Chapter 3
CHAPTER
THREE
Addie
The car came back on a Thursday, a few weeks after Hutchens's visit.
Silver sedan, tinted windows, parked across the street from my shop where the road shoulders out.
First morning I'd told myself it was nothing.
A realtor casing the empty lot. Somebody waiting for the post office to open.
This morning it was back in the same spot, engine running, and my body knew.
It always did. Corbin. A man I'd driven eighty miles to escape, parked across my street before breakfast.
My hands shook on the mug while the rest of me counted exits, stairs, the lock on the back door. Four years of flinching and apologizing. Eight months of trying to unlearn it. And one silver piece-of-shit sedan had undone all of it in the time it took to look out my own goddamn window.
I pulled the curtain shut and took the stairs down barefoot.
Work. That was always the fix. I had a settee frame stripped to bare wood, upholstery tacks that needed sorting, and hands that could shake all they wanted so long as they stayed useful.
The shop smelled of linseed oil and the cold ash of a stove I hadn't bothered to light.
For a little while I let that be enough.
Then my phone rang, and the number on the screen took the whole day out at the knees.
Lexington area code. I knew it like a scar under your clothes. You don't have to look. My thumb hovered. Every smart thing I'd ever told myself said don't, and I was already answering, because apparently a new zip code hadn't taught me a goddamn thing about self-preservation.
"Adelaide." Corbin's voice cracked open a room I'd bricked shut. Warm and measured and wounded in exactly the right places. "I just want to talk."
My knees locked. The tack hammer was inches from my hand and I was gripping the edge of the bench hard enough to feel the grain printing into my palms, and I hated him for doing that to me in my own shop. In Gran's shop. The one place in this fucked-up world I once felt safe.
"There's nothing to talk about."
"You left without—I didn't get to?—"
"I left because I was done. That hasn't changed."
"Baby, if you'd just let me explain?—"
I hung up. Set the phone facedown on the bench.
Stood there breathing like I'd sprinted a mile, sweat prickling along my hairline, my throat closing up tight enough that I could feel his hand on it.
And still, still, some sick, stupid corner of me wanted him to call back.
Wanted to hear whatever pretty thing he was going to say next.
Eight months and eighty miles, and the bastard could still ring me like a dinner bell.
The bell on the shop door jangled and I came off the bench with the hammer in my fist.
Louetta Byrd, from the diner, filled my doorway holding a foil-wrapped plate and wearing a look that said she'd been exactly where I was.
"Honey." She set the plate on the nearest chair. "You look like you've been fighting and the fight ain't over."
"I'm fine."
"Uh-huh." She didn't push it. Just looked at the phone on the bench, at my white knuckles, at the hammer, and did the math faster than anyone ever had. "I brought you biscuits. Eat them before they get cold. I don't waste good gravy on people who let my biscuits go cold."
She left the plate, squeezed my arm once, hard, and walked out. The bell jangled behind her. My fist was still clenched around the hammer. And the first kind thing anyone in this town had done for me sat on an estate-sale chair that still needed caning.
I ate two biscuits standing up over the bench because Louetta was right about the gravy and because busy hands don't shake.
By late afternoon I'd re-webbed the settee, sanded a rocker arm, checked the window more times than I'd admit under oath. The sedan was gone. I'd almost convinced myself it had been nothing when Cage's Harley rolled onto his lot.
His bike I knew by sound now. The low idle, the kickstand, the gravel.
A few weeks in this town and I could pick that engine out of traffic, which I wasn't going to examine too closely, because that meant admitting what happened to me when that rumble cut through the wall, and I wasn't in the mood.
Today I had used up all my stupid on answering Corbin's call. There was none left for Cage.
Except my feet were already at the back door.
He was at the fence line, one boot on the lower rail, forearms braced on the top, the low sun warm on everything it touched.
I hated how good he looked doing nothing.
My mama would've called that a whole situation and either sent me walking the other way or told me to ask for a ride.
I wanted to cross the lot and put my hands on him, and the wanting was getting louder every time I saw him.
