7. Chapter 7 #2
Nobody has told me what any of it means. The cameras went up without an explanation. Cole has a name for this, I'm sure of it, the way his jaw set this morning before he left for the treeline. He just hasn't given it to me.
“I'll handle it,” I say.
“Mara.”
“I'll handle it.” I put the snickerdoodle down. My hands are steady because I've trained them to be.
Junie looks at me the way older women sometimes do. Like she's seen every version of I'll handle it and knows exactly which kind ends badly.
She doesn't push.
She doesn't bring up the senator again.
“And Mara.” Junie waits until I look at her.
“This town's smaller than it looks and it talks more than it should.
But it closes ranks when it decides to. You let me decide you're one of mine, and the talking starts working for you instead of against you.” She stands, brushing flour off her apron. “I've about decided.”
Junie digs in her apron, comes out with a receipt and a pen, and writes a number on the back of it.
“That's me. Not the bakery line, me.” She presses it into my hand and closes my fingers over it. “Those two come back, or anything else with wrong shoes shows up, you text me. Day or night. I mean that the way your mother meant it, not the way people say it to be polite.”
I look at the number in my hand. All this time of people finding reasons not to give me theirs, and a woman I met over a snickerdoodle just handed me hers and told me to use it.
“Okay,” I say. It comes out smaller than I mean it to.
“Okay.” She pats my hand once and lets go.
I'm halfway through thinking she might be the best person in this town when the library door opens.
My eyes go there before I can stop them.
The jacket first. The shoulders that take up too much of the doorway, squared and unhurried, the whole line of him announcing that whatever room he's just entered has been renegotiated.
Four days. Four days and my body's already learning the frequency of him the way a tuning fork learns a note. I resent how fast.
The pull starts low. Below my ribs, below anything respectable. It moves up through me before I can redirect it, settling behind my sternum in a way I have no professional language for.
My thighs press together. My breath adjusts without my permission.
I am aware, sitting in a children's library chair, that I want him. In a way that does not care at all about contracts or complications.
Four days ago, he listed the rules at me like I was a liability he'd already priced. No playdates. No friends. He's eight. He needs to be safe, like I'd suggested otherwise. I haven't forgotten the way he said it, flat and pre-decided, a man closing a door he'd already decided to close.
My body, apparently, has.
That's the part I can't get level. He stood six inches from me in a kitchen at one in the morning and chose not to close the distance.
I think about it more than I want to. And in the same breath I'm still angry he gets to decide what I'm allowed to know, what Owen's allowed to have, where the fence line falls for both of us.
Four days, and I keep landing on the same two facts. I want him. I'm still furious he gets to ration the truth and call it protection.
Both are running. Neither is winning.
He looks at me the way he looked at me at the gate. Like he's running a calculation he already knows the answer to and is choosing not to write it down.
Cole scans. Exits first, everything else second. He finds Owen, then me, then Junie.
He clocks Junie's expression.
Then mine.
His gaze stays on my face a beat too long, reading something I didn't mean to leave visible. The corner of his mouth tightens, the look of a man who's noticed there's something to smile about and locked it down before it could become one.
“Ready?” he says to Owen.
Owen doesn't look up. “Five more minutes.”
“Two.”
“Four.”
Cole's mouth tugs sideways, almost giving way. “Three. Final offer.”
Owen considers this with great seriousness. “Deal.”
Cole moves toward us. His eyes cut to Junie, polite and contained, then back to me.
“Everything okay?”
“Great.” My smile feels like a mask I'm holding up with both hands.
Junie stands, smoothing her apron. “Cole Grayson. Junie. I've been feeding your nanny snickerdoodles and minding my own business.”
“Appreciate it,” he says. He doesn't sound like he appreciates it. He sounds like a man doing math in his head.
Owen collects his stack. Cole raises an eyebrow at the height of it, says nothing, takes four from the top. We check out and leave.
Outside, Sheriff Ward stops us with a storm warning: thirty-six hours before the ridge road floods.
She holds eye contact with me half a second longer than the warning requires. Like she's filing something. I tell myself it's a small-town thing, sheriffs knowing every face, and I let it go.
Cole's face doesn't shift through any of it. Not the market. Not the bakery counter, where Donna rings us up and I see the watch at his wrist for the first time. Not the parking lot, where he tells me my replacement vehicle is being delivered Friday. Paid for. Don't argue.
I don't, because I am not arguing about anything small while two men in wrong shoes are sitting in my head.
The drive back starts quiet.
Cole pulls out of the parking spot and a black sedan three cars back pulls out with us. I clock it without turning my head. Cole's eyes go to the rearview, twice in thirty seconds. He doesn't say anything. I don't either. The kind of not-saying-anything that means we both saw it.
Cole is a careful driver. Both hands. Full stops. Radio off. The silence in the cab is not the comfortable kind. It's the kind with weight.
Owen is in the backseat with a comic book, headphones in. Cole checked. I saw him check.
The ridge road curves. I stare out the window. The trees are doing that late-afternoon gold thing where everything looks prettier than it is.
My hands are folded in my lap and I'm watching the tree line like it owes me something.
Wrong shoes. Too clean.
“She recognized your name,” Cole says.
Not a question.
“She was nice about it.” I keep looking at the window.
“Mara.”
“I'm okay, Cole.”
“It's not fine. Your jaw has been set since the library.” A pause. “I've learned your jaw.”
That lands somewhere it shouldn't. I don't answer.
He checks the rearview. Not casual. Third time since we left town.
“Why are we going the long way?” Owen asks from the back.
“Wanted to check the bridge before the storm.”
Owen accepts it and goes back to his comic.
I don't accept it. I don't turn my head, either. I reach back and adjust Owen's seatbelt buckle that doesn't need adjusting. The motion gives me one second of cover to look.
Black sedan. Two doors. Tinted windows. Three cars back. Holding the same distance through the last curve.
I face forward.
The sedan passes us a minute later. Slow. Steady. The pace of a man making sure he's been seen. Then it's around the next bend and gone.
My hands are still in my lap. I have not let them move.
Cole's hand comes off the wheel.
It lands on my forearm. Heavy.
He has not touched me before. Not like this. Four days of standing close enough to feel the heat off him and choosing not to, every time, and now his hand is on me and the choosing is over.
The weight of it is a sentence I can't read the language of yet. His thumb finds the inside of my wrist and stops, and my pulse jumps once, twice, fast enough that he has to feel it. My breath catches in a way I don't have time to hide.
He doesn't move his hand.
He leaves it there for a count I will remember later. Long enough that I have to feel the weight of it as a choice, not an accident. His thumb moves once, slow, across the soft underside of my wrist, and goosebumps come up on my arm before they reach the rest of me.
Four days of inches. This is the first one he's closed.
When his hand goes back to the wheel, the cold spot it leaves says everything he doesn't.
“We're fine,” he says. Low. For me, not Owen.
I'm not sure I believe him. I'm not sure he does either.
Soon, the house appears through the trees. Solid and unreadable. He slows for the gate. His phone buzzes against the console. Once. Twice. He doesn't look at it.
He's not looking at his phone because he's watching me.
The gate swings open. He doesn't pull through.
“Tell me what you're running from, Mara.” His voice drops. Quiet. Certain. “Now.”