Chapter 6
Ethan
Evening finds us on the porch.
The ranch is alive with dusk, the chirp of crickets tuning up, a horse blowing near the south barn, the creak of cooling wood.
Jenna sits in the chair next to mine, wrapped in my blanket. The one I left folded on her bed because it gets chilly at night. Now she’s wrapped in it, sitting on my porch, her chin tucked against the wool.
“I thought you’d be taller.” Her voice cuts through the dark, her comment surprising me.
“What?”
“When I imagined you from the phone calls.” She pulls the blanket tighter. “Your voice is so low. I pictured someone... bigger.”
“I’m six-two.”
“You’re lean. Long. Like a—” She catches herself and laughs. “I was going to say, like a paragraph that’s all one sentence and keeps going.”
The practical description is so typical of Jenna. “What else did you imagine?”
She pauses for a moment. The porch light catches her glasses and the soft line of her jaw.
When she speaks again, her voice has shed its careful edges, the formal vocabulary, and measured pace.
This is the Jenna from the phone calls, who shared stories about the library in her third placement and how rain sounds different when you’re sleeping in a car.
“Older. I thought you’d be older because you’re so steady. And I thought you’d be loud. Not loud exactly, but your voice fills a room even when you’re not trying.”
The air between us is charged and close. She’s the epitome of everything I never knew I wanted in a woman, but it’s too soon.
“I thought you’d be taller too,” I say, playing along.
Her laugh is startled and genuine. “I’m five-six.”
“I know. You’re—” I pause, hesitant to say perfect because I'm not ready to say that out loud. “Exactly right.”
She falls silent. A listening quiet. It’s the stillness I’ve come to recognize as Jenna preparing herself.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t be the same.” The words spill from my mouth before my brain can catch up.
“In person. I worried you’d be different face-to-face, and I’d lose the version I’ve been holding on to for six months. ”
“Am I different from what you imagined?”
“Everything about you is better, and it’s… yeah. It’s a lot.”
Her fingers toy with the edge of the blanket, picking at the wool with bitten nails. I’ve noticed her doing this all week, a tell she had long before I came along. In the porch light, the skin on her wrists reveals angry, red welts where her sleeves have ridden up.
She catches me looking and stills.
Her body pulls inward and her chin lifts, not defiantly, but defensively.
There it is. The brace. She’s been hiding her skin her entire life, and I’ve just seen it.
Now, she waits for whatever comes next: pity, disgust, judgment.
I remember the night she told me in a flat voice about a foster father who left cortisone on her pillow because he thought it was contagious.
“When I brought you home from the crash and the doctor came and checked you over, your skin was flaring. Bad. Worse than now.” My jaw works.
“Maggie put cream on you. The doctor showed her where and how much. She did it while you were unconscious because it needed to be done, and I—” I stop and breathe.
“I wanted to do it myself. I wanted to be the one taking care of your skin. But you were unconscious, and you hadn’t chosen that.
You hadn’t chosen me. I’m not the kind of man who—” I shake my head. “Maggie did it. I stayed in the hall.”
I don’t tell her the rest: how my hands pressed flat against the hallway wall to resist reaching for the door handle.
Her face crumples.
She’s not crying. It’s something that comes before tears.
The expression of a woman who’s hidden her body her entire life, realizing that someone saw it at its worst and chose to protect her dignity instead of touching her while she couldn’t consent.
I will carry that expression to my grave.
Her face in the porch light, breaking open.
“The soap,” she whispers. “That was you.”
I exhale. “I swapped it. I didn’t want to make it a thing.”
She looks at me as if I’ve done something extraordinary. I haven’t. I noticed her skin and replaced the soap. This isn’t heroics; it’s simply the minimum I want to do for her.
But her expression says nobody has ever given her even that.
“The insurance. Health insurance is why I stayed at LandCorp.” Her voice is flat, presenting facts to avoid feeling them.
“My condition requires specialists, biologics, and the good cream that works. Without the company plan, I can’t afford to keep my skin from eating itself alive.
I traded 2 years at a company that was hurting people because without that card, I—”
She stops. Her knuckles turn white on the arm of the chair.
“You didn’t know,” I remind her. “But as soon as you did, you acted, despite what it could cost you.”
