Chapter 2
Finn
I've been in love before. Not real love, not the kind the guys in this club talk about now, the kind that reorganizes your whole skeleton around another person — but the smaller stuff, the crushes, the good dates, the handful of relationships that lasted a season and ended without either of us bleeding much.
I know what interest feels like. I know what a crush feels like.
This did not feel like either of those things.
This felt like standing at the base of a mountain I hadn't planned on climbing and discovering, halfway through breakfast, that I'd already started.
"You've got the look," Diesel said, sliding onto the bench across from me at the clubhouse table Monday morning, coffee in one hand, a grin already loading on his face like he'd been saving it since I walked in.
"What look."
"The look. Nadia gets it when she's found a business she wants to fix. Silas got it — don't tell him I said this — the entire first month he knew Briar. Distracted and delighted at the same time. Like your brain went somewhere nice and forgot to bring the rest of you back."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"You bought seven jars of honey this weekend."
"I like honey."
"Nobody likes honey that much, Finn. Nobody on this earth needs seven jars of honey. What are you doing, bathing in it?"
"That's not — no. I'm not bathing in honey, Diesel, Jesus."
"Then why do you have seven jars."
I didn't have a good answer for that, mostly because the honest answer was that every Saturday I found some new reason to buy more than I needed, because buying more meant staying at the stall longer, and staying at the stall longer meant more time in the general vicinity of a woman who looked at me like I was a mild but persistent infestation she hadn't gotten around to calling an exterminator about.
"She's interesting," I said, which was the understatement of my adult life.
"She threw a honey jar at Hawk."
"I heard about that."
"For touching her display. Not even breaking anything. Just touching it. Rearranged one jar half an inch and she came around that table like a woman defending a border."
"I know," I said, and I could feel my own face doing something helpless and delighted, a grin I hadn't authorized spreading out on its own. "Incredible aim, from what I hear."
Diesel stared at me for a long second, coffee mug halfway to his mouth, and then set it down slow, like a man recalculating a bet he'd already placed.
"Oh, no," he said.
"What."
"You're not interested in her. You're gone on her. There's a difference. Interested is what I look like at a car auction. Gone is what you look like right now, talking about a woman throwing a jar at Hawk like it's the most romantic thing you've ever witnessed."
"It kind of was."
"See, that's — Finn, that's not a normal sentence."
"You married a woman who broke into a mob boss's compound to steal evidence, don't lecture me about normal."
That landed, because it was true, and Diesel had the decency to laugh instead of arguing, which is one of the things I love about my brothers — you can hit them with the truth about their own ridiculous love stories and they'll take it on the chin because they know exactly how ridiculous it was and how glad they are it happened anyway.
Silas came through a few minutes later, coffee of his own, and took one look at the two of us — Diesel grinning like a man who'd found gossip, me apparently still wearing whatever expression I'd been wearing about the jar-throwing thing — and said, without needing to be told anything, "Who is she."
"Honey lady," Diesel said. "From the market. Dunmore something."
"Hazel," I said. "Hazel Dunmore."
Silas sat down slow, the way he does everything, a big man who's spent twenty years learning that most problems get easier if you don't rush at them. He looked at me for a while.
"Grumpy?"
"Extremely."
"Doesn't want to be bothered?"
"Says so approximately every four minutes."
"Keeps saying it and you keep coming back?"
"That's the plan, yeah."
Silas nodded slowly, and something moved behind his eyes — recognition, I'd call it, if I had to name it, the specific look of a man seeing an old photograph of himself. "She reminds me of me," he said.
"That's why I like her," I said.
"That's not a compliment to either of you," Silas said, but he was almost smiling, which for Silas counts as an ovation.
Here's what I understood about Hazel Dunmore by the end of that first month, watching her from thirty feet away every Saturday and thinking about her considerably more than thirty feet away the other six days of the week: her grumpiness wasn't a personality flaw.
It was architecture. Load-bearing, exactly the kind of thing you build when you've had to hold something up alone for a long time and you learn, the hard way, that walls are cheaper than trusting people not to leave.
I know that architecture. I built a version of it myself, once, at fourteen, on a curb outside a group home.
