8. Nolan
NOLAN
The first thing I did when I woke up was reach for my phone and put on music.
The second thing I did was turn it down.
I didn’t even realize I’d done it until I was standing in the kitchen, pouring coffee, and noticed the volume was at four instead of my usual fourteen.
My hand had gone to the dial out of habit, but instead of cranking it up the way I always did, I’d dialed it back automatically, like some part of my brain had rewritten the routine overnight.
I glared at the speaker. Then I reached out and turned it up to seven.
Two minutes later, I turned it back down to four.
“What the hell,” I muttered into my coffee.
My bear was relaxed this morning. I knew it was because of the porch conversation last night with Rose. He’d enjoyed sitting in the dark with her while the storm rolled through, talking about real things instead of bickering about noise and driveways. He was calm now because of it. Satisfied.
I was not.
I finished my coffee, grabbed my keys, and headed out.
Delilah’s Café was quiet this early. A couple of regulars at the counter, the morning light slanting through the windows, and the smell of fresh pie that meant she’d been baking since before dawn. I just needed a breakfast sandwich to go. I’d be in and out in two minutes.
“Well, look who it is,” Delilah said from behind the counter before I’d made it three steps inside. “Haven’t seen you in a while. What’s new, honey?”
“Nothing much. Just wanted to get a breakfast sandwich for the road.”
She jotted my usual order down without breaking eye contact and passed it to the cook. “And how are things with that neighbor of yours?”
“Fine.”
“Fine?”
“Yeah. Fine. She’s fine. Everything is fine.”
Delilah set both hands on the counter and leaned forward, that grin spreading across her face like she’d just been handed a gift. “Nolan Bridges, in all the years I’ve known you, I have never once heard you use the word ‘fine’ three times in one sentence.”
“It’s early.”
“It’s not that early.” My sandwich came up, and she passed it to me.
“Thanks for breakfast, Delilah.” I handed her a twenty.
“You’re welcome, honey. Tell your neighbor I said hello.”
I was out the door before she could say another word, but I could feel her grinning at my back all the way to the truck. The woman was a menace. A well-meaning, pie-baking, gossip-fueled menace.
The job that day was a full yard overhaul for a couple on the north end of town.
I pulled up weeds, laid mulch, and trimmed back an overgrown hedge that had merged with their neighbor’s fence.
It was the kind of work that usually emptied my head, let me go on autopilot while my muscles did the thinking.
Today, though, my brain wouldn’t shut up.
I kept replaying everything on the porch last night with Rose.
She’d been different. Not guarded. Not snippy. Just... Rose. And I’d liked that version of her more than I wanted to admit.
My bear rumbled his agreement, and I told him to stay out of it.
By the time I got back to the duplex, the sun was dropping, and my muscles were sore from the day’s work.
Rose’s side of the duplex was quiet. There were no lights visible from the front, which probably meant she was at the desk by the back window, still writing.
She’d probably been at it all day if her pattern held.
I showered, changed, and fired up the grill on the back porch for some burgers, nothing fancy. While I made the patties, I made more than I could eat, so I would have leftovers for lunch tomorrow. Not because I wanted to have company at dinner.
Definitely not.
The grill was hot, and the burgers were smelling good when Rose’s door opened and she stepped onto the porch.
She had her laptop under one arm and her reading glasses pushed up on her head. Her hair was pulled back in a messy knot, and she looked like someone who’d been staring at a screen for eight hours straight—tired with bloodshot eyes, but too wired to stop.“That smells amazing,” she said.
“Burgers.”
“I can tell.” She settled into her chair and opened the laptop, but her eyes drifted toward the grill twice in thirty seconds.
She clearly hadn’t eaten. I wondered if she’d even thought about food since this morning.
I flipped the burgers.
“You want one?” I kept my eyes on the grill when I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “Sure. Thanks.”
I didn’t make a big deal of it. Instead, I put a burger on a bun, added some chips from the bag I’d brought out, and handed it to her without commentary. She took it with a small nod, and for a minute, neither of us said anything while we ate.
The evening was warm, the kind of coastal warmth that settled in after the rain cleared out. The sky was streaked pink and orange, and the ocean was calm after yesterday’s storm.
“This is really good,” she said between bites.
“Secret’s the seasoning.”
“What seasoning?”
“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a secret.”
She rolled her eyes, but the corner of her mouth twitched upward. “That’s such a guy answer.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
She laughed. It was short, though, like it had slipped out before she could catch it. It was the same laugh from last night, and hearing it did the same thing to my chest that it had then—a warm feeling that I had zero control over.
My bear grew content.
I was irritated at myself over how much I was enjoying this. A burger on a porch with my temporary neighbor shouldn’t have felt like anything, but it did.
We kept eating. She told me about a scene she’d been working on all day—some argument between her hero and heroine that she couldn’t get right.
She talked about it with her hands, waving a chip around to illustrate her point, and I found myself actually listening.
Not just hearing the words, but tracking the way her face changed when she talked about writing—how the tiredness fell away and this charged energy took its place, like she’d plugged into something and it was breathing life back into her.
She was lit up, and I liked the look on her.
It suited her well.
I told her about the job I’d been at all day. She grinned while listening to me talk, and I noticed the freckle by her lip again. The one I’d been trying not to notice again.
My bear was so content he’d practically dissolved.
He was so not fighting this. In fact, he hadn’t fought it at all.
Instead, he’d been hers since the first time she’d knocked on my door with those blue eyes blazing with irritation.
The problem was that I wasn’t done fighting it.
I didn’t want this—this pull, this awareness of her I couldn’t ignore, this gravitational shift that was rearranging my entire life around a woman who was going to leave soon.
Even so, I kept sitting there. And she kept sitting there. And the burgers were gone. The sun was almost down, and neither of us was moving.
When she finally stood and gathered her plate, I stood too.
“I’ll take that,” I said, reaching for her plate.
“I can—”
“I’ve got it.”
She let me take it. Then she picked up her laptop and headed for her side, and I followed—carrying two plates and a bag of chips like some kind of idiot. She stopped at the entrance and turned around to look at me.
We were close.
Closer than we’d ever been outside of sitting in my truck. She looked up at me, and I looked down at her. All I could think about was how close we were, the soft scent coming from her, and the way I desperately wanted to kiss her.
“Um, thanks for dinner,” she said, before she slipped inside and closed the door quickly like she was scared I might chase her.
I stood there. Staring at the closed door like a man who’d forgotten how his legs worked. The plates were still in my hands, and my bear was so quiet, so absolutely still and certain, that the silence inside me was louder than any music I’d ever played.
“Damn it,” I muttered.
Then I went to my place.