16. Rafe
RAFE
Three weeks since the porch kiss, and I still catch myself checking the clock before she's due, same as I did before that first real date, except the nerves have quietly turned into something closer to impatience.
There's been a diner dinner since then, an afternoon spent teaching Eli to fly a kite badly, a movie night that ended with both kids asleep on the couch and Jenna's head finding my shoulder like it had been looking for that exact spot the whole time.
Tonight the twins are at Maggie's for the night, some sleepover involving a movie marathon and a promise of pancakes that Josie negotiated like a hostage situation, and that leaves me standing in my own kitchen at six in the evening trying to cook dinner for one person like it's a mission with a timeline and a failure state.
It isn't, obviously. Nobody's life depends on whether the chicken comes out right. I still check it twice.
"You're doing the thing," Gunny says from the doorway, watching me time a pan of roasted vegetables against a mental clock only I can hear.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you treat dinner like a supply drop." He leans against the frame, arms crossed, entirely too pleased with himself. "Relax. It's Jenna. She already likes you. You don't have to win her over with root vegetables."
"I like doing it right."
"Sure." He pushes off the frame, heading for the stairs.
"I'm heading home. Lock up behind her whenever she leaves, or don't, none of my business either way.
" He's gone before I can decide how to respond to that, boots on the stairs and then the door below, and the loft goes quiet in a way that feels different tonight, charged instead of empty.
She knocks at seven, right on time, and when I open the door she's traded her usual brewery clothes for something softer, a sweater the color of the ridge at dusk, and for one second I forget every word I planned to say.
"Something smells good," she says, stepping past me into the loft, and I catch the scent of her, rain and something warm underneath it, before I remember to close the door.
"Chicken. Vegetables. Nothing that requires a compliment."
"I'll be the judge of that." She sets a bottle of wine on the counter, looks around at the room she last saw buried in a snowstorm and two sleeping kids, and something in her face softens at whatever she finds different about it now. "It looks bigger without an entire family camped on the floor."
"It's the same size. You're just used to seeing it full."
"Maybe I like it full."
Nothing ready comes to mind, so I busy myself pulling plates down instead, and if my hands aren't quite steady doing it, she's kind enough not to mention it.
Dinner goes easier than I braced for, conversation moving the way it did at the restaurant, no careful pauses, no rehearsed distance, just two people talking because they want to and not because either of us is managing something.
She tells me about a customer who tried to return a growler because the beer inside it had gone flat after three weeks in his truck bed.
I tell her about the time Gunny nearly set the smoker on fire trying to cold-smoke a brisket during the coldest week we'd had in years and blamed it on wind shear.
She laughs loud enough that Biscuit lifts his head from the floor to check on us, decides we're fine, and goes back to sleep.
"How are the twins doing at Maggie's?" I ask, refilling her glass.
"Terrorizing her, probably. Eli was drafting a movie lineup on the drive over like it was a military campaign. Josie packed four different pairs of pajamas in case the first three didn't feel right for the occasion."
"Sounds like they'll survive without you for one night."
"They'll survive better than I will." She says it lightly, but something underneath it isn't entirely a joke, and I understand it without needing her to explain further, the particular strangeness of an evening with nobody small enough to need you every few minutes. "It's quiet in a way I'm not used to."
"Good quiet or bad quiet?"
"I haven't decided yet." She looks at me over her glass, steady, and something about the way she says it makes it clear she's not really talking about the twins anymore.
"You're different tonight," she says, somewhere past the second glass of wine, watching me over the rim of her glass.
"Different how?"
"Looser. Like you left the checklist downstairs."
"I didn't leave it. I just decided it could wait." I reach across the small table and take her hand, turning it over, tracing the lines of her palm with my thumb the way I've wanted to since she first walked through the door. "Some things don't need a plan."
"That sounds dangerously unlike you."
"I contain multitudes." She laughs again, softer this time, and the sound of it does something to my chest that no amount of tactical training ever prepared me for.
