15. Jenna
JENNA
Getting out the door for a first date turns out to require clearing a gauntlet I didn't know I'd built until my own son is standing on the porch with a piece of notebook paper, blocking the exit like a one-man checkpoint.
"Before you take my mom anywhere," Eli says, reading off the paper with the gravity of a man administering an oath, "I need to ask you some questions."
"Okay." Rafe stands very still, hands at his sides, the same posture he uses when a keg line's about to blow. "Go ahead."
"Where did you get this list?" I ask, though I already suspect the answer.
"The internet." Eli doesn't look up. "There's a whole website about it. Question one. What are your intentions with my mother?"
"To take her to dinner. Treat her well. Bring her home at a reasonable hour." Rafe answers like he's reciting coordinates, no hesitation in it anywhere, and something about the total sincerity of it lands harder than if he'd laughed the question off the way most adults would.
"Question two. What would you do if she needed help in the middle of the night?"
"Whatever she needed. I've driven eleven miles in the dark before for less."
Eli glances at Josie, who's perched on the porch railing critiquing Rafe's shirt with her arms crossed, and some silent twin communication passes between them that I'm not invited to.
"Question three," Eli continues. "If you had to choose between saving my mom or saving your dog, who would you save?"
"Eli."
"It's a fair question."
"It's really not."
Rafe doesn't flinch. "I'd save your mom first, and then I'd go back for Biscuit, and I'd probably get yelled at by both of them for taking the risk twice instead of just once."
Eli studies him for a long moment, weighing that answer against some internal rubric only an eight-year-old has access to, and finally nods like Rafe's passed something significant.
"Last question," Eli says, consulting the paper one more time. "If you make my mom cry, what happens to you?"
"That's not actually a question. That's a threat with a question mark on it."
"It's both. Answer it."
Rafe crouches down so he's closer to eye level, and something about the gesture, unhurried and completely serious, makes my chest go tight in a way I wasn't prepared for on an ordinary evening on my own porch.
"If I ever make your mom cry for a bad reason, you have my full permission to hold me accountable for it. Whatever that looks like to you."
"I'm eight. I don't have a lot of leverage."
"You've got more than you think. You've got a checklist and a dog the size of a small horse who already likes you better than he likes me most days."
Eli considers this, apparently satisfied by the honesty of it, and folds the paper back up. "That's an acceptable answer." He tucks it into his pocket like a badge of office. "You may proceed."
"Wait," Josie says, hopping down from the railing. "The shirt's wrong."
"What's wrong with the shirt?"
"It's the same one you wear at the brewery.
You should wear the blue one. It makes your eyes do the thing.
" She says it with total confidence, the same tone she uses to diagnose a wobbly picnic table or a poorly hung banner, and I watch a grown man who once walked toward gunfire for a living actually go back inside to change his shirt because an eight-year-old told him to.
"Did you put them up to this?" he asks me quietly, once he's back, now correctly attired according to Josie's standards.
"I had nothing to do with the checklist. I take full credit for raising kids who ask good questions, though."
"They're better interrogators than half the people I served with."
I laugh, and the sound of it surprises me, easy and unguarded in a way I haven't managed on a doorstep in ages.
Watching a man who survived actual combat get cross-examined by an eight-year-old with a printed checklist, and answer every question like his life depends on it, might be the most romantic thing I've seen in a decade.
I don't even try to talk myself out of that on the drive over.
The restaurant's a small place outside town, wood-paneled and half empty, the kind of spot that doesn't advertise because it doesn't need to.
Rafe picked it on purpose, I can tell, someplace quiet enough that we might actually get to finish a sentence without an emergency interrupting it.
It's a nice theory. It survives about twenty minutes.
"Isn't that Dot Higgins by the window?" I ask, midway through the bread basket.
Rafe follows my glance and goes very still. "That's Dot Higgins."
Dot's already got her phone out, not even pretending to be subtle about it, snapping a picture across the room like she's documenting a crime scene.
By the time our entrees arrive, Rafe's phone buzzes twice, then a third time, and he checks it with the resigned expression of a man who already knows what he's going to find.
"Gunny wants to know if this is a business dinner."
"Is it?"
"He knows it's not. He's just enjoying himself." He reads the next one and huffs out something close to a laugh. "Maggie wants to know your dress size. For reasons she refuses to specify."
"Tell her I'm not answering that on principle."
"Dot's already asking if we want the corner booth at the diner for our anniversary. We've been here twenty minutes."
"Pinewood Ridge doesn't do slow news days."
"Pinewood Ridge doesn't do privacy, is what it doesn't do." He sets the phone face down, a gesture that already feels familiar on him, except this time it doesn't feel like a retreat. "Small towns. I should've picked somewhere in another state."
