Chapter 18 #2
I went into the bedroom and put on a button-down. One of two I owned that didn't have a Station 33 patch on the sleeve. I rolled the cuffs and unrolled them and rolled them again.
I'd asked her on a date.
I left the cuffs rolled.
I came out. Tessa got up from the couch and went past me into the bedroom.
She came out fifteen minutes later in a simple navy dress. She had been beautiful in the kitchen with flour on her hands, and she was beautiful now in front of me, and the dress had nothing to do with it.
She had stopped dyeing her hair dark a few weeks back. The honey-blonde was coming back at the roots. The bathroom light was on behind her, and her hair caught it, and for a second, I was looking at the girl I had known at sixteen.
"Ready to go?"
"Yeah."
I stood up from the couch and got my keys.
I drove. She sat next to me with the window cracked an inch and her hair moving in the air. She was humming again. I kept my eyes on the road. I kept failing to keep my eyes on the road.
"Have you tried the food there before?" she said.
"No. I heard it's good."
"You don't eat out often, do you?"
"What makes you think that?"
"You don't go on dates. What reason do you have to eat out?"
"I could be too lazy to cook."
She looked over at me.
"Cole. The guy who's rebuilding his own house by himself has lazy days?"
I shrugged. "Yeah. When I'm too tired to cook."
"When do you get too tired to do anything?"
"After I finish working on the house."
"Right. So you eat out alone? That's sad, isn't it?"
"I don't eat out alone. I take the guys."
"Cole, you're really not making a strong case about being not gay."
"Do you want me to prove it to you?"
I'd said it before I'd finished thinking it.
In the passenger seat, Tessa's jaw came open.
"Did you just—"
"What?"
Tessa was looking at me suspiciously now. There was a small smile on her face she wasn't quite hiding.
"Nothing," she said.
I pulled up half a block from the restaurant. The closest spot I could find on King Street on a weeknight. I parallel parked. Cut the engine.
We got out. I came around the front of the truck and met her at the curb. The evening was warm, the sky still light. She fell in beside me, and we walked.
We walked the half block in silence—not the bad kind, not even the awkward kind. The kind where two people had just said something neither was planning to say and were waiting to find out what came next.
The restaurant was on the corner. The sign was small. The light through the window was warm and gold.
I held the door for her. The bell above it rang. She stepped inside, and the gold light caught her hair as she went past me.
I followed her in.
A waiter showed us to a table by the window.
It was a small place. Twelve tables. Brick walls, tin ceiling, candles on the tables in glass holders—the small kind that didn't do much for light but did something for the way it landed on a person's face. The waiter handed us each a menu and went away.
I opened mine.
I looked at her over the top of it.
Her hair was down. The honey at her roots caught the candlelight. She was reading the menu the way she read everything—fast, focused, her finger tracking the lines. She didn't know I was looking at her.
"What are you getting?" she said, without looking up.
"Steak."
"I'm thinking shrimp pasta. Or—there's a seafood tower."
"That sounds suspicious."
"Why?"
"Anything called a tower at a restaurant is going to be a quarter of what it ought to be."
She laughed. She closed the menu.
"Shrimp pasta."
The waitress came back. We ordered. She filled our water glasses, her wine, my beer, and went away.
Tessa took a sip of her wine. She set it down. She looked at me across the candle.
"So," she said. "Is this your first date?"
"What?"
"Am I the first woman you took out on a date?"
"Don't make it weird."
"Come on, just humor me."
"You can call it a date if you want."
"Is it a date?"
"Do you want it to be one?"
She looked away and smiled.
Even in the candlelight, I could see her turn red.
"You know what," she said. "Because you've never been on one, I'll be charitable and call this a date."
I laughed.
"Fine."
"So. Since you've never been on a date, I'll take the lead."
"Take the lead?"
"Yeah, because you wouldn't know how these things usually go."
"Fine then. Enlighten me, how do these things usually go?"
"So when you're on a date, people usually ask questions to get to know the other person. Are you comfortable answering personal questions?"
I shrugged again. "Depends on what you ask."
"Can I ask what made you choose to become a firefighter?"
I took a sip of water.
"I almost enlisted."
Her eyebrows went up.
"Military?"
"Yeah."
"That explains the model figures."
"Mm."
"What stopped you?"
I set the glass down.
"Liked the idea of it. The structure. Order, discipline, everybody knowing where they fit. I read about it for years."
"And?"
"And then I'd read about the actual job. Pull the trigger. Kick the door. Follow the order." I shook my head. "Sat with it long enough to figure out it wasn't what I'd been wanting."
"What were you wanting?"
"The part where you helped people."
She didn't answer for a second.
"Firefighting got there faster," I said. "I get to keep the rest as a hobby. Models. The reading. Don't have to make it the work."
"You ever regret it?"
"No."
She watched me. The candle was doing something to her face I was trying not to look at directly.
"Can I ask about your family?"
"What about it?"
"Anything you want to say?"
"My dad died when I was three. I don't remember him."
"Cole."
"It was a long time ago."
"I'm still sorry."
I sat with it for a beat.
She didn't push. I'd half-expected her to.
"Sam was the closest thing I had to one," I said.
I hadn't planned that either. The Sam thing had come up the way certain things came up around her—without any of the doors I usually kept things behind.
"Sam Reeves?"
"Yeah. He took me under his wing when I was a rookie. Didn't make a thing of it. Just showed me what it looked like to be good at something that mattered."
"That's a lot to give somebody."
"Yeah."
"Does he know?"
I looked at her.
"Know what?"
"That he's that, to you."