The difference is I tore mine down on purpose, young enough that I got to choose what to build instead.
Hazel built hers slower, more carefully, reinforced it over years, and as far as I could tell had never once considered that a wall could come down without the whole house collapsing with it.
I understood that. And understanding it made me patient in a way that probably worried my brothers more than it should have, because patient, for me, has historically meant a week, maybe two. This felt like it might take longer. I found, to my own considerable surprise, that I didn't mind.
"You're gonna get your heart broken," Hawk told me at the clubhouse bar that Tuesday, nursing a beer he'd earned the hard way — divorce court, two kids, a slow rebuild toward the man he is now. Hawk knows heartbreak from the inside. He doesn't say things like that lightly.
"Maybe," I said.
"That doesn't scare you?"
"Course it scares me. I'm not an idiot, Hawk, I just don't let scared make my decisions for me. Learned that a long time ago."
"She's not gonna make it easy."
"Good," I said, and meant it, which surprised me a little even as I said it. "I don't want easy. Easy's boring. I want the thing that actually matters, and the things that actually matter are never easy, they're just worth it."
Hawk studied me over his beer for a second, then knocked his bottle against mine — the closest thing to a blessing you get out of Hawk, and worth more than a speech from anybody else.
Knox found me later that week, out back by the fire pit where I go sometimes to think, which he knows, because Knox knows everything about everybody in this club, has since he built the whole thing out of scraps and stubbornness twenty-some years ago.
"Heard you found somebody," he said, settling into the chair beside mine without asking, the way he does, the way that's always felt less like an intrusion and more like a door being propped open.
"Working on it."
"She know yet?"
"That I'm working on it? Not exactly. I think she suspects. I'm not subtle."
"No," Knox agreed, with the particular fondness he reserves for the things about me he's never once tried to change. "You've never been subtle a day in your life. It's one of your better qualities."
"You think it's a good idea? Going after somebody who's put up that many walls?"
Knox was quiet a minute, looking at the fire, and I understood he was thinking about his own story before he told it — about Del, about a woman who'd needed exactly the kind of patient, stubborn refusal to leave that he'd had in him without knowing it yet.
"I think," he said finally, "that the ones who've built the strongest walls are usually protecting something worth protecting.
Doesn't mean you go smashing through it.
Means you show up regular enough, and honest enough, that eventually they start wondering if maybe the wall's more work than it's worth.
" He looked at me. "You've got the patience for that.
Always have. It's why we call you Rebel, even though half this club still thinks it's ironic. "
"It's not ironic."
"I know it's not. I've known it's not since you were seventeen and refused to give up on Rosco even after that cat drew blood on you four separate times."
"Rosco came around eventually."
"Rosco loves you more than he loves food, and Rosco loves food an alarming amount. You want my advice?"
"Always."
"Don't try to fix her grumpiness. Don't even try to soften it.
Some men hear 'wall' and think their job is demolition.
That's not your job. Your job — if you actually want this, and I think you do — is just showing her that a wall and a door aren't opposites.
She can keep every bit of who she is, prickly included, and still let people in.
That's the whole trick. Took Del about six months to believe it about me.
Took me most of my life to believe it about myself. "
I thought about that for a long time after Knox went inside, sitting by the dying fire with the spring night going cool around me, and something in it settled into place like a key finding its lock.
I didn't want to fix Hazel. God, no. I wanted her exactly as she was — the flat stare, the honey-jar throwing arm, the sign that said NO, I WILL NOT PET YOUR DOG NEAR THE HIVES in handwriting so blunt you could feel the irritation radiating off the ink.
I just wanted her to know she could be all of that and still not be alone in it.
That, I could work with. That, I had infinite patience for.
The next Saturday I found out her farm supplied half the businesses in town — Del mentioned it, offhand, complaining that the diner's honey order was running behind because Hazel did every single delivery herself, no help, stubborn as a mule about it — and I felt the shape of an actual plan click into place, the kind of plan that made Diesel groan when I told him about it that afternoon.
"You're going to volunteer to help with her deliveries."
"I'm going to volunteer to help with her deliveries."