3. Tessa
TESSA
Dot’s already got the back booth staked out when I get to the diner—the one with the good light and a clear view of the door, because Dot Pruitt doesn’t sit anywhere she can’t supervise.
There’s pie in front of my seat that I didn’t order.
There’s always pie I didn’t order. Arguing about it is how you end up with two pies.
“Okay.” I flip the legal pad open to page one of three. “Patch party. Go.”
“Cake first.” Dot puts on her reading glasses, which means business. “How do we feel about carrot?”
“Cal hates carrot cake.”
“It’s not for Cal, honey, it’s for sixty people. Cal gets one slice and a party. Now—Earl’s diabetic, so is Pug, so we’re doing a sugar-free sheet on the side, and if you tell either of them it’s sugar-free they’ll starve themselves out of spite, so we don’t tell them.”
“We’re lying to Pug about cake.”
“We’re protecting Pug from himself. There’s a difference.” She clicks her pen. “Brisket. How much does that man’s club eat, and don’t lowball me, I’ve catered for these animals for twenty years.”
This is why I brought the party to Dot instead of trying to run it myself. I’ve been building this thing for weeks—the guest list, the food, whether it’s tacky to do a banner (it’s not, I’m doing a banner)—because in thirty-one years, nobody has ever once thrown Cal Bramwell a party.
I asked him about his birthdays as a kid one time and he did the shrug, the one that means drop it, and said “we weren’t really a party family,” and I dropped it out loud and carried it out of the room with me, and I’ve been carrying it ever since.
He’s going to stand in that clubhouse and be the reason everyone showed up. He’s going to hate it for ten whole minutes. And then he’s going to get that look, the one he doesn’t know he does, and I’d plan this thing for a year straight to see it.
“Sixty pounds,” I say. “And Dot—he can’t know. He thinks I’m doing ‘errands’ today.”
“Honey, I’ve kept this club’s secrets since before you could drive. I know things about these men that would end marriages.” She writes 60 lbs like she’s signing a treaty. “What’s the banner say?”
“I’m between two options.”
“Show me both.”
We’re deep into a fight about brisket sides when the bell over the door goes and Josie Calder comes in with the baby strapped to her chest, doing the bounce-walk of a woman whose kid goes off like a car alarm if she stops moving.
She orders her milkshake to go at the counter—chocolate, extra thick, the postpartum special—and swings by our booth on the way out.
“Oh no.” She’s clocked the legal pad instantly. “It’s got pages.”
“It’s got three pages,” Dot says, proud as hell.
“Tell me the guest list is one of the pages.” Josie leans over, scans it, and laughs. “Tessa. Honey. Dot’s guest list is going to eat this club’s grocery budget for a month. This is the woman who catered my kid’s christening for what she called ‘a light forty.’”
“It WAS a light forty,” Dot says.
“There were nine people there, Dot.”
“Nine people who ate like forty.”
The baby makes a noise like a door hinge and Josie resumes the bounce, one hand cupped over the little knit hat.
And for a second, watching her—ring on her finger now, Levi’s whole last name wrapped around her like a coat, all of that after everything the two of them went through last year, the stuff the whole town only ever got pieces of—something goes warm and stupid in my chest.
People come apart around here and they get put back together. I don’t know why that lands the way it does today. I let it land anyway.
“Make him cry,” Josie tells me at the door, nodding at the legal pad. “That’s the assignment. Big tough prospect, blubbering in front of God and Wyatt. Do it for all of us.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Do better than that. Levi cried at ours and it’s still the best day of my life. Second best.” She pats the baby. “This thing rides shotgun now.”
Cal meets me out front after, takes the to-go boxes Dot forced on us without being asked, and we’re walking back to my truck, me half a step ahead, sun out for once, when a horn taps and a guy leans out of a pickup window—somebody I half-know, hardware store maybe—and hollers something about my legs in this skirt.
It’s not scary. It’s not even original. This town produces that kind of thing the way it produces potholes, and I’m already assembling the eye-roll when I register that Cal isn’t next to me anymore.
He’s between me and the truck window. I never saw him move. One arm loops around my waist, easy, no grip in it, and he just—stands there. Looks at the guy. Doesn’t say one word. Doesn’t need to.