In my own doorway, staring at Cage like Corbin had taught me nothing.
I crossed the lot before I could talk myself out of it.
Stone crunching under my boots. His head turned before I'd closed the distance.
Whatever he'd been looking at on the ridge went away, all of him suddenly on me, and Christ, that look.
Cage looked at me like he wanted to devour me and wasn't happy about the distraction.
My pulse kicked hard in my throat. I crossed my arms mostly to hold myself together.
"There's been a car parked across the street from my shop two mornings running," I said. "Silver sedan, tinted windows. I need to know if that's you, or Hutchens, or whatever the hell else is going on with my property."
He froze. He'd done that once before, on my back steps. Everything locking down at once while he thought faster than he was showing. He clocked it all. The red around my eyes, maybe. The knuckles. My arms crossed tight enough to ache.
"Not club business," he said, quiet.
"Then what? You sure it's not something to do with you?"
He didn't answer that. Just watched me, waiting, and I resented him a little for it because he was making room for me to say it and I didn't want the room. I'd known since the call. But I hadn't said his name out loud in this town yet, and my mouth wanted to keep that streak alive.
"His name is Corbin." My voice scraped raw, and saying his name in Amberlin Falls tasted rotten, a thing I'd buried dragged back up.
"He's my ex. He called this morning. I hung up.
" The but stuck in my throat and I swallowed it whole.
Bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted copper because I wasn't going to fucking cry in front of this man, not about Corbin, not here where the diesel and pine hung thick in the cooling air. "He doesn't take no well."
The quiet came in heavy after that. Jays in the pines, a truck downshifting on the switchback, the creek below the ridge doing its one endless thing.
His jaw flexed when I said it, his shoulders squared, the rail creaking where he was holding it, and he'd heard more in that sentence than I'd meant to put there.
"He hurt you."
The flattest, quietest thing I'd ever heard. Whatever lived under Cage's voice was held so tight I could hear the effort in it, the tendons standing out where he gripped the rail. If he opens his mouth again, I need to not be standing this close.
"That's not—" I started, and he cut me off.
"You don't have to hide it. Or lie. Or protect him." His voice hadn't moved, but his eyes had, and they were on me so hard my skin prickled. "Not now. Not to me. But I need to know one thing."
My chest was hot and tight. My eyes were burning.
The ground was cold through my boot soles, he was right there, close enough to touch, and I wanted to touch him so badly my fingers ached with it.
Which was insane. I'd just gotten off the phone with Corbin.
Look where wanting to touch had gotten me.
"What do you want me to do?" he said.
I blinked. My arms dropped. That wasn't the question I'd been bracing for.
I'd been bracing for I'll handle it or I'll take care of it or don't worry about it, sweetheart.
All the ways a man makes your problem his and you disappear in the same breath.
Corbin would've had a plan halfway through my sentence.
He would've called someone, moved something, and I would've stood there watching my life get handled by a man who loved the handling more than he loved me.
Cage was asking me what I wanted, held so still it scared me. I could see exactly what he'd do if I said the word. All that violence, leashed, waiting on my say-so.
"I don't know yet," I said, and it came out raw, no armor on it at all.
He nodded once. "When you do, you tell me. I don't make a move without you saying." His breath left him slow through his nose. "But know that if you were mine, this conversation would end with an answer today."
One boot came off the rail. He straightened up. The light went out of the day, and the mountain filled up all the silence I'd made.
I climbed the steps on shaking legs, shut the door behind me, turned the lock.
My back hit the wood and I slid down it until my ass hit the floor, and I cried.
Ugly, hard, ribs-hurting, snot-on-my-face crying.
I pressed my forehead to my kneecaps and let it come because there was nobody to perform for and nowhere to put it and Cage had asked me what I wanted and I didn't have an answer and that was worse than anything Corbin had ever done to me.
My phone buzzed on the bench above me. I wrapped my arms around my knees and breathed until it stopped.
Across the fence, Cage's floodlight cut on, and its glow bled through the shop window and across the floor where I sat. If you were mine. I put my head back against the door and let that light sit on me until my legs quit shaking.