17. Jenna
JENNA
Iwake up disoriented, not because anything's wrong but because everything's different.
The ceiling's too close, the light's coming from the wrong angle, and my arm's gone numb under a weight that isn't a pillow.
It takes a few seconds to sort out where I am, and then it all comes back at once, and it's worth every second of the confusion it cost me.
Rafe's already up. I hear him before I place him, quiet movement in the small kitchen, water running, a cabinet closing with more care than the average person gives a cabinet.
By the time I've got myself sitting upright, blanket pulled up against the morning chill, he's crossing the room with two mugs, already dressed, hair still damp, moving with the same economical precision he brings to everything he does, except looser somehow, softer at the edges in a way I haven't seen on him before.
"Cream, no sugar." He hands me one of the mugs like it's obvious, like he's never once had to ask how I take it.
"How did you know that?"
"I pay attention." He sits on the edge of the bed, close enough that his knee presses against mine through the blanket. "You've made yourself a hundred cups of coffee at that brewery. I've been watching the whole time and pretending I wasn't."
"That's either very sweet or a little concerning."
"Ask me again in daylight. I'll let you know which one it turns out to be."
I laugh into my mug, and it comes out lower and rougher than my usual laugh, my throat still a little worn from a night that didn't leave much room for sleep.
Rafe watches me with an expression I don't have much experience reading on him, something unguarded and faintly stunned, like a man who still isn't convinced this is real and has decided not to examine that too closely.
"What time is it?"
"Eight forty." He says it without checking anything, the same flat certainty he brings to a brew schedule. "I already called Gunny. He's got the taproom covered until noon."
"You called Gunny? This morning? Before I was even awake?"
"I like to plan ahead."
"You like having a checklist for everything. That's what you like."
"Guilty." He doesn't argue the point, just drinks his coffee and watches me over the rim of it, something easy and pleased sitting in his face that I don't think he'd let most people see. "Today's checklist only had one item on it. Let you sleep as long as possible."
"That's not much of a checklist."
"It was the only thing that mattered."
I glance at the chair by the window, where my clothes from last night are draped in a heap I don't remember making, and the reality of the morning finally catches up to the warmth of it. "I need to get the twins from Maggie's before she starts feeding them sugar for breakfast out of spite."
"Would she do that?"
"She's threatened it before. Something about payback for the time Eli explained, in detail, exactly how her knee replacement probably works."
Rafe laughs, real and surprised out of him, a sound I don't think I'll ever get tired of causing. "I'll drop you at your car."
"That obvious a getaway plan?"
"I'm ex-military. Every plan I make is technically a getaway plan." He stands, holds a hand out to pull me up, and doesn't let go of it once I'm standing, like helping me up was never really the point. "You've got a bit of a situation, by the way."
"What kind of situation?"
"You're wearing my shirt."
I look down, and he's right. Somewhere around one in the morning, borrowing his shirt apparently seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea, one I have zero memory of agreeing to.
"I don't remember agreeing to this."
"You didn't. I offered. You didn't argue very hard."
"I should probably not be wearing your shirt when I go pick up two very observant eight-year-olds from their honorary grandmother's house."
"Probably not, no."
I change back into yesterday's clothes, the same jeans and sweater I wore to dinner, and it isn't until I'm standing in front of the small mirror by his door that the actual problem announces itself.
Same clothes, same everything, and there isn't a version of walking into Maggie's kitchen in this outfit that reads as anything other than precisely what it is.
"This is going to be a disaster," I tell him.
"You'll be fine."
"You don't have kids. You don't know how fast an eight-year-old can build a case."
"I met the prosecution personally. On your porch. With a printed checklist." He kisses my forehead, quick and easy, like it's something we've done a hundred times instead of something brand new. "Good luck. Call me later."
It's an eleven-minute drive from the brewery to Maggie's place, the same eleven minutes it takes to get anywhere in this town that matters, and I spend every one of them rehearsing a story that falls apart a little more each time I run it in my head.
Maggie's is a low ranch house with a wraparound porch and wind chimes she's had since long before I moved to town, and I've barely got the car in park before the front door bangs open and both twins come barreling out, Eli in the lead, Josie a half step behind with her backpack still half unzipped.
"Mom!" Eli's already talking before he's off the porch steps. "Maggie let us watch three movies. Three. And we had popcorn with the fake butter, the good kind, not the healthy kind."
"Sounds like a rough night," I say, catching him in a hug he tolerates for exactly two seconds before wriggling free, already moving on to the next piece of news.
"Josie cried during the sad part and said she didn't, but she did."
"I did not cry. My eyes were just tired."
"Your eyes were tired in a crying way."
Maggie appears in the doorway behind them, coffee mug in hand, still in her robe, taking one long look at me before her eyebrows climb somewhere near her hairline. I know that look. I've seen versions of it on her face before, usually right before she says something I'm not prepared to answer.
"Morning," she says, entirely too innocent.
"Morning. Thank you for having them."
"Anytime. They're easier than my own grandkids, and that's saying something." Her eyes travel over me, slow and deliberate, cataloguing details I'd very much rather she didn't notice. "Nice sweater."
