Chapter Four
She found Sawyer in his front yard that evening, running a hand mower over a strip of grass along the property line he didn’t need to cut, which told her everything about the state he was in before he said a word: he only did unnecessary yard work when he was avoiding a conversation with himself.
“You didn’t come,” she said, once he’d cut the engine.
He wiped his palm on his jeans and looked at her for a second too long before he answered. “I came,” he said. “I stood on your porch for twenty minutes.”
That wasn’t what she’d expected. “Why didn’t you—“
“Because you were asleep before I got there,” he said.
“Really asleep. Dead-weight, dreaming, gone. And I stood there thinking about the fact that I have a key to your side door for exactly one reason, and that reason has always come with a light on and a woman who knows I’m coming and wants me to, and Friday you were just—“ He stopped, jaw working. “You were just a woman alone in a house who’d had an ugly week and fallen asleep with the light on by accident, far as I could tell. I didn’t know which version of that I was looking at. So I left.”
Ivy stood very still, absorbing that. It should not have undone her the way it did.
A man declining to touch her, of all things, shouldn’t have been the tenderest thing anyone had done for her in a year, but it hollowed something out in her chest anyway, some old scar tissue she hadn’t known was still that thin.
“That’s not how it’s supposed to work,” she said, half a protest, half something else. “The light is the yes. That’s the whole point of the light. You don’t have to guess.”
“I know what the light means,” Sawyer said.
“I helped write what the light means. But the light can’t tell me whether the woman under it still means it the same way she did the day we wrote it down, and I decided a while back that if I’m ever standing somewhere wondering which one’s true, I’m going to choose wrong on the side of leaving.
” He set the mower’s handle down like it was something that might break if he didn’t.
“You can be angry about that. I’d rather have you angry at me for leaving than have you ever once wonder, after, whether I looked hard enough at what I was looking at. ”
She didn’t say anything for a while. The cicadas were loud in the gap between them, and somewhere down the block a sprinkler ticked on.
“I wasn’t angry,” she said, after a beat. “I think I was disappointed. Which is worse, honestly, and not fair to you.”
“It’s fair,” he said. “Disappointment means you wanted something. I’d rather know that than not.”
She sat down on the porch step beside the mower, and after a moment he sat down too, close enough that their shoulders almost touched. “Can I ask you something?” she said. “Why twenty minutes? Why not just leave the second you saw I was really out?”
He considered that longer than the question seemed to need.
“Because some part of me kept thinking you’d wake up,” he said.
“Stir, hear something, come up out of it enough to tell me one way or the other. I gave it time because I wanted the choice to be yours, not mine, and twenty minutes felt like the longest I could stand there without it turning into something else. Watching a woman sleep because you’re hoping she’ll wake up isn’t a good look on a grown man. I know that.”
“You could have just left after five.”
“I could have.” He turned the words over like he was checking them for splinters.
“I didn’t want to, is the honest answer.
I wanted to stay exactly as long as I did, and not one minute longer, because that felt like the line between wanting you and taking something you hadn’t actually given me that night.
Twenty minutes felt like respect. Twenty-one would’ve felt like something else. ”
“That’s a very specific number to have thought that hard about.”
“I think about everything that hard where you’re concerned,” he said, the words out before he could call them back, which was somehow more convincing than if he’d meant to.
She looked at him, really looked, the way she tried not to let herself do too often, because looking too long at Sawyer Reyes had a way of turning into wanting things the notebook had never been written to hold.
Forty-four years old, a widower’s grief still sitting somewhere behind his eyes even on an ordinary Saturday, careful with his hands and his words in a way that had nothing to do with the nineteen years between them and everything to do with who he’d decided to be after the worst thing that had ever happened to him.
“Next week,” she said. “I’ll try to actually be awake this time.”
Something in his mouth almost became a smile. “You don’t have to be awake,” he said. “You have to be sure. That’s the only part I need.”