"Would that have actually worked?"
"No. Dot would've found a way." He almost smiles, and something about watching him be lightly, easily amused instead of carefully guarded does something warm to my chest that I don't examine too closely.
We talk through dinner in a way that surprises me with how easy it turns out to be, no careful pauses, no rehearsed distance, just conversation that moves wherever it wants to.
I ask about the brewery's start, expecting the same clipped, professional answer he'd give a supplier, and instead I get something else entirely.
"The land was my grandfather's first," he says, turning his water glass slowly on the table.
"He ran cattle on it before any of this existed.
I spent every summer out here as a kid, mucking stalls, mending fence, learning that everything on that ranch broke eventually and somebody had to know how to fix it. "
"Sounds exhausting."
"It was. It was also the best part of my year, every year, until I was old enough to enlist instead.
" He says it plainly, no weight added for effect, just fact laid down like a brick.
"He died my second year in. Left me the land in his will, probably assuming I'd sell it the second I got the chance. "
"You didn't."
"I couldn't. It felt like the last room in the house nobody else had gotten to yet.
" He looks up, and there's something unguarded in his face I haven't seen before, not even in the loft.
"He kept a recipe book. Beer, mostly, some of it going back to before Prohibition, handwritten, half the measurements in units nobody uses anymore.
I taught myself to brew out of that book because it felt like the only conversation I still got to have with him. "
"What was he like? Your grandfather."
"Stubborn. Quiet, until he wasn't. He'd go a whole day without saying six words and then talk your ear off about barley for an hour if you got him started.
" A real smile crosses his face, the kind I haven't seen from him before, open in a way that catches me off guard.
"He's the reason I know how to fix almost anything with my hands and the reason I still can't throw away a piece of scrap wood if there's a chance it's useful later.
Gunny says I inherited his hoarding along with his land. "
"That's where Ridgeline came from."
"Every batch we make starts somewhere in those pages.
I've updated the process, obviously, we're not still measuring hops by the handful, but the bones of it are all his.
" He turns the glass again, slower this time.
"I don't tell people that. It sounds sentimental, coming from a guy who spent years in uniform being told sentiment gets people killed. "
"It doesn't sound sentimental. It sounds like the truest thing you've said to me since I met you."
He considers me for a long moment, like he's deciding whether to trust that, and something settles in his shoulders that I've genuinely never seen there before, not even close.
"There was a version of me before all of it," he says. "Before the Army, before years of learning to compartmentalize everything I felt into something manageable. A kid who liked cattle dogs and bad radio and thought the ranch was the whole world. I don't let that guy out much anymore."
"He seems like he'd be good company."
"He's rustier than he used to be. But he's still in there." Rafe holds my eyes, steady, none of the careful blankness I've gotten used to reading around. "You're the first person in a long time I've wanted him to meet."
I don't have a clever answer for that, and for once I don't try to build one.
I just let it land the way he meant it. This is the first time I've seen him fully unguarded, no checklist, no careful distance, just a man telling me who he used to be.
I like what I see enough that it scares me a little, the good kind of scared.
By the time we get back to the cabin, the porch light's on and the twins are long asleep at Maggie's for the night, and the whole world's gone quiet the way it only does out here after dark, crickets and distant dogs and nothing else.
"Thank you," I say, at the door, "for tonight. For all of it."
"Thank the checklist. I nearly failed question three."
"You didn't, though."
"Close call." He steps closer, slow, deliberate, none of the surprise of that first hand-hold at the fireworks or the rush of the loft, both of us choosing this with our eyes fully open under a porch light neither of us is in any hurry to leave.
The kiss is unhurried this time, no interruption waiting to break it, no small stirring body on a couch to pull us apart before we're ready.
It's just the two of us on a porch in the quiet, taking exactly as long as we both want to take, and when we finally break apart he doesn't step back right away, forehead nearly resting against mine, both of us breathing like something important just happened, because it did.
"I want to do that again," he says, half disbelieving, already walking backward toward his truck like his feet started moving before the rest of him agreed to it. "Soon. Tomorrow. Whenever you'll let me."
"Drive safe, Rafe."
"Copy that." He almost trips over the porch step, catches himself, and keeps walking backward anyway, grinning in a way I don't think he knows how to stop.
I stand there in the doorway long after the taillights disappear down the gravel road, arms wrapped around myself against the chill, replaying the whole evening from the checklist on down.
I can't remember the last time a night left me feeling this full instead of tired.
I go inside eventually, lock the door, and lie awake longer than I planned to, smiling at the ceiling like a woman half my age.