizz in my chest that has nothing to do with pastry sugar.
Outside, the light is brighter. Or maybe I am because nothing sounds as good as a vinyl record.
We find Rowan on the bench by the planter, one ankle crossed over a knee, paper coffee cup turning in his hands. He looks up as we approach and stands immediately, like he wasn’t comfortable without us in his line of sight.
“You rob them blind?” he asks, nodding at the player's case.
“Sanctioned robbery,” Bailey says. “We’re cultivating taste.”
“Coral Bell legal,” I add, smug now that I understand the joke.
He shakes his head. “Let’s get you back before you start quoting bylaws.”
We walk the boardwalk before we leave, because I ask and because he says yes even though I can tell he’s not a strolling man.
The bay is a sheet of hammered metal in this light, sun biting at the crests.
A dog barrels after a tennis ball, then decides the real prize is attention, demanding scratches like payment.
Rowan obliges. Of course, he does.
We lean on the railing. I tilt my head back, breathing this. Bailey snaps a photo of the view and then—because she’s not subtle—one of me with a slice of Rowan’s jaw in the frame.
“Evidence,” she says, not sorry.
“For what?” I ask, even though the answer buzzes under my skin.
“That you looked happy on a Sunday,” she says simply. “You can forget, you know? Photographic proof helps.”
We leave before the sun gets bossy. Rowan drives, one hand at twelve o’clock, the other on his thigh. My gaze drifts there once. Okay, twice. I tug at the frayed edges of my shorts.
“You good?” he asks quietly, eyes on the road.
“Better than I should be,” I admit.
He nods like that’s a thing he understands.
Back at the farm, he unloads the record player and my book bag as if he’s not cataloging every new thing I’ve just set inside his life. We’re halfway to the cottage when my phone dings.
Publicist (Mara):
Zoom at 3p your time? Quick and painless .
Celeste:
Confirmed you for 2p CST. Join the link below.
I type one response.
Me:
3p works. Thirty minutes, that’s all I have .
I don’t reply to my mother. The old reflex to obey crackles and snaps, but I step away from it like a live wire.
“Work?” Rowan asks.
“Zoom at three.” I grimace. “I’ll keep it short.”
“You need the big house Wi-Fi?”
“The cottage is fine.” I hesitate. “Thank you. For making space for me to… not run.”
He tips his chin, eyes searching mine like he wants to check the ground before he nods. “You don’t owe me anything.”
“Not owing and not being grateful aren’t opposites,” I say, because maybe he needs to hear it. Maybe I do.
Something in his face shifts—pleased, wary, soft. He pushes the cottage door open and leaves me on the threshold with a brand-new-to-me record player and a new appreciation for small-town life.
“See you later,” he says.
I watch him walk away until the oak eats him, then sit cross-legged on the rug and listen to Stevie Nicks tell me not to chain my heart. I make a cup of lemon water. I read five pages without absorbing a single word. At 2:59, I click a link.
Mara’s face fills my screen—neat bun, cat-eye liner, smile like a solution.
“You look… peaceful,” she says, surprised and delighted. “It’s unsettling. In a good way.”
“I’m doing a rural immersion program,” I deadpan.
“Great. Think we can monetize it?”
We run down the list—deliverables, the three interviews I need to reschedule, and a charity gala I was somehow on the poster for despite not agreeing to attend.
Mara promises to deflect, delay, and de-escalate.
She uses words like window and reset and creative space . She asks if I’m writing. I don’t lie.
“Not yet,” I say, tracing a circle in the condensation of my glass. “But there’s humming.”
“Good enough.” She leans closer. “Also, you should know that the internet thinks you’re on an enlightenment retreat in Idaho. Shh. Don’t correct them.”
I laugh. “Bless the internet’s geography.”
The call ends without stress lodged behind my eyes. That in itself feels like a minor miracle. I sit with it. Then I stand because my body remembers a different kind of ritual I haven’t had in months.
I take the record off the player and slide it back into its sleeve. And then I bait fate by walking up to the main house at dusk.
His porch is all long shadows and soft sounds—wind through leaves, insects tuning up, a distant laugh that could be a neighbor or a fox. The screen door is propped with a smooth river rock. I tap my knuckles anyway.