I didn't have an answer for that. I'd never told him. I'd assumed for a long time that the people around you knew what they were to you without it being said.
Sitting across a candle from a woman who'd asked me a question I'd never asked myself, I wasn't sure that was true anymore.
"I don't know," I said.
"You should tell him."
"Maybe."
The food came.
The waitress set down Tessa's pasta. My steak. She refilled the wine, asked if I wanted another beer, and went away when I shook my head.
Tessa took a bite of the pasta.
"Oh."
"Good?"
She nodded with her mouth full.
"Worth the walks past?"
"Yeah."
I cut into the steak. Good steak. I wouldn't have noticed it any other night of my life.
We ate. We talked.
I asked her what had gotten her into baking, and she told me.
The cleaned-up version—a job she'd needed when she'd come to Havensworth, the only person willing to take her on without experience being Mrs. Thompson, the surprise of finding out she was actually good at it.
I knew the long version. The pieces of it I knew, anyway.
Needing a job was a clean way of saying she'd needed somewhere on this earth to put her hands.
She talked about the dough. About the proof.
About the way the kitchen smelled at five in the morning before anyone else was in it.
There was a thing she said—about making something with her own hands and watching somebody eat it and be happy about it—that I let sit in the air longer than she meant it to.
The first time she'd brought me something she'd made, I'd declined.
I'd told her I didn't eat sweets and watched her face do a thing it hadn't done before.
It had taken half a second to land and another half to disappear.
She'd reset it so fast I'd almost talked myself into thinking I hadn't seen it.
I had.
I wasn't making that mistake again.
She kept talking. Her hands had come out of her lap, moving with the sentences the way they moved at the bakery counter when she was explaining a pastry to someone. She was laughing at small things in her own story that didn't strictly earn a laugh.
She was Natalie tonight.
The girl from when we were sixteen. Chatty. Bright. The kind of girl who could turn a room without meaning to.
She'd come back to her own face.
I lost a few seconds inside that.
My phone buzzed against my thigh.
I didn't pull it out.
It buzzed again.
"You can take it," she said.
I pulled it out.
I winced.
Davis had taken it—him and Martinez in the station kitchen, both of them shirtless, both of them flexing for the camera. Martinez had a rose between his teeth. The caption read: Mr. JULY OR ME.
"Bad news?"
"Davis and Martinez."
"Is it work?"
"It's the calendar."
She put down her fork.
"What calendar?"
"The firefighter one. They want me for Mr. July."
She laughed out loud, into the room, head back. The waiter looked over.
"You should do it."
"No."
"Cole. Come on."
"No."
"I would buy six. I'd ask Mrs. Thompson if I could put one up by the register. We'd get more customers."
"You'd put it up at the bakery?"
"Yes."
"My face. At your bakery."
"That's the idea."
I shook my head.
"I don't want more attention than I've already got."
"Boring," she said. But she was smiling. She picked her fork up.
The rest of the evening was lighter. Smaller things. Noah at Jamie's earlier in the day. Noah's running argument with himself about whether he wanted to play soccer in the spring. Whether the bakery's new oven was actually new.
The bill came. I took it.
She watched me put my card back into my wallet.
"Thank you for dinner."
"Don't think about it. I wanted to eat out."
"Yeah," she said. "You did."
She was looking at me across the candle the way she'd looked at me when I'd come out of the shower and asked her if she'd wanted to go.
The candlelight wasn't helping me think straight.
She laughed quietly. Took a last sip of her water and set the glass down.
"Ready?"
"Yeah."
I held the door for her on the way out.
The street had cooled. Air moving up off the harbor a few blocks down. We started back toward where I'd parked.
She slipped her arm through mine before we'd gone three steps.
She didn't make a thing of it. She didn't look up at me. She hooked her hand at the bend of my elbow and walked.
I didn't pull away.
It wasn't a performance. Nobody was on this stretch of King Street at this hour. She'd done it because she'd wanted to be holding my arm.
I'd wanted her to be holding my arm.
We walked the half block to the truck without saying anything.
We picked Noah up from Sam and Jamie's on the way home. He climbed into the back seat half-asleep and was all the way asleep by the time I'd backed out of the driveway. Jack and Ben had run him into the ground.
The drive passed in silence. Tessa had her arm against the window and her head against her arm. I didn't reach for the radio.
I parked, cut the engine, went around to the back, and got Noah out. He was heavier than he looked, and he didn't wake up when I lifted him. His head went into the side of my neck and stayed there. I carried him up the three flights.
Tessa had the door open by the time I got to it. She closed it behind me, went past me down the hall, and turned on the lamp in his room—the one we'd put low on the nightstand for the nights he didn't want it all the way dark. I laid him on the bed.
"I've got him."
"Yeah."
I stepped out of the way. She knelt by the bed and slid his shoes off, setting them by the rug.
She got his arms out of his shirt the way a person who had done it a thousand times, eased him into his pajamas, pulled the comforter up to his chest, and tucked the edges in along his sides.
She brushed the hair off his forehead and kissed it.
She didn't see me in the doorway. I stood there longer than I needed to.
There was a woman on the floor by the bed with her hand on her son's hair, doing what she had probably done for him every night of his life. There was a boy in that bed who had come into my arms in the back of the truck without waking up because his body had decided I was a person it slept against.
I had known it while walking back from the restaurant with her hand at my elbow. I had known it at the candle. I had known it standing in my kitchen this morning with Shelby's recipe card propped against the box. I knew it standing in this doorway in a way that wasn't going to come back out of me.
I didn't want them to leave.
Not for the case. Not for the year. Not at all.