Chapter Twelve
By evening, Bunting Day had turned into a potluck, and the meeting hall was full of music, lamplight, and the cheerful roar of a town proud of itself.
Lottie should have been delighted.
The lending-library table had been moved near the front wall, where everyone could see it beneath the new red, white, and blue swag.
Children darted between skirts and benches.
Men stood near the back wall with tin cups in hand.
Cornelia stood near her husband and corrected the children when they became rowdy with a calm authority of a schoolteacher who had survived worse than patriotic enthusiasm.
Delly had arrived with Jebediah and was now listening to Mrs. Schulte discuss the Fourth of July program as if a town celebration required military command.
Peterson had worked the entire day. Lottie had watched him more than she meant to.
He had lifted ladders, steadied boards, hung bunting, moved crates, fixed a loose hinge on the meeting hall door, and carried in one of the benches when Mr. Prentiss complained of his back.
Every task had been done quietly, as if helping were the easiest way for him to remain near the thing he cared about without admitting it aloud.
Helping had cost him. By late afternoon, his right hand had stiffened badly enough he stopped reaching with it unless he forgot himself.
During supper, he kept it low against his side.
When the fiddle started and the room filled with clapping, stomping, and calling for another tune, Peterson’s mouth had gone pale around the edges.
Then he slipped out the back door.
Lottie gave him a few minutes. Long enough he would not feel chased. Not so long she could pretend she had not noticed.
Then she set down her cup, murmured something about air, and followed him into the night.
The dusk behind the meeting hall had gone deep blue and cool.
Music thumped through the log wall, muffled by timber and laughter.
Lantern glow spilled in a narrow bar across the packed dirt near the back steps, but beyond it, the shadows gathered beneath the eaves.
Peterson sat on an overturned crate with his hat on the ground beside him and his head bowed over his right hand.
He had removed the glove. A length of soft cloth lay partly unwound around his palm, and he was trying to work it loose with his left hand and his teeth. The motion was clumsy, frustrated, and private enough Lottie knew at once he had not heard her come out.
She stopped. Two fingers ended at the second knuckle. The scarred skin had drawn tight over the bones, pale in some places and red in others from the day’s work. The knuckles were swollen. The whole hand looked sore, overused, and stubbornly brave.
His face hurt her more than the hand did.
There was no anger in it now. No gruffness. Only weariness, pain, and the worn-out concentration of a man tending himself because he had long ago decided that was the only way tending happened.
“Let me,” Lottie said softly.
Peterson came up off the crate so fast he nearly knocked it over. His right hand jerked behind his back.
“Go on inside, Miss Bellamy.”
“Mr. Peterson.”
“This is no place for you.”
“It seems to be precisely where I am needed.”
His jaw tightened. “I said go back to the music.”
The harshness was not anger. Lottie knew the difference now. This was fear. She stepped closer, stopping just beyond arm’s reach. “Peterson, sit down, please.”
His gaze lifted to hers. She said his name gently, not as an order and not as pity. Simply as the name he had allowed her to use.
His jaw tightened. “Go back inside, Lottie.”
Lottie let out a little huff. “Then sit down, Peterson.”
A faint breath left him. It might have been a laugh if it had not hurt so much.
“You worked that hand all day,” she said. “For the library, for the town, and for every person who found a task and decided you were the man strong enough to do it. Now it is paining you, and you are back here trying to wrap it with your teeth.”
“I’ve done it before.”
“I believe you. You do not have to do it tonight.”
He looked away toward the dark line of trees behind the hall.
Lottie lowered her voice. “You told me I might ask about it sometime. I am not asking yet. I am only asking you to let me help.”
“That hand is not something you want to look at.”
The words came out rougher than before.
There it was. The fear beneath all the hiding.
Lottie’s heart squeezed, but she kept pity out of her face. Pity would insult him worse than mockery.
“You do not get to decide for me.” His gaze cut back, as she lifted her chin.
“You are forever deciding what I can carry, what I can bear, where I may stand, and how close I ought to come. I crossed half a continent with my sister and several trunks full of books. I’ve survived Mrs. Hanford’s opinion of poetry and spent this morning on a ladder old enough to have known Moses.
I can decide whether I wish to look at your hand. ”
Despite himself, his mouth twitched. It was enough to give her courage.
“Sit down,” she said. “Please.”
For several seconds he did not move.
Then, slowly, Peterson sat back on the crate.
He brought his right hand forward as if it weighed more than the rest of him. His face turned partly away, jaw set hard, shoulders braced for the reaction he had spent months expecting from her.
Lottie gently took his hand in both of hers.
The injured fingers were stiff against her palm. The scars were not smooth, and the swelling made the joints tight beneath the skin. He did not look at her while she looked at him, but she knew he felt every second of it.
She did not rush. She looked at the hand fully, because pretending not to see it would be another kind of hiding. Then she looked up at him.
“It is sore and tired,” she said. His throat moved, and he gave a slight nod. “It has been asked to do too much today.”
He gave a low, humorless sound. “That all?”
“No.” She found the fallen strip of cloth near his boot and shook the dust from it. “It is also the hand that caught me this morning and held me.”
She had seen his hand earlier, but it wasn’t angry then. Peterson did not answer.
“It held me safely. It helped hang the library bunting. It pressed a wild rose without crushing it.” She began to wrap the cloth around his palm, careful to support the strained places without pulling too tight.
“I know winter took from it. I know there is a story there. I am not afraid of your hand, Mr. Peterson.”
His fingers flexed once in her hold.
She kept working.
“You do not have to hide it from me.”
The music inside swelled, then softened as the fiddle changed tunes.
Lottie smoothed the cloth across the back of his hand and wound it around once more. “When you are ready to tell me, I will listen. Until then, I can sit beside you in the dark and help you wrap what hurts.”
