Chapter 12 Old Rhythms
Two weeks into Cain's careful presence in her life, Wren caught herself laughing at something he said, really laughing, the kind that came from her stomach and surprised her with how unfamiliar it felt after eight months of careful, guarded living.
They were in the shop's back room after closing, sorting a box of donated books, and Cain had picked up a battered paperback romance with a shirtless man on the cover and was reading the back copy aloud in a dramatic voice that had nothing to do with his actual speaking voice.
"'His rugged exterior hid a heart of gold,'" he intoned, deeply serious, "'but could she tame the beast within?'"
"Stop," Wren said, laughing despite herself. "You sound ridiculous."
"I contain multitudes." He set the book down, something warm and genuine in his expression. "I forgot how much I liked making you laugh. I used to plan it, you know. Whole conversations, angling toward whatever joke I thought would get that exact laugh out of you."
The admission landed somewhere soft and undefended in her chest. "You never told me that."
"Didn't seem like the kind of thing a club president was supposed to admit to.
Even the morning of the day everything fell apart, I remember thinking about what I'd cook for dinner that night because you'd mentioned missing that chicken thing my mother taught me to make.
I was still trying, even while I was failing you in the worst possible way.
I don't say that to excuse anything. I say it because you deserve to know that what we had wasn't fake, even in the parts where I was being the worst version of myself. "
Wren felt her throat tighten, the careful walls she'd maintained developing another crack, wider this time.
"I loved you so much it scared me," she admitted. "That's part of why it hurt so badly, I think. I'd given you access to a part of myself I'd never given anyone else, and finding out you'd betrayed that access made me question every good memory I had."
"It was real. Every good year, every good memory, it was real, Wren." He reached out, almost without deciding to, and touched her hand, the first deliberate physical contact she'd initiated in eight months. His hand went still under hers, like he was afraid moving might scare the moment away.
"I'm not ready to say what this means," she said carefully. "But I heard you. And I believe you, about the love being real. It's the trusting-you-again part that's harder."
"That's more than fair. Take whatever time you need, Wren. I've got nowhere better to be than wherever you are, proving it, for as long as it takes."
Later that same evening, after the box of donated paperbacks had been sorted and the shop had gone dark around them, Cain lingered at the back door instead of heading straight for the couch that had become, without either of them naming it, his.
"Can I tell you something I haven't said out loud yet?""Okay."
"I used to think losing the presidency would feel like losing my whole identity.
Lately I've caught myself actually looking forward to Diesel taking more off my plate.
Not because I'm tired of the club. Because I like who I am in the hours that aren't consumed by it.
I like this version of my evenings. Sorting books with you.
Fixing Reyna's chair. I didn't expect that, and I don't fully know what to do with liking it as much as I do. "
Wren considered that for a moment, something warm moving through her at the admission. "That doesn't sound like nothing to me. That sounds like exactly the kind of thing that's actually changed, not just the parts you knew I'd want to hear about."
"I hoped you'd see it that way." He offered a small, uncertain smile, the kind she remembered from years before any of this, back when he was still a young man nervous about whether she'd like him at all. "Goodnight, Wren."
"Goodnight, Cain," she said, and found she meant the warmth in it more than she'd expected to, three weeks into something she still didn't have a name for.
Wren caught herself, later that same week, humming while she restocked the shop's front display, an old habit from years ago that she hadn't realized she'd lost until she noticed herself doing it again.
Reyna clocked it from the register, said nothing, but allowed herself a small, private smile, the particular satisfaction of watching someone you love come back to themselves one unconscious gesture at a time.
"Tell me something you never told me during the marriage," Wren said one evening, curled at the opposite end of the small couch, feeling bold enough now to ask for pieces of him she'd never had access to before.
"Something small. Doesn't have to be important. "
Cain thought about it seriously. "I used to practice what I'd say to you in the mirror before big conversations.
Proposing. Telling you about a rough patch with the club.
I never once told you that, because it felt embarrassing, a grown man rehearsing like a nervous teenager.
But I did it for six years straight, and some nights I still catch myself doing it now. "
"That's not embarrassing," Wren said, moved by the admission. "That's someone who cared more than he knew how to show plainly."
"Maybe," Cain said. "Took me long enough to learn how to show it plainly instead. Wasted a lot of years rehearsing instead of just saying things straight out.
Reyna, watching Wren hum through her closing routine one evening in early spring, finally couldn't resist commenting. "You know, for a woman who spent eight months telling me she was completely over him, you sure do smile a lot these days whenever his name comes up."
"I never said I was completely over him. I said I was handling it.""Handling it," Reyna repeated, amused. "Is that what we're calling this now."
Wren threw a dish towel at her, laughing, and the two of them fell into the easy, teasing rhythm of old friends who'd survived enough hard conversations together to have earned the lighter ones too.
Cain, watching her laugh freely for what felt like the first time in longer than either of them could easily count, found himself thinking of a particular afternoon early in their courtship, years before any of this, when he'd first understood he wanted to spend the rest of his life finding new ways to make this exact sound happen.
He didn't say any of that out loud. He just watched her, grateful, and let the moment be exactly what it was without needing to narrate its significance.