22. Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Two
REGAN
The first thing I register is the smell.
Engine oil and metal and something else underneath, warm, woodsy, like the inside of a barn on a cold morning.
The second thing is the leather under my cheek, cracked and soft and not my pillow.
The third thing is that my body hurts in places my body doesn’t usually hurt, and every single one of those places remembers why.
I open my eyes.
Morning light spills through the dusty workshop window, pale gold, catching the sawdust suspended in the air.
The workbench is across the room. The tools are back on it, lined up clean.
Somebody picked up the wrenches. Somebody swept up the broken beer bottle.
Somebody draped a wool blanket over me that smells like motor oil and cedar and him.
The sofa is old leather, battered, pushed against the workshop’s back wall. I’ve never noticed it before. Every other time I’ve been in this workshop, I’ve been standing, or sitting on the floor next to a man having a panic attack, or being pressed up against the workbench while he… while we…
Okay. Okay. We did that.
At least I’m fully dressed now. My sandals are beside the sofa, placed there, not thrown. He did that. Placed them neatly side by side while I was asleep, and the care of that small act hits me hard.
I sit up. My hair is a disaster. There’s a crick in my neck from the sofa arm and a bruise forming on my hip where the workbench edge dug in, and I feel wrecked. Wrecked in a way that hurts, but also suggests someone had a very good time last night. Damn.
My phone says 6:47 a.m. Two missed calls from the clinic. I’ll deal with those in a minute.
The workshop door is open. Through it I can see the clearing, the Airstream, the hickories catching the early light.
Bear is lying in the patch of sun between the workshop and the Airstream, nose on his paws.
He lifts his head when he hears me move and thumps his tail twice.
He looks fine. Relaxed. It’s like the terror of the firework never happened.
Caleb is at the fire pit. Shirtless, wearing only jeans, crouched over the coals with a coffee pot.
His back is to me. I can’t help but stare at the shoulders, tattoos, the scar on his left shoulder blade I didn’t ask about last night.
The morning light hits the planes of his back, and I watch him a while longer before I remember I should probably announce myself instead of sitting here cataloging the topography of a man who had me on a workbench six hours ago.
“Morning,” I say from the doorway.
He doesn’t turn around. “Coffee’s almost done.”
His voice is flat. Not hostile. Something worse. Neutral. like he’s talking to someone in the grocery store. It’s the same voice he used the first week I was in town, before the banter, before the barn, before any of it. Like last night was a hard drive that got wiped.
My stomach tightens.
He pours two cups. Stands, turns, brings one to me. Doesn’t touch my hand when he passes it. Doesn’t look at me longer than he needs to. Doesn’t smile.
“Thanks,” I say.
He nods. Goes back to the fire pit. Sits on the log bench and drinks his coffee and looks at the trees, and doesn’t say a word.
I drink mine standing in the workshop doorway with Bear at my feet and the blanket still warm on the sofa behind me, and the silence between us thick enough to chew.
You’re not doing this. You are not going to let him do this.
“Caleb.”
“Hmm.”
“We should talk about last night.”
“Nothing to talk about.” He says it to the trees. Not to me.
“We had sex on your workbench. There’s something to talk about.”
“People have sex. It doesn’t have to be a conversation.”
“It does when the people in question have ten years of history and unresolved… whatever we have. It does then.”
He drinks his coffee. Doesn’t respond.
I walk to the fire pit and stand in front of him so he has to look at me or look through me. Caleb Callahan is a lot of things, but he’s never been able to look through me, not even when he wanted to.
“Last night meant something,” I say. “To both of us. You know that.”
“Last night was adrenaline. Bear bolted. We were wired. It happened.”
“It happened? That’s your version?”
“That’s what happened.”
“You swept the tools off the workbench, Caleb. That’s not adrenaline. That’s a choice.”
His jaw tightens. He looks at the fire pit. At the coals. Anywhere but at me.
