Chapter 18
Cole
I woke at three in the morning for no reason and didn't get back to sleep.
The apartment was the way it was at that hour—the radiator ticking over, the streetlight outside leaking through a gap in the blind, the dishwasher long done with its run.
The pullout sat at the corner of the master bedroom where I'd been sleeping for a few weeks.
Tessa was across the room in the bed. I could hear her breathing.
I turned my head on the pillow toward her.
She had one arm thrown above her head. Her face was turned toward the window. The moonlight was on her cheek.
The first time I'd watched her sleep had been the morning after the bedroom switch.
She had drifted toward me in the night. Her hand had been on the comforter, palm up, four inches from my shoulder, fingers curled the way fingers curled when a person had reached for something in their sleep and stopped. Her face had been a foot from mine.
I'd given myself one minute to look at her.
In that minute, I'd wanted to put my hand on her face. I'd wanted to lift the comforter and put my mouth on her shoulder. I'd wanted things I had no right to want from a woman who had asked me into a bed because she couldn't sleep with me on the floor.
I hadn't done any of it. I'd got up. I'd taken my shoes by the laces and put them on at the kitchen table. I'd bought the pullout the morning after that shift.
I'd told myself it was for the GAL. The pullout hadn't been for the GAL. The pullout had been because I hadn't trusted myself another night, a foot from her face, without doing something she hadn't asked me to do.
I'd been on the pullout ever since.
She'd kissed me yesterday in Sean's. Her hands at the back of my neck.
Her mouth on mine. I'd had her in my arms for what couldn't have been more than fifteen seconds, and I'd given the next five hours to the work of putting her down.
The shape of her mouth. The taste of the coffee she'd been drinking on the way over.
Her hand at my jaw. The way she'd smelled—bread, butter, something on her skin I didn't have a name for.
I'd wanted, while it was happening, to push her up against the swatch wall. The woman Nicholas had probably hired to seduce me had been ten feet away. Sean had been twenty. I'd still wanted it. I'd held the want at the back of my teeth all the way home.
I was looking at her now from across the room. The moonlight had moved a hand-width across her cheek.
If I get into a relationship, I had told her in the truck that afternoon, I want to get into something real. Something like Sam and Jamie.
I'd said it without looking at her. It had been the most direct I'd been with her since the lawn.
So you've really never been with a woman?
I don't have the patience for dating. Haven't met anyone worth the trouble.
She was worth the trouble. I'd known it for weeks. I hadn't said it to her in the truck. I still didn't know how.
I got up.
I made the pullout up the way I made it up every morning.
Fitted sheet pulled tight. Blanket folded into thirds at the foot.
I dressed in the bathroom so I wouldn't have to turn on the bedroom light.
I put on coffee in the kitchen and didn't drink it.
I left the apartment at five-fifteen and drove to the firehouse in the dark.
She was still asleep when I walked out.
The shift was the worst kind of shift.
Sam met me in the bay before report and pulled out his phone.
"You'll want to see this before someone shows you."
It was a photo of Tessa kissing me at Sean's. Taken from across the shop by someone with a phone they'd had ready. The angle was tight—Tessa's hand at my neck, my hand at the small of her back, both of us with our eyes closed. It had three hundred thousand likes.
The caption was the girl and the firefighter.
"It's everywhere," Sam said. "Channel 5 ran a thing this morning. They zoomed in on the ring."
"Of course they did."
Sam looked at me. He didn't grin. He waited.
"What?"
"They want you for the calendar."
"What calendar?"
"The firefighter one. The state one."
"Sam. I am not doing the firefighter calendar."
"That's what I told them."
"Then why are you telling me?"
"Because Davis is going to bring it up at lineup, and I wanted you to have your no lined up before he made it weird."
He didn't lie about that. Davis brought it up at the lineup. The crew got eight or nine minutes of it before we moved on to the run sheet. They had another twenty in the kitchen after, over coffee. By the time Martinez had drafted me into a hypothetical centerfold pose, I'd stopped responding.
I spent the rest of the morning hoping a barn would catch out off Highway 17 just so we'd have something to do. Nothing caught.
By two in the afternoon, I was thinking that if a call didn't drop in the next five minutes, I was going to call one in myself.
Nothing dropped. I didn't call one in myself.
I worked out in the station gym. I racked the weight twice. I went to bed in my bunk at ten-thirty without checking my phone. I woke at five-forty and was in my truck headed home by six.