Her lower lip trembles, and the pressure behind my ribs becomes a physical thing—not from the urge to fix this, because I can’t.
It’s the desire to fold this woman into my arms and hold her until her hands unclench, until she understands she will never have to trade pieces of herself for basic care again. Not while I’m breathing.
I don’t say any of that. It’s too much. Too soon.
Instead, I offer the truth. “Your voice got me through some dark times.”
She blinks. “What?”
“Six months of fence posts and data trails, my brother going quiet, and the ranch falling apart. Every night, you talked to me about spreadsheets. Quarterly projections. The woman in accounting who microwaved fish every Tuesday.” My hands move restlessly on my knees.
“You talked, and your voice settled into my chest. You kept me breathing.”
The silence that follows is immense because it holds everything we’ve built in those six months.
Her hand finds mine on the arm of the chair. Jenna Calloway, who has never reached for anything because it means taking a risk, is reaching for me. Her hand is warm and so much smaller than mine, the skin at her knuckles rough and red.
I close my fingers around hers and hold on.
Turning toward her in the chair, I lift my free hand to her face, my thumb tracing the line of her jaw with a certainty I don't feel anywhere else in my life.
I look at her, at her bitten nails, the angry skin, the blanket she doesn't know is mine, and the glasses that always slip down her nose, and I choose all of it.
“Jenna.” Her name escapes my lips like a claim.
She leans into me. Her hand leaves mine and finds the front of my shirt, pulling me closer, the same gesture from the barn but slower. Her other hand slides up my arm to my shoulder, and I can feel her trembling. Or maybe I’m trembling. One of us is. Or both.
I kiss her. Not like earlier in the barn.
This is different. This is me kissing her without rushing, without hesitating.
My hand weaves through her hair, her glasses brushing against my cheekbone, and her taste is a mix of coffee, night air, and something uniquely Jenna.
My entire body lights up like a fuse, struggling to remain controlled.
She makes a soft, needy sound against my mouth, as if she’s just realizing she’s allowed to have this. Want this. It hits me in the chest like a bullet.
Pulling back, I press my forehead against hers. Her breathing is ragged; mine is worse. My hand remains in her hair, cradling the back of her head, her pulse echoing through her skull and into my fingers.
“All of you.” I don’t sound anything like the careful man who meticulously measures every decision. “The skin, the nails, the way you ask what the protocol is because no one ever just let you stay. All of it, Jen. I choose all of it.”
Her breath catches, and her fingers tighten in my shirt.
I want to keep going, want to relish her mouth and the warm weight of her against me. My body aches with a clarity that borders on pain. I want to carry her inside, lock the door, and spend the rest of the night teasing moans of pleasure from her throat and memorizing every one of them.
But she’s shaking. She’s not ready, and I’m not a man who takes more than what’s offered.
“We should go inside,” I say roughly, even though my body is screaming the opposite of what my mouth just said.
She knows because she hasn’t moved, and her hand is still fisted in my shirt. “Yeah,” she whispers. “We should.”
She glances away, her hand loosening as she tugs the blanket around her shoulders. She stands, and I follow. We walk toward the door, my arm instinctively wrapping around her waist because my body has stopped consulting my brain when it comes to Jenna Calloway.
Jenna pauses at the hallway door. She looks back at me, the blanket trailing from one shoulder, her glasses reflecting the lamplight, so I can’t see her eyes.
“Goodnight, Ethan.”
“Goodnight, Jen.”
She disappears down the hall. Her footsteps retreat until the guest room door opens, soon followed by the soft click of it closing. I stand there longer than I should, still reconciling myself to the fact that she’s really here.
The living room is dark except for the lamp by the bookshelf. Daniel is in the armchair by the cold fireplace, boots off, a glass of something amber balanced on his knee. He’s been waiting. I knew he would be. Daniel doesn’t let things sit. He’s not built for it.
I drop onto the couch opposite him and scrub a hand over my face.
“Six months,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“And in all that time you didn’t say a word to me or to Dad. Not even to Maggie, who finds out everything within forty-eight hours whether you tell her or not.” His gray eyes are steady over the rim of the glass as he takes a drink. “Was she some kind of secret?”
“No.” I lean forward, elbows on my knees.
Daniel waits. He’s good at waiting when he decides to be, which isn’t often.