Chapter 27
Biology Class
Day 52
It was our last day in class. The last five minutes, actually, if the slow tick of the clock could be trusted. The last biology class of my high school career. Dax drummed his fingers on the table, ignoring me to listen to a song through his earbuds.
To my surprise, he suddenly turned toward me, a determined aloofness in his eyes.
“I’ve got a question for you, Books.”
I blinked at him. “What?”
“Why is DNA so good at solving crimes?”
His face was so carefully passive, you almost wouldn’t know that we’d ever had any moment between us outside of this class.
My lips twitched ever so slightly. “Did somebody read the chapters again?”
“Quit stalling.”
“I don’t know.”
His eyes shot up. “Did you not read the chapters?”
I hadn’t. My brain had been too occupied with other things.
“Not yet.”
He leaned toward me. “Because it has all the inside information. ”
The bell rang so I grabbed my backpack and stood up to go. “You’re right. That is annoying.”
“Exactly. Have a nice life, Books.”
News of our escapade had spread like wildfire, at least according to the dozens of text messages from this morning that I had yet to read on my phone. I left the judge’s office with a surprising (given the lack of sleep) spring in my step. Beau was nowhere to be found, and I became almost positive Dax had taken him on the ferry with him. He had some apologizing to do, and I was willing to bet the two boys had pulled off on a lonely stretch of road to break the car in.
The island looked different now that I was staying.
The sunshine and ninety-degree weather at ten in the morning? Cheery.
The sweat dripping down my neck? Charming.
The fact that I could still listen to Dax knock on my wall a tune that was now imprinted on my heart? Divine.
Seeing my dad sitting on the front steps of my duplex in his expensive running shorts and t-shirt? Nerve-wracking.
And then, strangely exhilarating.
There had been so much truth I’d had to face the past few weeks that now I actually craved it. So much inside of me sat simmering below the surface, begging to be freed. There was a power in giving feelings a voice. And I had a lot to say.
He stood at my approach. His hair looked matted at the edges, like he’d been sweaty before it dried in the breeze.
“I tried calling you,” my dad called out.
“I haven’t checked my messages,” I said, stopping a few feet away from him.
“I imagine it’s difficult to check messages when you’re in jail. ”
Shrugging, I said, “Beau didn’t take our phones away. And it was just the holding cell. Not jail.”
By the look on my dad’s face, he didn’t appreciate my spelling out the difference.
“I’m not even going to give voice to the stupidity of what I heard went down last night.” His jaw clenched as his arms folded across his body. “I just want to know what the judge said.”
“He told me I could finish out my community service hours in Tennessee if I wanted.”
Relief poured over his face.
“I told him I was staying.”
His eyes darted back up to mine. “What? Why would you?—”
“Because I’m staying.”
“No. You’re not.”
“I am.” A cool calm spread through me along with a breath of laughter. My voice didn’t waver. A weight I’d carried for so many years began to lighten as I realized that this man’s opinions didn’t mean much to me anymore.
“You’re not going to waste ten years of schooling because you decided to sow some wild oats this summer.”
“I’m not wasting them,” I said. “I’ll still be teaching, but I’ll find somewhere nearby.”
“What? A community college? No.” He shook his head adamantly while I grew bored of the conversation. “Not my daughter.”
“Am I your daughter? Your name comes up as The Senator on my phone.”
His jaw ticked with anger. “I’m very aware that my career means nothing to you, but?—”
“Probably because your career means everything to you.”
“That’s not true.” He shook his head adamantly.
“I’ve never once voted for you,” I said, a faucet unwilling to be shut off .
His next words stalled on his lips as a look of betrayal etched across his face.
“Even when you used to send me the absentee ballots at school. I always voted against you. So maybe instead of trying to give me life advice, you should think about why your daughter, one of the only people who truly knows you, wouldn’t vote for you.”
He reared back slightly at this. And it was enough for me. The honest truth of my statement suddenly felt so heavy. So sad. I had already put years of therapy into mourning the father I had grown up with. Looking at him now, I found myself mourning the father he could have been.
“We’re not done yet,” he stated as I brushed past him and took the stairs up to my door.