Tessa's car was in the lot when I pulled in.
Tessa wasn't usually home before noon. She was at Mrs. Thompson's by sun-up. The only mornings she was home before noon were the mornings we had a meeting with Miranda.
I sat in the truck for a beat and ran the case calendar. I didn't think we had anything with Miranda this morning. I'd had my phone in my bunk for the last twenty-four hours.
I unlocked it. Nothing from Miranda. Nothing from Tessa.
I went up the stairs.
The smell hit me in the entry.
Butter. Citrus. Sugar. I had not smelled it in any kitchen I'd lived in since I was sixteen.
"Tessa?"
"In the kitchen!"
I closed the door behind me and walked toward her voice.
She was at the counter with her hair up and a dish towel over her shoulder, lining cookies up on a wire rack.
She had a row of them already laid out and another tray's worth waiting for her on the stove.
There was a wooden box open on the kitchen table.
The one I'd put on the shelf in the living room when we'd moved in.
I had not opened it in eighteen years.
"Were we supposed to meet with Miranda?" I said.
"Hmm? No."
"Don't you have to be at the bakery?"
"Oh. Benjie asked to swap days off with me. So I'm home."
She kept working. The cookies went down on the rack one by one in a neat pattern, two fingers' width between each. She was concentrating on the spacing.
"I found this on your shelf. I hope you don't mind that I went into it. I was looking for a cookbook, and the box has been sitting there as long as I have, and the recipes were really good."
The cookies looked exactly like the ones Shelby used to bake for me when I got home from school.
"Try one?" She held the plate out. "Don't tell me you don't eat sweets. I know better now."
I picked one up.
I took a bite.
It tasted exactly like Shelby's.
For a moment, I was sixteen, standing in the kitchen of the rented house on Marlboro Street where Shelby and I had been each other's only person, and Shelby was at the counter with flour on her nose and on the front of her T-shirt, and she was sliding a tray off the rack onto the counter the way Tessa had just slid a tray off the rack onto the counter.
"So? Is it good?"
I nodded.
"It's good."
"Great. I hope Noah likes it."
She went back to her cookies.
I watched her work.
She was humming. Her hands were unhurried. The smile on her face was the smile I had seen on her when we were sixteen. She had been all sunshine then. She was something close to it now.
I'd been avoiding bakeries for eighteen years. Because the smell reminded me of what Shelby used to make for me, and I’d decided the day she had died that I didn't get to have what she made anymore.
Not after I'd done nothing. Not when the reason she was no longer alive was me.
For eighteen years, I had not eaten one of her cookies, and I had not deserved to.
Standing in my own kitchen with a rack of Shelby's cookies made by a woman who had survived her own abusive husband felt like Shelby reaching for me.
I finished the one I had taken. I set the napkin on the counter.
"I'm going to shower."
"Oh—Cole. Jamie texted earlier. The boys are asking if Noah can come over to play after school. I told her yes. He's going home with them. So you don't have to pick him up today."
"Okay."
I went to the bathroom and closed the door.
I came out of the bathroom in jeans and a T-shirt.
The apartment was quiet. Tessa had moved from the kitchen to the couch in the living room with one of the books Quinn had been sending her.
Quinn and Tessa had drifted into a steady texting friendship since they met at the barbecue, mostly running on book recommendations.
I managed to get a bunch of chores done, things for the house and around the apartment. The day passed quickly without my noticing. Late afternoon, I checked back in to see Tessa still absorbed in her book.
"I feel like eating out today."
I hadn't planned to say that. I didn't know why I'd said it. I'd been about to ask if there was anything in the fridge for dinner. I'd asked her on a date instead.
"What?" Tessa looked up from the book.
"Do you want to eat out for dinner?"
She marked her page with her finger.
"Are you asking me out?"
"I'm asking if you want to eat out for dinner."
She watched me. I hadn't been nervous about a question I'd asked someone in a long time. I was nervous now.
"Okay," she said. "Did you have anything in mind?"
I hadn't, in fact, had anything in mind. I hadn't had a thought in my head between turning off the shower and walking back into the living room.
"Anywhere you want."
"There's a place on King Street I've been meaning to try since I came back. I keep walking past it."
"King Street works."
"Okay." She closed the book.
"I'll go first," I said. "Just grabbing a shirt."