14. Almost
Chapter fourteen
Almost
The "good seats" turned out to be a low stone wall at the edge of the town square, shaded by an ancient oak draped in Spanish moss. From here, we could see the whole festival spread out before us; the dancing, the music, the endless parade of small-town humanity.
The air smelled like fried food, magnolia blossoms and something sweeter: funnel cake, maybe, or the kettle corn I’d seen a vendor selling near the entrance.
A bluegrass band played on the main stage, the fiddle weaving in and out of the banjo in a way that made my foot tap without my permission.
Children ran past, trailing ribbons, their laughter bright and uncomplicated.
It was, objectively, charming. The kind of scene that belonged on a postcard or in a movie about finding yourself in a small town.
A month ago, I would have felt like an outsider. I would have watched all this warmth and connection and felt the familiar ache of not belonging, of being on the outside looking in.
Instead, I felt… something else. Instead, I felt belonging taking root.
Jasper sat close enough that our shoulders touched. The warmth of him seeped into me, comforting in a way I didn't want to examine too closely.
He’d been the perfect companion all afternoon, pointing out landmarks, introducing me to people, steering me toward the best food vendors with the confidence of someone who’d been attending this festival his entire life.
He knew everyone, and everyone knew him.
More than once, I’d caught people watching us together, their expressions speculative.
“They’re staring,” I’d said at one point, after an elderly woman had looked between us with barely concealed delight.
“They’re curious,” Jasper had corrected. “New faces are rare here.”
“Should I be worried about the gossip?”
“The gossip started the day you moved in.” He grinned, utterly unbothered. “By now, they’ve probably married us off and named our children. Welcome to small-town life.”
I laughed, but the joke had landed somewhere complicated in my chest. The idea of being linked to Jasper, publicly, permanently, should have felt presumptuous. Instead, it felt… not unwelcome.
"So," he said, stealing a bite from my plate, "what do you think?"
"I think you were right about the ribs."
"I'm always right about food." He grinned. "What else?"
I looked out at the festival. The people laughing, the children running, the easy intimacy of a community that had known each other for generations.
"I think it's nice," I said slowly. "Being somewhere with history. Somewhere people have roots."
The question was casual, but I heard the real curiosity underneath. Jasper had a way of asking things that sounded light but landed deep.
"You don't have roots?"
"I had roots. Then I pulled them up." I shrugged. "Then I pulled them up again. And again. After a while, you stop trying to plant them."
“Why?”
I considered the question. Considered how much to tell him. The full story was too heavy for a sunny afternoon at a festival, but the surface version felt dishonest.
“The first time, it was for college. Normal stuff; growing up, moving away. The second time, it was for a job. Also, normal.” I paused. “The third time was for a relationship. That’s when it stopped being normal.”
“The relationship that brought you here.”
Not a question. He already knew; I’d told him enough that night on my porch, the morning after Marcus’s text. But he was giving me space to decide how much more to say.
“Yeah.” I took a breath. “When you’re with someone who…
isolates you, I guess is the word. Who makes your world smaller and smaller until you don’t have anyone but them.
Leaving means leaving everything: your friends, your job, your apartment, your whole life.
You have to pull up every root at once just to get free. ”
Jasper was quiet, his easy humor set aside. When I glanced at him, his expression was intent, serious.
“That takes courage,” he said.
“Or desperation.”
“Maybe both.” He shifted closer, not quite touching but near enough that I could feel the warmth radiating off him. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad you landed here. Whatever brought you.”
“Even if what brought me was running away?”
“Running away is just running toward something else you haven’t found yet.” He smiled, and the seriousness softened into something warmer. “Maybe you were running toward Magnolia Creek all along. Maybe you just didn’t know it.”
It was a romantic thing to say. The kind of thing that should have made me roll my eyes, dismiss it as charm, file it under things men say when they’re trying to impress you.
But Jasper’s eyes were steady on mine, and there was no performance in them. Just sincerity, offered without expectation.
He was quiet for a moment. Then: "Maybe you just haven't found the right soil."
I turned to look at him. In the golden afternoon light, his face was soft, his eyes serious, his usual easy humor stripped away. He was watching me with an intensity that made something turn over in my chest.
"Maybe," I agreed.