“Yes, we are.” When I grasped the door handle, I turned back. “Listen, Dad. I’m staying. I’m going to figure out what I want to do next, and you’re going to have to deal with that. I don’t want to be angry. I don’t want to fight anymore, but if that means I can’t talk to you, then so be it. I’ll smile at you at the cafe. I’ll pour your coffee. I’ll even wave to you on the street. But until you’re willing to try for something different, that’s where our boundaries will have to stay.”
And then I walked inside, feeling strangely liberated.
The rest of my morning passed without Dax.
After my dad left, I got my phone call to Vanderbilt out of the way. They had been unsurprisingly understanding about the whole thing, which confirmed my suspicion that they would have no trouble replacing me. There were still things I needed to decide. I had a house in Nashville I would need to sell or rent. Eventually, I’d have to go back to pack up my house .
Noon rolled around with still no sight of or even message from Dax, which was fine. I was absolutely certain he and Beau were out on a joyride right now. And good for them. Hopefully, the friends had made up and buried their hatchets.
I attempted a nap after lunch but quickly decided that pacing my floor, listening for any sound of Dax returning, was more fun. When the cafe called at two in the afternoon, extremely short-handed and asking me to work, I couldn’t get out of my house fast enough.
Had it all been a mistake? Why wasn’t he texting me?
Maybe he forgot his phone. Maybe he didn’t get the car on the ferry in time, and Beau had to arrest him. Maybe—and this idea was rapidly taking flight in my head—I had scared him off.
It was just now occurring to me that neither Dax nor I had ever really talked about our feelings. We danced around things, sure. This morning, brushing our teeth, and our late-night conversations began to blur in my mind. Then I went and more or less proposed marriage to Dax Miller inside the judge’s office. Maybe not marriage, but it had been pretty clear what I was sticking around for. Who I was staying for. That was a lot of pressure on a man who had gotten comfortable carving out a life of not needing anyone.
I picked up my pace to the restaurant, needing something to occupy my hands and hopefully quiet the noise in my head. It was all going to be fine. Why do brains do these things? They find that tiny seed of doubt and then plant it, sprout it, and let it fully bloom all within minutes.
Dax had been ready to kiss me in Judge Baylor’s office—a good one too, by the looks of it.
So, shut up, brain.
But seriously…where was he?
“What’s with you?” Cat asked a while later, sitting across from Jane in a booth at the cafe.
“Huh?” I asked, wiping up some water drops on her table .
“I asked you three times if anything happened between you and Dax while you were sharing a freaking jail cell, and three times you told me the daily special.” She leaned forward with a laugh. “I don’t want clam chowder.”
“Oh, sorry.” I checked behind my ear for my pencil and found it. “What do you want?”
Jane bit back a laugh as I looked at them both in question.
“You’ve already put in her order,” Jane said, smiling. “We just want to see how things are going with Dax. Though, by the looks of you, I think we could guess.”
I opened my mouth to say something when a jingle at the door to the cafe drew my attention. I’d been looking up at the sound all afternoon. And every time, I’d been disappointed.
This time, however, a man with dark, rumpled hair and wild and sweet brown eyes, wearing a delicious pair of jeans and a black t-shirt strode inside. He scanned the cafe until his gaze locked on mine—where it stayed, swallowing me up. My heart came to a stop as I watched him. Feeling shy, all of a sudden, I tucked a loose curl behind my ear, waiting for him to tell me I had misread a few signals.
I wasn’t crazy. I hadn’t imagined it all. But…what if?
And then…the tiniest tug of his lips started my heart up again. From across the room, he began making his way toward me.
I heard the girls sitting in the booth gasp and whisper, but all I could think about as he approached was the gleam in his eye that made my insides quake and my hands clench together.
He stopped in front of me, a pace away.
“You staying, Caroline?” His low voice caused goosebumps to scatter across my skin.
“Do you want me to?”
He reared back slightly at this, confusion etched in his brow. “What?”
I fingered the tie on my apron. “I just…want to make sure… I wa s pretty bold in the judge’s…” I trailed off helplessly, tangling my words. I didn’t want to put any pressure on him, so if he didn’t want me, I was going to give him an out.