"Thanks."
"Didn't you wear that yesterday?"
I open my mouth to answer, and that's exactly the moment Josie, blessed with a merciless internal ledger, looks up from her backpack and squints at me with the particular focus she usually reserves for spelling tests.
"That is the same shirt," Josie announces, to the porch, to the neighborhood, to whatever satellite happens to be passing overhead. "You wore that to dinner last night."
"I have more than one sweater that looks like this."
"You have one sweater that looks like this. I picked it out with you at the store. It has the button that doesn't match the other buttons."
I glance down. She's right, it's the exact button, off-color and stubbornly out of place, the one I've never once bothered to replace. "Laundry's been a whole thing lately."
"You did laundry two days ago. I watched you do it. You made me match socks."
Maggie has to turn fully away from us, shoulders shaking, pretending very hard to be occupied with something extremely important on the porch railing, and I know exactly what she's doing, and how close she is to losing that particular battle.
"It's a very versatile sweater," I say, with as much dignity as I can locate on short notice. "Get your bags. We're going to be late for absolutely nothing in particular."
"You're being weird," Eli says, not unkindly, the same tone he'd use to note that the sky looks like rain. "Is this a secret weird or a regular weird?"
"It's a get-in-the-car weird. Move."
They move, mercifully, twin backpacks and a stray stuffed rabbit and one abandoned juice box gathered up in under a minute, and I use the small window it buys me to grab Maggie by the arm before she can follow them out.
"Not one word," I whisper. "To anyone. Ever."
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to. I could see it forming."
"I was going to say I liked the sweater. That's all I was going to say." Her eyes are bright with something she's working hard to keep off her face. "You look happy, Jenna."
That lands different than the teasing did, quieter, and I don't have a fast answer for it, because she's right, and because hearing it said out loud makes the whole thing feel bigger and more fragile at the same time.
"I am," I say. "I'm also terrified. Both at once."
"That tracks. That's usually how the good ones announce themselves." She squeezes my arm once, gentle, the teasing set aside for a second. "Swear you'll tell me everything eventually."
"Swear you'll keep your mouth shut until I say otherwise."
"Scout's honor. Which means nothing, since I was never a scout, but you get the sentiment." She winks and steps back to wave the twins off from the porch, already reaching for her phone the second my car doors close, and I decide it's better not to speculate about who that call might be to.
The twins settle into the backseat still arguing about the sad movie, and somewhere around the second stop sign they abandon the argument entirely in favor of singing along to whatever's on the radio, off-key and completely unbothered by it, Eli a half beat behind the melody and Josie making up her own words whenever she forgets the real ones.
I used to find that kind of noise exhausting on a rough morning.
Today I'd pay money to keep it going a little longer.
I do the math again on the drive home, the same math I ran over coffee at Maggie's corner table weeks ago, except the numbers have changed since then and I don't entirely trust myself with the new total.
It isn't just a kiss anymore, or a storm-stranded night in a loft, or two people carefully not naming what's happening between them.
It's a whole morning that felt permanent before either of us said the word out loud.
It's twins in the backseat who've already decided Rafe belongs to them, singing badly and blissfully unaware their mother spent last night falling harder for a man than she has for anyone since before they were born.
That's the part that scares me, if I'm honest about it.
It isn't Rafe himself. Rafe drove eleven miles in the dark for a stranger's woodstove and answered an eight-year-old's checklist like his life depended on getting it right, and truthfully, I trust him more than I've trusted anyone in years.
It's the falling itself that scares me, the speed of it, the way something this good makes me reach automatically for the version of the story where it goes wrong, because that's the only version I've got real experience with.
I glance in the rearview mirror at both of them, Josie's head tipped back against the seat, mouth wide open on a note nowhere near the right one, Eli drumming both hands against his knees like the dashboard's a snare drum, and I make a decision somewhere around the third stop sign that I don't examine too hard before I commit to it.
I'm not telling them yet. Not about last night, not about any of it, not until I'm sure, or as close to sure as anyone ever gets about something this new, because if it falls apart I want it to be my heart that breaks first, not theirs, and I'll take whatever head start on that I can manage to buy myself.
"Mom, you're doing the face," Josie says, catching my eyes in the mirror between verses.
"What face?"
"The thinking-too-hard face. Your eyebrows do a thing."
"I really don't."
"You absolutely do," Eli confirms, unhelpfully. "Dad used to say you get it when you're doing math in your head."
The mention doesn't sting the way it used to, an old name carrying less weight now than it once did, and I let it pass without flinching, because some fights really can wait for another day. "Maybe I am doing math."
"Is it hard math?"
"The hardest kind." I check the mirror once more, both of them singing again by the next line, already moved on, and something in my chest twists, happy and nervous all at once, the strange, new feeling of carrying a secret that's good instead of bad. "Buckle up. We're almost home."
They sing the rest of the way, off-key and entirely unbothered by it, and I drive with both hands steady on the wheel and my heart caught somewhere I don't have a word for yet, dangerously close to hope.