Chapter 24 #4
“Bold.”
“I’m a bold man now. Haven’t you heard?” He kissed me, once, slow. “Winter. I want winter with you. Snow coming down, nowhere to be. You, my couch, that quilt Becca keeps threatening to make for me that I know for a fact will be hideous.”
He was doing it so easily—talking about winter, months out, snow on the windows, like a future with me in it was the most natural thing in the world to picture. My heart tipped right over.
“It will be so hideous.”
“We’ll treasure it.” Another kiss, at the corner of my mouth, drifting. “Sunday roast. Plural. Recurring. I intend to earn a standing invitation from your grandmother if it takes me all year.”
“Compliment the bees.”
“I’ve been studying bees since your text.
Ask me anything.” He was grinning against my cheek now, and then he pulled back an inch, and hesitated, and in the last of the light I watched his ears go faintly red, which I had learned by then was the tell.
Whatever came next was something he’d been keeping to himself, probably for years.
“And a dog,” he said.
“A dog?”
“I want a dog.” He said it like a man confessing to a parole officer.
“I have always wanted a dog. My whole life. I never let myself, because of the hours, because the house was empty all day, because it didn’t seem fair to the dog—” He stopped, and I watched the old reasons line up in his mouth, and I watched him decide not to say them. “I want a dog.”
“What kind of dog?”
“Big one.” No hesitation at all; the man had specifications. “Farm-sized. Terrible manners. The kind that puts its whole front half in your lap and has never once been told it’s too big for that, because nobody had the heart.”
“You’d train the manners into it within a month.” I teased him. “You couldn’t help yourself.”
“Probably.” He considered. “I’d teach him to sit, anyway.
To stay. I’d let the lap thing go.” And then he kissed me again, deeper, both cold hands framing my face, and murmured against my lips like it was a secret between us and the corn, “You asked what I want. That’s the list. But you’re at the top of the list.”
Every item on it had me in it. That was what I was still catching up to, standing there falling harder by the second—the standing invitation, the couch, the hideous quilt, the dog that didn’t exist yet—a whole life sketched out in the dark by a man who used to keep himself apart from everyone, and not one corner of it he’d drawn without me in the frame.
I went up on my toes and answered that the only way it deserved, and the stars came all the way out over the little clearing, and for a while the maze kept the two of us like a secret it was good at.
It was full dark when he asked me back.
“What about you?” His hand moved slowly up and down my spine, warm now, at home there.
Tell him, said the newest part of me. He asked. He is standing in the exact center of everything the money has to save, holding you like you’re the only thing that matters, asking.
And I almost did. The words came right up to the edge of me—there’s another loan, Matt, one nobody knows about, and I don’t know how to fix it—and stopped there, because the older part of me, the part that has run this whole operation my entire life, caught them before they could get out.
Not because I didn’t trust him. I trusted him more than I’d trusted anyone in years.
That was the problem. Because I knew this man, knew him bone-deep by now, and I knew exactly what he’d do the second he heard it.
He’d go still and serious and start solving it.
He’d take it on like it was his, the way he took the barn roof, the way he takes every broken thing he gets near, and he wouldn’t stop until it was fixed or it had flattened him trying.
He was just like me. Give him one loose thread of somebody else’s trouble, and he’d pull on it until his own hands bled.
And I could not do that to him. Not here.
Not tonight, when he’d finally, after a whole guarded life, let himself want a winter and a dog and a place at my grandmother’s table—when he was standing in the cold with his heart out in the open for the first time I’d ever seen.
Besides, it wasn’t mine to give away. My grandmother had guarded that secret from the whole family; the least I owed her was not to hand it to a man she hadn’t chosen to tell.
This moment was ours, and the secret was hers, and the money could wait at the edge of the field where I’d left it.
“This,” I said, and it wasn’t a lie; it just wasn’t everything. “More of this. All of it, just like this—with you.”
He gathered me in and kissed the top of my head and said he could work with that, and we found our way out of the maze by starlight and memory, his hand in mine at every turn, and the farm stood quiet and dark and mine around us, and if something in me wished I would have told him about Grandma’s secret loan—well.
Nobody knew it but me. I was getting so good at secrets, it should have scared me.