Dax looked down at Cat and Jane, who weren’t even pretending to hide the fact that they were watching this discussion with rapt attention. He held his hands out as if to have them explain something.
Cat shook her head, giving me a look. “I’m so sorry, Dax. She’s into math and stuff. Some things she’s pretty clueless about. But she’s been messing up our orders all morning because she can’t stop thinking about you.”
His lips tugged upward at that and he turned back to me. “Can you go on break?”
I glanced around the busy cafe, not seeing Jean anywhere. “I don’t kno?—”
“We’ll watch her tables,” Jane said, grinning, her eyes dancing. “You go show her what’s painfully obvious to the rest of us.”
“Great.” Dax grabbed my hand and whirled me around to follow him as he strode toward the kitchen in the back of the restaurant.
“Dax!” I pulled on his hand. “I can’t just leave them to watch my tables!”
“Yes, you can,” came his obstinate reply. “You just got out of jail. You’re a wild woman now.”
A chorus of delighted catcalls from the restaurant regulars followed us as we burst into the kitchen.
“She’s going on break!” Dax called out as we flew past Jean and a laughing Marco, and out the back door.
By the time he released my hand and pushed me gently against the back wall of the cafe, I was blushing and laughing and completely head over heels for Dax Miller.
He stepped closer, one arm around my waist and one hand behind my neck, pulling me into him as he kissed away every doubt. He was very thorough about this business, to which I could only feel grateful.
“Where were you?”
He leaned in, nuzzling my neck as though this wait had been too long for him as well.
“I forgot my phone in the holding cell. And then I took Beau with me, and he wanted to exact his revenge by keeping me away from you as long as possible.”
I laughed, throwing my arms around his neck to drag myself even closer to him. “I’m sure you were just miserable, driving that old bucket of rust up and down the highway.”
His arms tightened around me. “It was the worst. And actually, Beau wasn’t planning to torture me quite so long. The car got a flat tire down the highway. I didn’t have a spare, so we had to get towed into a tire shop and wait forever to get it put on. Then the ferry was late. Then I couldn’t find you. It was like the universe was trying to punish me for letting you take the car out last night.”
I leaned up and kissed him, slow and sweet. “If this is being punished, you better lock me up.”
“I’m sorry you got in trouble,” he said, his eyes sweeping across my face as if he was memorizing every freckle.
“I’d do community service with you any day.”
He grinned. “My kind of woman.”
I took a breath. “Dax…I like you so much it scares me. I’m worried I won’t be enough for you. I’m worried that my brain has gone to mush, and I can see myself forgetting all about teaching because I just want to sweep the floors in your shop so I can hang out with you. You’ve jumbled me up in all the best ways.”
His smile slayed me just then. As did the way his hands slid up my sides to land on my shoulders and neck. As did the kisses he wielded at that spot just below my ear. And along my jawline. Until I captured his mouth with mine .
When he’d had his fill, he stepped back.
“Books, I was gone for you in high school and it took about ten seconds of you being back to realize not much had changed.”
It was too much. The sweetness. He was too much. But he wasn’t done.
He leaned in closer, “So gone that I would clean the shop bathroom every day before you got there.”
A laugh sputtered out of me. “I knew it.”
“And I’d leave my shop doors open to blow in dirt so the floors would be dirty enough to sweep every day. I ate at the cafe more times this summer than I have my entire life. I wanted you by me. But I knew you were leaving and so I kept trying to deny it and push you away, just like everybody else in my life.”
I brushed at a strand of his hair on his forehead.
“Books, I’m not good with words. I hadn’t realized how much I had shut people out of my life after Mason left. I made it my business not to need anyone again. And then you showed up and I suddenly needed every second with you.”
“It was incredibly annoying,” he said, as he kissed my nose and made me laugh.
“You’re exactly who I want—who I’ve always wanted.” He glanced down, running a hand through his hair. “I just never thought I could have you.”
“I think you’re pretty good with words,” I said, smiling up at him.
“I’m better without words, though,” he said, his nose brushing softly against mine.
“My kind of talk,” I said. “And what about?—”
His impatient lips interrupted mine, making me forget everything else.