We clear the dishes together, standing shoulder to shoulder at the small sink, her hip bumping mine every time she reaches for another plate, and by the third bump neither of us pretends it's an accident anymore.
She sets the last dish down and turns, and I'm already turning too, and there's no fireworks this time, no storm outside forcing the moment, just the two of us choosing it in an ordinary kitchen on an ordinary night, which somehow makes it feel like the most deliberate thing I've ever done.
The kiss starts slow and stays that way, unhurried in a manner I haven't let myself be with anyone in longer than I can measure, both of us learning the shape of this new quiet certainty instead of racing through it.
Her hands find the collar of my shirt. Mine find her waist, then the small of her back, pulling her closer until there's no more room left between us for hesitation.
"Rafe." She says my name against my mouth, half question, half something else entirely.
"Yeah."
"I want this. All of it. I need you to know that before we go any further."
"I want it too." I pull back just enough to see her face, to make sure she reads exactly how much I mean it. "I need you to know something first."
"Okay."
"I've got scars. More than the one on my arm. Some of it isn't pretty to look at, and I've spent a long time making sure nobody gets close enough to see it." My voice comes out rougher than I intend, honesty costing more than I expected it to. "I don't know what you're going to do when you see it."
She reaches up and rests her palm flat against my chest, right over the loudest part of me, and holds it there like she's steadying something.
"I'm not going anywhere," she says. "Show me."
I lead her to the bed instead of answering out loud, because some things are easier shown than said, and when I pull my shirt over my head I brace myself the way I've braced for incoming my whole career, muscles locked, waiting for the flinch, the polite recovery, the careful way people's eyes skip past what they don't want to see.
She doesn't flinch. She traces the long scar along my ribs with two fingers, slow and deliberate, like she's memorizing a map instead of enduring a sight, and moves to the smaller ones scattered across my shoulder, the puckered mark below my collarbone that still aches before it rains.
"This one," she says quietly, at my ribs.
"Shrapnel. Bad day, worse week."
"This one." Her fingers move to my shoulder.
"Recoil, wrong angle, dumb mistake I made exactly once."
She doesn't ask about the rest, not yet, and I don't offer more than she asks for, and somewhere in the unhurried cataloguing of every place I thought I needed to hide, something that's been clenched tight in my chest for six years finally, quietly, gives way.
Nobody's ever looked at all of it and stayed.
She's still here, still tracing, still looking at me like I'm something worth the careful attention instead of something to get through.
"You're not broken," she says, reading exactly what I'm thinking without my having said a word of it. "There's nothing about you I find anything less than whole."
"You don't know all of it yet."
"I know enough. I know the man who drove eleven miles in the dark for a stranger's woodstove.
I know the man who let two kids interrogate him on a porch and answered every question like his life depended on it.
Whatever put these here didn't take any of that away from you.
" She leans in and presses her mouth gently to the scar at my ribs, and something in me that's been braced for years finally stands down.
"Jenna."
"I'm right here."
Her hands move from the scars to the rest of me like she isn't finished learning the terrain, palms flat against my chest, my stomach, the line of my hip, and every place she touches feels like the first hand that's ever mapped it on purpose.
I catch her wrists gently and bring them up, turning her until her back meets the edge of the bed, and the sound she makes, soft and startled and pleased all at once, unravels something in me I didn't know was still wound tight.
"Tell me if I do anything you don't want," I say, low, my forehead against hers.
"You won't." She says it with a certainty I haven't earned yet and want badly to deserve. "But I'll tell you anyway, so you stop worrying about it."
I find the hem of her sweater and wait, an actual question instead of an assumption, and she answers it by pulling it over her head herself, impatient in a way that startles a laugh out of both of us at once.
Whatever careful pace either of us planned dissolves somewhere in that laugh, replaced by something more urgent and considerably less orderly.
I kiss the line of her throat, her collarbone, learn the particular catch in her breath when my mouth finds the spot just beneath her ear, and file it away the same automatic way I file everything worth remembering, except this stopped being tactical the second her hands found my ribs.
