15. Brooke #2
“Thirty minutes,” he says. “Maybe less. Stay in the car, keep it locked, and if anybody stops before I get there you do not roll the window down. Thirty minutes.”
He hangs up before I can argue, which is the only way anyone’s ever won an argument with me, and I sit in a dead car on a darkening road and I hate that the thing I feel, under the fear and the annoyance and the stubborn independence, is relief.
Adrian makes it in twenty-six.
I watch his headlights come around the bend and slow and pull in behind me, and he’s out of the car before it’s fully stopped, crossing to my window in the last gray light, and I roll it down and he crouches down to my level and looks at me like he’s checking me for damage.
“Are you okay? Is the baby, are you…”
“I’m fine. We’re fine. It’s the car that’s dead, not me.”
The worst of the fear goes out of him, and he nods, and then he stands and looks at the hood with the grim determination of a man who is about to pretend he knows what he’s doing.
“Pop the hood.”
“Do you know anything about cars?”
“No.” He rolls his sleeves up. “Not one thing. But I’m going to look at the engine like I do, because standing here useless while you wait isn’t a thing I’m willing to do. Pop the hood.”
I pop the hood, mostly to see what happens.
What happens is my estranged husband, in the deepening dark, props open the hood and stares into the engine of a car he does not understand with the fierce concentration he used to save for a sentence that wouldn’t come right.
He touches things. He jiggles a cap. He asks me to try the key and I try the key and it clicks and he says “hm” like the click told him a fact, which it did not, it told him nothing, he has no idea, and it is the single most attractive thing I have watched a man do in longer than I want to admit.
Because here is what’s happening to me, sitting in a dead car watching Adrian Ashbourne fail to fix an engine.
The evening’s warm, storm-warm, that dense air before rain, and he’s rolled his sleeves to the elbow and undone the top buttons of his shirt against the heat.
There’s a smear of engine grease up one forearm, and his hair’s a mess from raking his hand through it, and he’s frowning at a machine that has comprehensively defeated him and refusing to give up on it anyway, and I am pregnant and exhausted and in the middle of divorcing this man, and I cannot stop looking at his hands.
I try to look at literally anything else. The road. The sky. The reservoir going pewter in the last light. My own phone.
My eyes keep going back, to the forearms, to the open collar, to the concentration, to the sheer stubborn refusal in him to stand still while I need help, and I feel a thing move through me that has no business showing up on the shoulder of a county road.
Low and warm and entirely unwelcome, and I press my knees together and stare at the dashboard and will it away.
It does not go away.
Stupid hormones.
“I think,” Adrian says, wiping his hands on a shirt he’s ruining, “and I want to be clear that I am guessing, that your car is extremely broken.”
“Your diagnosis is that it’s broken.”
“My diagnosis is that it’s broken and I am not the man to un-break it.
” He drops the hood and it bangs shut and the sound is very loud on the empty road.
“Which means we wait for the auto club, or we get you somewhere warmer than a dead car, because the temperature’s dropping and you’ve had a day, and I can see you shivering from here. ”
And then, as if the sky has been waiting for its cue, the first fat drops of rain hit the windshield, one, two, and then the whole storm at once, coming down in sheets across the hills, drumming the roof, turning the last of the light to water.
We look at each other through the rain on the glass.
“There was a building,” Adrian says slowly, raising his voice over the downpour. “A quarter mile back. Little cabin, maintenance shed, some kind of outbuilding, set off the road. I saw it on the way in. It has a roof, which is currently more than your car can say.”
I look at the wall of rain and I look at the dead car. I look at my husband, soaked already just from crouching by my window, holding his jacket half off to hold over my head the second I say yes.
“This is a terrible idea,” I say.
“Almost certainly,” he agrees. “Come on. Before you’re any colder.”
We run for it.
The rain is a wall by the time I’m out of the car, cold and total, soaking through my blouse in the first three steps, and Adrian keeps his jacket over my head with one hand and his other hand at the small of my back, not pushing, just there, steady, guiding me up the muddy track toward the dark shape of the cabin while the storm tries to knock us both flat.
It’s a quarter mile that feels like a mile, and by the time he shoulders the unlocked door and we stumble inside, we’re both soaked to the skin and shaking and breathing hard, and the door bangs shut behind us and cuts the roar of the rain down to a drumming on the roof.
It’s a maintenance cabin, one room, a cot, a stack of firewood, a woodstove, a lantern that works when Adrian finds the switch, and it smells like sawdust and cold and old smoke. Not romantic.
Nothing about it is romantic. Which is why I don’t understand what happens to the air the second the door closes and it’s just the two of us and the small yellow light and the storm walling us off from the entire rest of the world.
“You’re shaking,” he says. “You need to get out of the wet shirt, you’ll freeze.”
“I’m fine.”
“Brooke.” He’s already crossing to the woodstove, crouching, feeding it kindling with hands that aren’t quite steady either. “You’re pregnant and soaked and it’s forty degrees in here. Please. There’s a blanket on the cot. Get out of the wet things and wrap up and let me get this lit.”
And I want to argue, because arguing is what we do now, it’s the safe thing, the wall, but I’m shaking too hard to hold onto it.
So I turn my back to him and peel the wet blouse off over my head and wrap the rough wool blanket around my shoulders, and when I turn back around he’s peeling his own soaked shirt off, wringing it out, and I forget for a second how to breathe.
I’ve seen him without a shirt a thousand times. I was married to him.
And still, in the lantern light, with the rain coming down and the day I’ve had and the thing that’s been building since the county road.
The sight of him goes through me the way a current goes through water, the long lines of him, the water still on his skin, the muscles of his back moving as he wrings out the shirt and drapes it over the woodstove rail to dry.
Adrian turns around and catches me looking.
Neither of us pretends I wasn’t.
“Don’t,” I say, and my voice isn’t as steady as I want it.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re doing the thing where you’re wonderful and it’s raining and you drove twenty-six minutes and you built me a house out of cardboard, and I am tired, Adrian, I am so tired of being angry at you when you make it this hard.”
“Then stop being angry at me.”
“I can’t.” It comes out cracked. “That’s the whole problem. The anger is the only thing keeping me from doing the stupid thing.”
He goes very still across the small room. The stove has caught now, throwing heat and unsteady light, and the storm is loud on the roof, and he looks at me wrapped in a blanket with my wet hair down my back and my anger held out in front of me like the last shield it is.
“What stupid thing?” he says quietly.
And I should not answer.
Every part of me that has spent months rebuilding a spine is screaming at me not to answer. But the day has burned all my caution down to ash, the wine and the walkout and the lightness and the fear and the rain, and I am so tired of holding the line, and I hear myself say it.
“Come here and find out.”
He crosses the room.
He doesn’t lunge, he doesn’t grab, that’s not what this is. He crosses the room slowly and deliberately, giving me every step to change my mind, and he stops close.
Close enough that I have to tip my head back to hold his eyes, and he lifts one hand and cups the side of my face, his thumb along my cheekbone, and his hand is warm now from the fire, and I lean into it before I can stop myself.
“If you tell me to stop,” he says, low and rough, “I stop. Right now, later, in the middle, whenever. You say the word and it’s over and I never bring it up. Do you understand me?”
“I understand you. Stop talking.”
I fist my hand in the front of him, in the bare warm skin of him, and I pull him down and I kiss him, and it is nothing like the careful reverent way he’d kiss me if I let him lead.