The moment stretched between us. Festival noise fading. His shoulder against mine, his hand on the stone wall inches from my thigh.
If I leaned in… if I closed the distance…
Then someone called Jasper's name, and he turned away, and the spell was broken.
“Duty calls,” he said, and there was regret in his voice. “Mrs. Henderson wants to tell me about her grandson’s college applications. It’ll take approximately forever.”
“Go. I’ll be fine.”
“You sure?”
“I’m a grown woman at a festival. I think I can manage five minutes alone.”
He grinned, the easy Jasper mask sliding back into place. “Ten minutes, tops. Save me some ribs.”
He disappeared into the crowd, and I was left alone on the stone wall, my heart beating faster than it should have been. Get a grip. You’ve damn near publicly made out with an entire family of brothers. Fuck me.
But I felt it still. That pull. That thread connecting us, drawing tighter with every shared moment.
I sat there for a while, watching the festival flow around me.
Couples danced near the stage. A group of teenagers clustered around a game booth, cheering as someone won a stuffed animal.
Two older women sat on a bench nearby, their heads bent together in what looked like serious gossip.
Everyone here had a place. A role. A web of connections that anchored them to this town and to each other.
I had that once, before Marcus. I’d had friends who knew my coffee order, family who called on Sundays, and a sense of belonging that I’d taken for granted until it was gone.
He’d taken all of it, piece by piece. It had happened so slowly that I hadn’t noticed until I was standing in the rubble of my life, wondering how I’d let it happen.
Rebuilding was harder than I had expected. Trust didn’t come back just because the threat was gone. The habit of isolation, of self-protection, of keeping people at arm’s length, that was harder to break than I’d thought.
But here, in Magnolia Creek, it was happening anyway. Despite my best efforts. Despite my walls. Mel knew my coffee order. Lila treated me like a partner. Rowena fed me casseroles and saved me seats at Sunday dinner. Dex had appointed himself some kind of gruff protector. And the brothers…
The brothers were something else entirely.
I was thinking about that, about them, about what it meant, about what I wanted, when I saw Callum.
I saw Callum before he saw me.
He was standing near the edge of the square, alone despite the crowd around him.
His dark shirt was untucked, sleeves rolled to his elbows, revealing forearms that flexed as he lifted a drink to his lips.
Even relaxed, or as relaxed as Callum ever got, he radiated a contained intensity that made people give him space without seeming to realize they were doing it.
He looked different out here, away from the house. More visible, somehow. At Thornwood, he blended into the shadows, the quiet corners, the spaces between conversations. Here, in the golden festival light, there was nowhere to hide.
And he was beautiful. I could admit that now, to myself if not out loud. The sharp line of his jaw. The dark hair pushed back from his forehead. The way his shoulders filled out his shirt without any apparent effort.
He was also, I noticed, scanning the crowd methodically. His gaze moving with the precision of someone who was always assessing threats, memorizing faces, and noting exits, even at a festival. While surrounded by people he’d known his entire life. When his eyes found me, they stopped.
For a long moment, we just looked at each other across the crowded square. The noise of the festival seemed to fade, the music and laughter becoming distant, muffled. There was only Callum, watching me with that barely leashed intensity, and me, unable to look away.
And I thought: What is happening to me?
The pull I’d been feeling, the one I kept trying to explain away, was almost overwhelming now. Like a hook behind my ribs, tugging me toward him. Like gravity had shifted, and he was the new center.
I should have looked away. Should have broken the connection, waved casually, done something to dispel the tension building in my chest.
Instead, I held his gaze. Let him see I was looking back. That I wasn’t intimidated by his intensity, or if I was, I wasn’t going to let it show.
Something flickered in his expression. Surprise, maybe. Or recognition.
Then Jasper appeared at my elbow with two cups of lemonade, and the world rushed back in.
"Callum's standing there scanning the crowd for threats," I said unnecessarily.
"Callum takes festival security very seriously." Jasper's voice was amused, but I was picking up a different vibe, an awareness that he knew exactly what he’d interrupted. "I suspect he's been watching you since we arrived."
"That's not unsettling at all."
"It's how he shows affection." Jasper handed me a lemonade. "Would you prefer he write you sonnets?"
I looked back toward where Callum had been standing, but he'd disappeared into the crowd.
"I have no idea what I'd prefer," I admitted.