“You put a blanket over me while I slept,” I say, quieter now. “You put my sandals beside the sofa. You picked up every wrench and swept the broken glass so I wouldn’t step on it. And now you’re going to sit there and tell me it was just adrenaline.”
“Regan. Don’t.”
“Don’t what? Don’t call you on your bullshit? Don’t point out that you were a completely different person six hours ago? You said my name like it meant something, Caleb. You looked at me like I was the only real thing in the room.”
“I shouldn’t have.”
That hits. Center mass. I feel it in my ribs.
“You shouldn’t have,” I repeat. “Which part? The part where you kissed me, or the part where you meant it?”
He stands. Walks three paces away. His back is to me, and I can see the tension running through his shoulders, his arms, the rigid set of his spine. His hands open and close at his sides.
“I can’t do this,” he says.
“Can’t do what? Talk to me? Be honest with me?”
“Be anything with you.” He turns. His face is locked down tight, but his eyes are a mess. Red-rimmed. Dark underneath. He hasn’t slept. “This is exactly why I said nothing good comes from this. Last night was a mistake.”
“Don’t you dare call it a mistake.”
“It was a mistake, Regan. For both of us.”
“You don’t get to decide that for me.”
“I’m not deciding for you. I’m telling you the truth.”
“You haven’t told me the truth once since I got to this town.
” My voice is rising, and I don’t care. “You’ve told me you know what I did.
You’ve told me you saw something. You won’t say what.
You treat me like I’m guilty of a crime you won’t name, and then you take me to bed, then you wake up and put the wall back up, and I’m supposed to just accept that? ”
“Yes.” His voice cracks on it. A single fracture, hairline, running right through the center. “Yes. You’re supposed to accept that. Because the alternative is worse.”
“Worse for who?”
“For both of us.”
“How? How is talking worse than this?”
He opens his mouth. Closes it. I watch the fight happen behind his eyes, the words shoving against the wall, trying to get through.
For three seconds, I think he’s going to say it.
Whatever it is. The thing that made him leave, the thing that’s kept him locked in this Airstream for years, the thing he carries on his phone like a grenade.
He doesn’t.
“I need to help Ethan at the ranch this morning,” he says. And the wall is back. Smooth, practiced, absolute. Like a shutter dropping.
“Caleb.”
“Lock the workshop when you go. Key’s on the hook. Oh, and I fixed the truck while you were sleeping.”
He tips the dregs of his coffee onto the ground beside him, grabs a T-shirt from the line, yanks it over his head, and marches off through the clearing. Bear watches Caleb disappear through the trees, looks at me, and stays where he is.
I stand at the fire pit with a half-drunk cup of coffee in my hand, the morning sun warming the side of my face, and the taste of last night still in my mouth, and I am so angry I can’t see straight.
Angry and hurt and turned on and confused, and underneath all of it, underneath the fury and the frustration and the ten-year wound that just got torn open and closed in the space of one night, one thing.
I want him.
I want him more than I did yesterday. More than I did before the workbench and the workshop and his hands on my skin and the sound he made when he came, the one from somewhere he keeps locked.
I want that sound. I want the man who makes it.
I want the version of him that exists between midnight and dawn, when the wall comes down and he says my name like he used to.
And he just walks away from me. Again.
I put the coffee cup on the log bench. I find my purse in the workshop, wedged between the sofa cushions. I lock the door, hang the key on the hook, and walk to my truck in the clearing. Bear follows me, presses his head against my thigh. I scratch behind his ears.
“Your owner,” I say to him, “is the most infuriating man alive.”
Bear leans into my hand. He doesn’t disagree, but he doesn’t agree either. Loyal to the end, that dog.
As I climb into the truck, my body is still humming in all the places he touched, and my head is running a list of every reason I should walk away, but my chest is running a different list entirely.
The intimacy didn’t bring you closer.
It gave you both something new to lose.
And you’re already losing it.