Peterson’s breath caught.
She tied the cloth off neatly, not too tight, then rested his wrapped hand between both of hers.
“There,” she murmured. “That should ease it a little.”
He looked down at their hands.
For once, he did not pull away.
The quiet between them changed. It deepened into something Lottie felt in her chest and did not dare name too quickly. Then, because her heart had always been quicker than her caution, she lifted his wrapped hand and pressed a light kiss to the back of it.
Peterson went motionless.
“Lottie.” Her name broke low in his voice.
She looked up.
His face was closer than she expected. The lamplight from the door touched one side of his jaw and left the rest in shadow. His left hand lifted, slow and uncertain, toward her cheek. Lottie did not move away.
“You shouldn’t,” he said.
“I know what I am doing.”
“No.” His hand hovered near her face. “You don’t know what I am.”
“I know what you have shown me.”
“That is not enough.”
“It is more than you think.”
His thumb brushed the edge of her bonnet ribbon.
The touch was so careful it nearly undid her.
Lottie held his wrapped hand between hers and looked up at him, letting him see plainly she was not frightened by the scarred hand, or the nearness, or the tenderness he had spent all week trying to bury beneath silence.
Peterson bent his head. This time, he did not stop.
His mouth touched hers softly at first, almost as if he were asking a question he feared she might answer too honestly. Lottie’s fingers tightened around his wrapped hand, and the small sound that left her was enough to break whatever restraint he had left.
His left arm came around her waist and drew her closer.
Not roughly. Never that. With a sudden, aching certainty that made her forget the music inside the meeting hall, the lamplight spilling through the door, and the whole town only a few boards away.
Lottie rose into the kiss.
Her free hand lifted to his shoulder, then slipped higher, trembling only a little as her fingers threaded into the dark hair at the nape of his neck. It was softer than she expected, and the discovery made her heart turn over in the most ridiculous, wonderful way.
Peterson made a low sound against her mouth. That sound did more to Lottie’s knees than the ladder had managed all morning.
She had dreamed of romance in letters and poetry, in grand declarations and moonlit certainty, but this was no polished dream.
This was Peterson’s wrapped hand, held carefully in hers.
It was his arm firm at her waist, his heart beating hard beneath her palm, his mouth warm and unsteady on hers as if he had been starving himself of tenderness and had forgotten, until this moment, how badly he wanted it.
Lottie kissed him back.
Not timidly, or with the airy sweetness she had imagined for a first kiss when she was younger and sillier and believed love would arrive easily.
She kissed him with all the hope she had carried from Chicago, all the courage it had taken to board the train, and all the affection that had been gathering in her since the dock, when a wounded logger had picked up her fallen book as though broken things deserved careful hands.
Peterson’s arm tightened around her. For one shining moment, he didn’t move to leave.
He stopped arguing with himself, stopped hiding his hand, stopped measuring all the ways she might be disappointed in him someday. He simply held her close and kissed her as if she was not a mistake, not a danger, not a dream he had no right to want.
As if she were Lottie.
His Lottie.
The thought went through her so sweetly she nearly lost her balance all over again.
Peterson lifted his mouth from hers just enough to breathe her name. “Lottie.”
It was barely more than a whisper. She opened her eyes.
His forehead hovered near hers, his breathing uneven, his wrapped hand still caught between them. The look in his eyes was not guarded now. It was tender, startled, and almost afraid of how much he had given away.
Lottie touched the edge of his hair once more, because she could, because he had let her, because she wanted to remember the shape of him in this one honest moment.
Then the back door banged open. Music, lamplight, and laughter spilled into the dusk.
“Peterson!” Luke called from the doorway. “There you are. Olsen says you know all the verses to ‘Shenandoah,’ and there’s a dollar riding on it.”
Peterson pulled away as if the sound had struck sense back into him. Luke stopped short when he saw them. “Oh. Beg pardon.”
Peterson stood. His wrapped hand moved toward his coat, but he stopped before tucking it fully away. He looked down at it, then at Lottie. Regret crossed his face so plainly her heart ached.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” he said quietly.
Lottie rose, too. “I did not do it alone.”
His jaw tightened. “I need to go in. We can’t do this again.”
The words landed between them with no gentleness at all. She had known he might still believe that. Hearing him say it was worse.
Inside the meeting hall, someone called for Luke, and he backed away with more haste than grace. Peterson looked toward the bright doorway.
“This only makes it harder.”
“For whom?”
“For both of us.”
“No,” she said. “Do not put my heart into your sentence unless I hand it to you.”
He looked back at her. She could hear Delly in that answer, but she did not mind.
“I cannot be what you think I am,” he said.
“You do not know what I think.”
“I know what you deserve.”
“Then perhaps you should ask me what I want.”
The fiddle began again inside. Boots stamped the floor in time with it. Peterson looked toward the door, then back at her. Whatever softness the kiss had drawn out of him was still there, but he was already trying to cover it.
“I need to go in,” he said.
“For the song?”
A faint, pained attempt at humor touched his mouth. “For the dollar.”
He stepped past her. At the threshold, he paused with his wrapped right hand still visible at his side.
“Lottie.” His voice broke.
“Yes?”
He did not finish the thought.
He did not say whatever had brought her name to his mouth.
After a moment, he only touched two fingers to his hat brim, though he was not wearing his hat, and went inside. Lottie remained behind the meeting hall with the dusk around her and the warmth of his mouth still on her lips.
He had said he was going back in; he didn’t say he did not care. Not that she had imagined the tenderness between them.
She pressed her fingers lightly to her mouth and looked toward the bright doorway where he had gone.
Peterson was still fighting.
For the first time, Lottie wondered if he was no longer fighting her.