Chapter Sixteen – Crew
In the early morning light, I turn to go, hoping to fend off more small-town rumors. The universe, which has a timing I both resent and respect, chooses then to make my phone vibrate. I glance down. David.
Of course.
Bailey watches my face shift. “You can get it.”
“It’s nothing,” I lie.
“It’s not nothing,” she says gently. “Take it.”
I swipe. “Hey.”
“You see PR’s email?” David’s voice is all brass tacks and calendar invites. “We’ll loop local press into the story hour. Soft optics. Good for rehab narrative.”
“No press,” I say immediately.
“Crew—”
“No press,” I repeat, quieter, in a voice I don’t use with anyone else. “This is for kids. Not for cameras.”
He exhales sharp. “You’re leaving juice on the table.”
“I’m leaving room for breathing.” I look at Bailey.
She isn’t listening, not exactly. She’s giving me privacy by staring very hard at the window we just fixed, lips pressed together like she’s studying a text only she can see.
“Set it up with the school only,” I tell him.
“Make it easy. If they say no, we don’t do it. ”
Silence, the kind that means he’s reorganizing his strategy. “Fine,” he says at last, clipped. “But you’re throwing for the official team doc and GM in Nashville on Monday. No more delays.”
“I’ll be there,” I say, and my chest answers yes and no at the same time.
I hang up. She looks at me. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I did,” I say simply. “I can do noise. I won’t do it to you.”
Something shifts in her face—relief, thank you, a new kind of trust. She steps close, palms on my ribs, not pulling me in and somehow pulling me in. “You’re dangerous when you’re good,” she says.
“Working on being consistently dangerous,” I say, because if I don’t joke, I’ll say something like I’d burn it down before I let it touch you, and that’s too much for a weeknight.
We walk back to the spiral, to the landing where we pretend good night is easy. She catches my hand on the rail, presses a kiss to the knuckles—light, devastating—and says, “Go home before our reckless seconds turn into days.”
I go. Barely.
I wake at 5:12 a.m. to rain interrogating the roof.
The storm arrived early, slanting in off the bay with opinions.
The rehab band hangs off the chair’s arm where I left it.
I loop it around a porch post and start the routine Marcus wants.
Rotations. Holds. Slow burn. I count breaths, not reps, because I am training a different muscle too—the one that chooses patience when my whole history begs for a sprint.
By eight, I’m soaked and happy and on my way to the shop with two coffees and a crooked grin.
She opens at the exact second I knock, like a magnet and steel.
We spend the morning making the kind of weather people could live inside: story hour at ten (the otter is a diva and demands grapes), a line of tiny raincoats, one dad who cries at the last page and pretends it’s dust. Between the chaos, we exchange small looks that carry the weight of last night’s seven seconds.
I’m no good at hiding. She’s getting worse at it, too.
At noon, a text from Marcus.
Marcus: Doc wants velocity video. Tomorrow by 3.
I shoot him a thumbs-up and a thirty-second clip of a clean throw into the net on the side lot. The shoulder sings on the follow-through, not pain, not warning—just the memory of how good it can be. I send it and picture the doc nodding in a room full of slow computers.
At two, the storm flexes. Wind shouldering the door. Windows rattling like a choir. Bailey looks up, and I’m already at the back entrance, checking the latch we fixed and verifying that the shim held.
“You okay?” I ask.
“I like thunderstorms,” she says bravely. “But they can still scare me.”
She then adds, “Stay until it passes?”
“You couldn’t move me with a forklift.”
We light candles even though the lights haven’t flickered yet.
We make cocoa. She puts on a record with crackles that sound like a campfire.
We talk about nothing that matters and everything that does: the first book that broke us open, the first coach who yelled in a way that made us smaller, the places our parents got it right, and the things we forgive because it makes room for peace.
My knee ends up against hers. She draws absent circles on my shin with her socked toe and doesn’t seem to know she’s doing it.
I file the moment under reasons I don’t care if the stadium forgets my name.
The power flickers twice and holds. The storm swears and moves north like it lost interest in us. We stand at the window and watch the bay calm down, the surface smoothing its dress like it’s about to go somewhere fancy and lie about what it did all afternoon.
The door opens then without the bell—Rowan, dripping, grinning, carrying two boxes over his head.
“Rescue drop,” he declares. “Mom sent soup. I brought scones. Also news. The Chronicle wants a quote about ‘the quarterback’s community outreach of literacy excellence,’ and I hate that sentence so much I came in person. ”
Bailey blinks. “You walked here in that?”