“That’s fair..” Jasper chuckled as he settled back onto the wall beside me, closer than before. “You don’t have to know anything yet.”
“Yet implies I’ll have to decide, eventually.”
“Does it?” He took a sip of his lemonade, watching me over the rim of the cup. “Maybe. Or maybe some things don’t require deciding. Maybe some things just… happen.”
“That’s very zen of you.”
“I have hidden depths.” He grinned. “Also, Mrs. Henderson’s grandson got into LSU, if you were wondering. I now know more about his application essay than any human should.”
I laughed, grateful for the shift in tone. “She kept you that long?”
“She’s thorough. And she wanted to know if I was ‘courting the pretty new girl at Thornwood.’ Her words, not mine.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That I was working on it.” His eyes met mine, playful but sincere. “Was I wrong?”
I should have deflected. Should have made a joke, changed the subject, done any of the things I’d learned to do when conversations got too close to the truth.
Instead, I said: “No. You’ve done a pretty decent job so far.”
His smile softened into something that made my chest ache. “Good. That’s… good.”
We sat there for a while after that, watching the festival, not quite touching but aware of each other in a way that felt new, fragile and important. The bluegrass band finished their set, and a country singer took the stage. The sun started its slow descent toward the tree line.
And across the square, I caught glimpses of Callum, appearing and disappearing in the crowd, always watching, never approaching. A shadow with dark eyes and an intensity that followed me wherever I went.
Two different energies. Both of them pulling at something inside me I was only beginning to understand.
* * *
Eli found us as the sun was setting.
He appeared without warning, the way he always did, one moment absent, the next standing beside the stone wall with his hands in his pockets and his glasses catching the golden light.
“Jasper, Serena.” He nodded at each of us. “Enjoying the festival?”
“Serena’s been sampling the local cuisine,” Jasper said. “I think she’s had four different types of barbecue. I’m impressed and slightly concerned.”
“Three types,” I corrected. “And a funnel cake.”
“The funnel cake was a good call,” Eli said. “The Henderson booth?”
“Is there another?”
“No. Mrs. Henderson has held the funnel cake monopoly for thirty years. There was an incident with a rival booth in ’04, but we don’t talk about that.”
I looked between them, trying to tell if he was joking. With Eli, it was hard to know.
“This festival has a lot of history,” I said.
“Everything in Magnolia Creek has history.” Eli sat down on my other side, so that I was bracketed between the two brothers. “That’s either comforting or claustrophobic, depending on your perspective.”
“Which is it for you?”
He considered the question with his usual care. “Both. The weight of the past can be grounding. It can also be suffocating. The trick is learning which parts to carry and which parts to set down.”
“Speaking from experience?”
“Speaking from a lifetime of living with family expectations.” A small smile.
“The Voss name comes with certain obligations. Certain assumptions. People expect us to be… certain things. It took me a long time to figure out which of those expectations I wanted to meet and which ones I wanted to reject.”
“And did you? Figure it out?”
“Eventually.” His eyes met mine, and there was something in them, an understanding, a recognition, that made my breath catch. “The secret is finding people who see you as you are. Not as your name, or your family, or your history. Just… you.”
The words landed somewhere deep in my chest. I thought about invisibility, about wanting it, and then not wanting it, and the terrifying vulnerability of being truly seen.
“That sounds nice,” I whispered. “Being seen like that.”
“It is.” He held my gaze. “When you find it.”
Jasper cleared his throat. “Not to interrupt this moment, but the fireworks are starting in twenty minutes, and if we want good spots, we should move now. Unless you two want to keep being profound, in which case I’ll go save us seats and you can catch up.”
“Fireworks?” I asked.
“Another festival tradition. They set them off over the preserve.” Jasper stood, offering me his hand. “Best view is from the hill behind the church. Come on.”
I took his hand and let him pull me to my feet. Eli fell into step beside us as we wound through the crowd, and I was aware of both of them, Jasper’s hand still holding mine, Eli’s shoulder brushing against my arm as we navigated the narrow spaces between booths.
I’d come to the festival with one, danced with all three, and now walked between two of them toward fireworks. Nothing about this was simple. Nothing about this was what I’d planned, but I have to admit; it was as exciting as it was confusing. I couldn’t wait to tell Tara.