We end up tangled in the sheets with no clear memory of how we got there, her laugh turning into something quieter and rougher against my mouth, my name coming out of her in pieces between kisses like she can't finish the whole word before she needs to say it again.
Every layer between us comes off slower than it needs to, both of us drawing the moment out on purpose now instead of racing past it, learning each other by memory instead of assumption, the kind of attention I've never once let myself give anybody, not like this, not with some part of me standing guard at the door.
There's no guard tonight. There's just her skin warm under my hands, the soft catch of her breath when I finally settle my weight over her, her legs coming up to bracket my hips like she's been waiting for exactly this and isn't interested in waiting any longer.
"Rafe." My name again, rougher this time, one hand fisting in the sheet beside her head, the other pulling me down until there's no space left worth measuring between us.
"I've got you," I say, and mean it as more than words in the moment, and when I finally move inside her the sound she makes against my shoulder is somewhere between my name and a prayer, and I lose whatever thread of coherent thought I'd been holding onto up until that exact second.
We find a rhythm unhurried at first and then anything but, her nails tracing lines down my back that I'll feel tomorrow and won't mind at all, my mouth finding hers again and again like I can't go more than a few seconds without it, both of us chasing something neither of us is in any hurry to reach because reaching it means this particular version of tonight is over.
She says my name one more time, broken open and certain all at once, her whole body going tight and then loose beneath mine, and the sound of it, raw and unguarded, undoes whatever restraint I had left.
I follow her over that same edge a few heartbeats later, her arms wrapped tight around my shoulders, both of us breathing like we've run somewhere fast and important and finally arrived.
We stay tangled together after, neither of us in any hurry to move, her heartbeat slowing gradually under my palm, my own pulse taking considerably longer to follow it down.
"Well," she says eventually, breathless, a laugh threading through the word.
"Well," I agree.
"I don't think either of us is winning any awards for subtlety."
"I wasn't trying to be subtle." I press a kiss to her temple, still catching my own breath. "I've been trying to be subtle about this for weeks. Tonight I decided to stop."
"Good decision."
"I have my moments."
Afterward, she settles against my chest, one arm thrown loosely over me, breathing slowing into something even and unguarded, and I lie there in the dark running the habit I can't seem to shut off no matter how many years pass.
It's threat assessment, exits, entry points, weak spots, anything that could go wrong before morning.
Tonight there's nothing to assess. The doors are locked.
The generator's quiet because the power never went out.
Nothing in this room poses a single actual threat to either of us, and I catalogue that fact three separate times before I admit what I'm actually doing, which is looking for danger in the one place I haven't let myself check yet.
The threat isn't out there. It's in here, lying against my chest with her hair spread across my pillow, breathing easy in a way that only happens when she trusts something completely.
The threat is how much I want this to be permanent, and I've never been good at keeping anything permanent, not the ranch, not anything I've loved without eventually watching it slip through my hands.
I look down at her, at the soft, unguarded line of her mouth, at the way her hand's found its way to rest flat against the scar on my ribs even in her sleep, like she's still keeping watch over it, and I do the thing I haven't let myself do out loud since long before I ever set foot back in Pinewood Ridge.
I admit it.
I'm falling for her. Not the careful, guarded version I've been rationing out for weeks, but the whole thing, twins and checklists and coffee cups left on desks and all, the kind of falling that doesn't come with an exit plan.
I haven't been this scared of anything since the night my career ended, since everything I thought I could control came apart in about four seconds flat.
She stirs against me, murmurs something too soft to make out, and settles deeper into the space between my arm and my chest like she's always belonged there, and I hold as still as I can, listening to the quiet, watching the woman who just walked straight through every wall I ever built without asking permission to do it.
I don't have a plan for this. For once, I don't go looking for one. I just lie here in the dark with her breathing slow and even against my heart, terrified and steady all at once, and let myself want it anyway.