“Heroically,” he says. “Give me a towel and deny me nothing.”
We feed him, mock him, compose a fake quote that is 100 percent just adjectives, then delete it because our mothers raised us better. He leaves trailing puddles and goodwill.
When the door shuts, the shop moans. Bailey leans on the counter, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “I used to think storms were interruptions,” she says softly. “This one feels like permission.”
“Permission for what?”
“To stop bracing,” she says. “To choose.”
I don’t touch her. I don’t speak. I let her choose.
Her hands find my face, my jaw, my mouth, and the beam sweeps, and the record crackles, and if patience is a holy language, then we’re fluent enough to invent our own dialect.
We keep the number. We break it and reset it.
We stop while we both still can and call it a win that feels cruel and exactly right.
Bailey’s hands linger at my jaw for a second longer, like they didn’t get the memo. Her thumb traces the corner of my mouth before it falls away, and I swear the record skips just from the shock of losing her touch.
The lighthouse beam sweeps across the front windows again, pale and slow, and the whole shop exhales like it’s been watching us.
“I should…” She clears her throat and straightens, palms smoothing down the front of her sweater. “Um. Check the windows one more time. Make sure we don’t wake up to a saltwater aquarium in the reading nook.”
Her voice shakes on the joke.
“Yeah,” I say, even though I don’t move. “Good plan.”
We orbit each other for a minute, both pretending to care about anything that isn’t the fact that we just stopped before we both did something we wouldn’t be able to walk back from.
She goes to the big front windows, testing the latch with deft fingers. I go to the back door, check the deadbolt, and flip the sign even though we locked up twenty minutes ago.
The storm pelts the glass, wind howling down the alley like it’s trying out for the ghost tour. Thunder rumbles low, close enough to vibrate the framed prints on the wall.
When I turn back, she’s standing in the middle of the shop, arms wrapped around herself, staring at the ceiling like it might have answers hidden between the beams.
“You okay?” I ask quietly.
Her eyes flick to mine. “I keep thinking about the power going out,” she says. “And how the emergency lights don’t always kick back on. And then it’s just me, alone with the ghosts and the romance section.”
“You’re not alone,” I say, before I can swallow it back.
The words hang there. Bigger than I meant them to be.
Her mouth tips up on one side. “Right now, I’m not.”
Something in my chest knocks hard against my ribs. “How bad is it supposed to get?” I ask, nodding toward the storm.
She blows out a breath. “Worse before it gets better. The weather alert said the bridge might close if the wind gusts stay this high. I was going to sleep upstairs.” She nods toward the stairwell that leads to her little loft apartment over the shop.
“Figured I’d beat the rush on the highway and avoid hydroplaning into the bay. ”
I picture her small space upstairs—books stacked three deep on every surface, that tiny kitchenette, the lumpy couch she swears is “perfectly fine.” I picture her up there alone while the wind shakes the glass and the whole building hums.
I don’t like it.
“You sure you’re okay up there by yourself?” I ask, trying to sound casual and failing miserably.
Her gaze flicks to my mouth, then to my hands, then back up. “You offering to tuck me in, Wright?”
My brain shorts out for a second. “I—no. I mean, yes. Not like that. Unless you… I just meant—”
Her laugh is soft, tired, fond. “I know what you meant.”
The record on the turntable reaches the end and clicks, the needle bumping lightly in the groove. She doesn’t move to fix it, and neither do I. The silence feels louder as the storm rages outside.
“Stay,” she says suddenly.
I blink. “Here?”
“No, at the gas station,” she says dryly, then softens. “Yes, here. The couch pulls out.” She tilts her head toward the stairs again. “You shouldn’t drive in this. And I… would feel better knowing I’m not the only one listening to the pipes rattle and wondering if the roof is going to peel off.”
“Bailey—”
“Just stay,” she says, voice quieter now, the joke falling away. “It doesn’t have to mean anything we’re not ready for it to mean.”
I could make a stupid joke. I could say something about needing to check on the horses at the farm, throw up a shield of responsibility. That’s what I’ve been doing for years—hiding behind duty, behind schedules, behind reasons.
But I remember her fingers on my jaw, the way she said permission to choose.
And how good it felt to let her.
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll stay.”
Relief washes over her face so naked and bright that it hits me in the throat.