“It’s open,” he calls from somewhere inside.
The kitchen is small and clean in that unfussy way—no matching canister sets, just a line of jars and a wooden spoon that’s earned its keep.
Rowan stands at the stove in a gray T-shirt and jeans, bare feet, a dish towel slung over his shoulder like it’s a uniform.
He turns when I hover in the doorway and does a quick once-over, eyes catching on the clean hoodie I quickly snag off the counter like it pleases him against his will.
“Tomato sandwiches?” he asks. “Got good ones at the market this morning.”
“You’re speaking a love language I didn’t know I had.”
He gestures with the knife. “Wash up and slice the other one. Salt’s in the pinch bowl.”
We move around each other like we’ve done this a dozen times instead of zero.
I wash the tomato, slice it carefully and thinly, then salt it like he said.
He toasts the bread and lays down a scandalous amount of mayo without shame.
We build something perfect between two palms, then carry plates out to the back steps, where the light turns everything it touches into memory.
I bite. I close my eyes. Rowan makes a small sound that could be a laugh if he were the laughing-out-loud type.
“Okay,” I say when I can speak again. “This is… indecent.”
“Don’t tell the nutritionist.”
“She’s already crying somewhere,” I say through a second bite.
We eat like people who worked for it, knees almost touching, shoulder to shoulder, but not quite.
That hum comes back—the one that feels like it starts in the chest and lives in the wrists.
His free hand rests on his thigh, fingers splayed, and I have to look away because the very idea of those fingers on me makes my blood do tiny irresponsible fireworks.
After dinner, he rinses the plates. I dry. The domestic choreography would terrify my PR team and thrill my therapist. When the last fork clinks into the drawer, the power blinks—not off, just a hiccup—and the house sighs.
“Storm later,” Rowan says, glancing at the window. “You hear it in the way the air sits on the trees.”
“You got poetic about geese,” I remind him. “Now the trees, too? Dangerous.”
“Don’t tell anyone,” he says, lips tipping.
We step onto the porch just as the first rush of wind rattles the oak.
The air is heavier. The world feels like it’s inhaled and is waiting to decide what to do with the breath.
A strand of my hair whips into my mouth, and I laugh, tugging it free.
Rowan reaches out—impulse, instinct—and tucks another behind my ear with a touch so careful that my knees consider giving out on principle.
“Thanks,” I say, breath not fully back.
He drops his hand like he remembered himself half a second too late. “You, uh… You need anything tonight? I can leave the truck if you want to run down to town in the morning.”
“I’m good,” I say. “Bailey said she’ll abduct me at ten for something called ‘market triage.’”
“Sounds legit.”
A flicker of lightning threads the clouds far off, silent for now.
We watch it. I think about the woman who couldn’t hear herself think in a glass apartment high above the noise, and about this one making lists that include tomatoes and records and learning the weather by the way a tree’s leaves turn their bellies up.
“Rowan?” I say, before I decide it’s a bad idea.
“Hmm?”
“Thank you. Not just for the big stuff. For… the little ordinary things. The coffee. The Post-it. The hoodie. The fence. The sandwich. Those feel…” I search for a word that isn’t like oxygen, because that will get me sent to a feelings monastery. “They feel like anchors.”
He goes still in that listening way he has. When he looks at me, something unguarded crosses his face and stays. “You’re welcome,” he says, like he means it from his bones. “You can keep the hoodie, by the way.”
My heart does the irresponsible thing again. “Dangerous offer.”
“Figured it’d save me a trip to the hook.”
We stand there until the first rumble makes itself known, a low roll that feels in my feet before it reaches my ears. He steps back like he doesn’t trust himself to stay put if he stays close. I step down because I don’t trust myself either.
“Good night, Rowan.”
“Good night, Ivy.”
The walk to the cottage is short and a little wild—wind playing with the ends of my hair, leaves whispering, and air electric with maybe.
I close the door behind me and press my back to it, then grin into the dark like a person who has accidentally stumbled into her own life.
I drop the needle on “Landslide” and crawl into bed with a book I don’t read.
Outside, the storm thinks about it. Inside, I do, too.
It’s only the second day. I am not supposed to feel this… full.
But I do. And for the first time in a long time, I don’t apologize to myself for it.