There’s a thing his face does that I’ve only seen a handful of times, nothing loud in it, and the window’s rolling up before I’ve finished my eye-roll and the pickup finds somewhere else to be, fast, like it remembered an appointment.
Then his fingers lace through mine like nothing happened, leftovers swinging in his other hand, and he says, “Dot give you the diabetic speech?”
“Earl and Pug. We’re lying to them about the cake.”
“Good call. Pug can smell sugar-free.”
“That’s what worries me.”
“He’ll be too drunk. It’ll be fine.” A beat, then, casual: “What’s the party for, anyway? Since you were doing errands.”
“Shut up.”
“Girl stuff, you said. Extremely uninteresting.”
“I will turn this hand-holding around, Cal Bramwell, I swear to God.”
He doesn’t perform the truck thing after. Doesn’t need me to have seen it, doesn’t check whether I did. But I saw it. I hold his hand the whole way to the truck and I don’t tell him I saw it, and that’s its own kind of nice—having a secret about him that’s this good.
Home, evening, pasta on the stove. I’m stirring and stealing tastes when his arms come around my waist from behind, no warning, chin hooked over my shoulder—his after-work move, motor oil and soap, just wanting his hands on me the way he does most nights, no agenda in it.
Except then his mouth finds the curve of my neck and stays there. And the agenda develops.
“I’m cooking,” I say, with zero conviction.
“Uh-huh.” His teeth graze the spot under my ear, the one he found in month two and has never once let me forget he knows about, and a shiver goes straight down my spine and out through my knees.
“Cal. The pasta.”
“The pasta’s fine.”
“The pasta is at a critical stage.”
“So am I.” His hand slides flat across my stomach, fingers spreading, pulling me back into him, and he’s hard against me, no ambiguity about it, and just like that I don’t give a single shit about the pasta.
I turn in his arms because I’m not made of stone. His hand fists in the back of my shirt and mine go up into his still-damp hair and we’re against the counter, the spoon abandoned in the pot, the pasta absolutely on its own now.
It tips fast, the way it does with us—sweet to starving in about forty seconds.
His thigh pushes between mine. My fingers find the hem of his shirt and slide under, flat on the warm skin of his back, and he makes a low sound into my mouth that I feel more than hear.
“We could eat late,” he says against my jaw.
“We could eat very late.”
“Cold pasta’s a thing. People pay for cold pasta.”
“That’s pasta salad, that’s different?—”
“Tessa.” His mouth comes back to mine, hungrier, one hand sliding down over my ass and hauling me up onto my toes, and I’ve got one hand hooked in his belt, actually working on the buckle now, both of us breathing like we ran here—The oven timer shrieks.
We both jump like teenagers. He swears into my shoulder—a whole muttered string of it, goddamn garlic bread somewhere in the middle—and I’m laughing too hard to kiss him, and then he’s laughing too, forehead down on my shoulder, both of us wrecked over a loaf of garlic bread.
“Saved by the bell,” I manage.
“Nothing about that bell saved me.” He steps back, adjusts himself with zero shame, and points at me. “Later. That’s a promise, not a threat.”
“Feels a little like a threat.”
“Little of both.” He grabs the oven mitt.
He rescues the bread while I rescue the pasta, and we eat at the little table with our feet tangled underneath, and he tells me about the transmission guy who rides his clutch, and I tell him nothing about the banner, and it’s a good day.
It’s such a good day. I keep having that thought over dinner, like a toast nobody raised: this, exactly this.
It’s later—plates done, TV mumbling to itself, me hunting for him with a question about whether we want Dot’s peach cobbler or a second dessert option—that I find the garage door shut.
The garage door is never shut. It’s a two-second detail and my feet stop anyway.
And I hear him through it. His voice. Low. Careful. Pitched down to almost nothing, and shaped around something—a softness, I don’t have a better word for it, a handled-with-care sound.
I stand in the hallway with the cobbler question dying in my mouth and my heartbeat picking up for no reason I’m ready to name, and I listen without deciding to listen.
I’ve heard this man talk to Wyatt. To the brothers. To me, half-asleep in the dark with his mouth against my hair. I know every register he’s got.
I’ve never heard this one.
I can’t make out a single word through the door. Just the tone, low and careful in a way that has nothing to do with me—and I stand there with my hand raised to knock, one second too long, two, my pulse tapping at the base of my throat, before I make myself turn around and walk away.