Chapter Eight #2
"It's dangerous," Cole agreed, because he wasn't going to lie to her, not tonight, not about this.
"That doesn't mean you're not going to get through it.
It means you shouldn't have to get through it alone, and I know you don't want to hear that from me of all people, but it's true whether you want to hear it or not. "
She wrapped her arms tighter around herself, and for a second Cole thought about reaching for his own jacket to offer her, and stopped himself, because offering it would have been exactly the kind of small, assuming gesture Preacher had warned him against, deciding on her behalf what she needed instead of waiting to be asked.
He stood there instead, close but not closing the distance, and let her be cold on her own terms if that was what she chose.
"Sit with me a second," she said instead, surprising him, and dropped down onto the loading dock steps without waiting for an answer, and Cole understood that as the invitation it was and sat down beside her, careful, a full arm's length between them even now.
They ended up sitting on the loading dock steps together, close enough now that the careful distance he'd been keeping for seven months had started, without either of them quite deciding to let it, closing by inches, waiting for Preacher, who Rowan had finally called despite everything, to come assess the damage and walk the property.
The adrenaline was ebbing out of both of them into something quieter, rawer, the particular exhausted honesty that came after a body had spent itself on fear and had nothing left to spend on pretense.
"Can I ask you something," Rowan said, staring out at the dark lot instead of at him. "And I want an actual answer, not the version you think I want to hear."
"Ask."
"Why. Not the mechanics of it, I don't need the mechanics, I lived the mechanics. I mean why, underneath it. What was happening in your head that made five months feel like a road you couldn't turn around on."
Cole was quiet for a long moment, because he'd promised himself, the night she found out, that if she ever asked him this question directly, he owed her the real answer, not the comfortable one, not the one that made him easier to forgive.
"I felt like I was disappearing," he said finally, low.
"Not from you leaving me, you weren't going anywhere, you were building something incredible right in front of me.
That was the problem. You were building something incredible, and every day I watched you need me less to do it, and instead of being proud of that, which I was, I was also, underneath it, scared that I was becoming the guy who used to matter to your life instead of the guy who still did.
Vanessa noticed me. That's it. That's the whole ugly center of it.
She noticed a version of me that felt important again, at exactly the moment I'd convinced myself I was fading out of my own life, and I chose that feeling over telling you the truth, over and over, for five months, because telling you the truth would have meant admitting I was jealous of my own girlfriend's success, and that felt like the smallest, most pathetic thing I could possibly be.
So I let it stay a secret instead. I let a secret be easier than a hard conversation.
That's not an excuse. There isn't one. It's just the actual, ugly truth of it, since you asked for the real answer. "
Rowan didn't say anything for a long time, and Cole let the silence sit, because he'd given her the truth and the truth didn't come with a demand attached for how she was supposed to receive it.
When she finally turned to look at him, her eyes were wet, and something in her face had gone soft in a way he hadn't let himself hope for in seven months, close enough now that he could see the exact shade her eyes went in low light, close enough that some old, worn groove in both of them was pulling them nearer without either one consciously deciding to move.
"That's the first time you've told me something that actually sounded true instead of sounding sorry," she said, quiet.
"It is true." His hand found hers on the step between them, careful, testing, and she didn't pull away, and for one long, suspended second the whole gravel lot went quiet enough that he could hear his own pulse, could feel the exact half-inch of space left between their faces closing by degrees neither of them was tracking anymore.
Preacher's headlights swept across the lot, engine loud in the pre-dawn quiet, and Rowan pulled back fast, standing, putting three feet of cold air between them again before Cole's hand had even finished feeling the shape of hers.
"That's Preacher," she said, unnecessary, already moving toward the steps, and Cole sat there a second longer in the space she'd vacated, chest still tight with something that had nearly happened and now, apparently, hadn't, and told himself it was better this way, that neither of them needed Preacher walking up on something neither of them had actually decided to let happen yet.
He told himself that. He didn't entirely believe it.
Preacher walked the property with a flashlight and a level of thoroughness that made Cole grateful, once again, that the man had ended up Sergeant at Arms instead of just another patched brother with a temper and a gun, cataloging the gouge marks on the window frame, checking the fence line for anything the intruder might have dropped, noting the direction he'd run in a small notebook he carried for exactly this purpose.
By the time he'd finished, the sky had started going gray at the edges, and Rowan had retreated fully back into the composed, precise version of herself that ran this business, standing with her arms crossed and her voice level while she answered Preacher's questions one by one.
Cole watched her do it, watched her rebuild the wall brick by brick in real time, and understood that whatever had almost happened on the steps a half hour ago belonged, now, to a version of the night that hadn't survived the daylight, filed away the way she filed away everything that threatened to cost her more than she was ready to spend.
He didn't try to reclaim it. He'd learned that much, at least, in seven months of standing outside doorways.
Some doors, once they closed again, needed to be let alone until she decided, on her own schedule, whether to open them a second time.
He drove back to the garage as the sun came fully up, jaw aching where the intruder's fist had caught him, hand still holding the phantom shape of hers against his palm, and understood that tonight had cost him something too, a glimpse of a door standing open that he now had to spend the coming days pretending he hadn't seen, in case pretending was the only thing that would let her feel safe enough to open it again on purpose.