Sophia #2
The man beside him said something I didn't catch and nudged him with an elbow. He straightened and turned. He saw me across the road, and the slow left-side half-smile came onto his face like he had been waiting all afternoon for an excuse.
His face. The mouth. The jaw. The two days of dark stubble along it.
Oh.
Oh, no.
Oh god. His mouth. It’s him.
"Sophia," he said.
The drawl ran under the second syllable. The hairs on the back of my neck lifted. I shut my mouth around the breath I was halfway through taking and made it stay shut.
"Oh," I got out. "It's you."
He set the wrench down on the bike's seat before crossing his driveway and stopping at the edge of the asphalt. The toe of one work-boot half an inch back from where his property ended and the street began.
I could feel the color traveling up the side of my neck.
"It's me," he agreed. The half-smile did not leave his face. "Small world."
I nodded. I tried to make a word. My mouth did not currently know any.
"Caleb." He tapped the center of his own chest with two fingers. The back of my own left hand, currently in possession of the trash bag handle, started to prickle warm right where his thumb had pressed four nights before — skin remembering on its own. "In case the first time wasn't a memorable —"
A laugh got out of me. Half a laugh. Quarter of a laugh. The smallest possible audio escape that could still be classified as a laugh.
The half-smile went up a degree.
"It was memorable," I said.
"I'll keep that in mind." He tipped his chin at the bag in my hand. "Want me to take that to the curb for you?"
"Oh — don't go to any trouble, honestly, I've got it."
I heard the wave-off the same way he did. He nodded once, slow.
"Next time then," he said.
I nodded — at him, at the asphalt, at the bag, at the part of the afternoon that was going to have to be lived through with my own face on fire — and turned, walking back up my own path, and closing my own front door behind me with both hands.
I put my forehead against the wood. Could I be any more awkward and embarrassing? I think not!
By six o’clock my dignity had recovered enough to get me into the car.
Doris started on the third turn of the key.
I took that as a kindness. I tipped my eyes at Willow’s empty wicker chair as I passed — she had presumably gone home to laugh at me from a porch I could no longer hear — and headed out of town without looking at the driveway directly opposite mine.
I had more than enough of that driveway for one afternoon.
The road to the ranch ran east through twenty miles of cottonwood and grass.
I knew every curve of it. Liam and I had owned our ranch for four years — bought it with the money that hadn’t bought my cottage, our parents’ inheritance split clean into one life apiece.
The big main house, where Liam and his wife, Stephy, lived, sat at the top of the long drive, with a line fence on the east marking the boundary with the main Blackwood Ranch.
Aunt Lou and Uncle Owen’s place. My cabin sits right next to the main house, close enough to walk between them in slippers if Stephy had cooked, which she usually had.
A paddock ran alongside, and in it was my eight-year-old golden quarter horse, Daisy, who would by now be wondering with equine bafflement where I had been for four nights.
I owed Daisy an apology and a carrot and an early-morning ride, in that order.
I owed Stephy a hug and a hand on her belly.
She was six and a half months gone with the baby due in February — Liam’s child, by the woman I had loved like a sister since I was six years old in Austin and our houses had shared a fence; lost to me when my parents died; given back when Liam saved her from a crazy stalker three years ago and brought her home to the ranch.
She had been my best friend in the world ever since and she was about to make me an aunt.
The arithmetic of that landed sideways every time I let myself think about it.
There was going to be a person, in February, whose existence I had not lost.
My phone went on the center console.
LIAM. In all caps, because I had put him in my phone that way at fifteen when I got my first phone and not adjusted it since.
“You on the road?”
“Just passed the turn-off.”
“Did you sleep, Soph?”
“Some.”
“Sophia.”
“Liam.”
“Did you sleep?”
“I slept four hours. I am a senior trauma nurse, I know what four hours of sleep is, you can stop being my mother.”
“Someone has to be. Listen. Steph cooked. Come over for dinner before you go out to the cabin.”
“Liam—”
“It’s lasagna. She made it knowing you’d done four in a row and you eat like a stray cat between shifts.”
“I do not eat like a stray cat.”
“Soph.”
“…okay, sometimes I eat like a stray cat. But—”
“Lasagna is on the bench. Come.”
“Tell her I love her and I’m coming.”
“She knows you love her. She cooked because she loves you.”
“I love you too.”
A pause on his end. Then: “Ride with me in the morning?”
“Um…”
“I’ve been on the road three weeks, Soph. I haven’t sat a horse with my sister since August. Brisket is going to bite me on sight if I don’t put eyes on him soon. Six a.m.”
“Six is criminal.”
“Six.”
“Fine. Six.”
“Good. Drive safe.”
He hung up.
I drove for a mile in the gold afternoon with my brother’s voice still in the car and my best friend’s lasagna waiting at the end of the road and my horse standing in a paddock not knowing I was on my way; and somewhere in the middle of the gold and the dust and the warm engine and the wholesome arithmetic of family arriving at me on a Wednesday, the part of my afternoon that had taken place at a mailbox came back online with full and unwelcome clarity.
I let the full diagnostic run.
The findings were grim. I was thirty years old.
I could restart hearts, I could hold a room together at four in the morning while a family learned their loved one had passed on.
Put a good-looking man within speaking distance, however, and speech was the first faculty to flee the building, closely followed by walking, blinking, and the operation of my own face.
It was, I felt, deeply unfair. Nobody warned you that competence didn't transfer.
The woman who could talk a hysterical father down off the ledge of the worst night of his life did not turn up for this.
She sent, in her place, a fifteen-year-old with a crush and a blush problem, and then she went somewhere with good cell reception and declined to answer her phone.
Clinically, I was a senior trauma nurse. Romantically, I was, frankly, a public health concern.
Doris took the turn with her usual reluctance.
There was really only one diagnosis left, and it was not in any of my textbooks.
I could not wait to see him again.