Chapter 20 #2
Cadence figured out where they were going almost immediately.
There simply were not that many restaurants in Magnolia Shore.
But she gamely pretended she had no idea and exclaimed in delight when they pulled into the small parking lot for Captain’s Crest, a seaside restaurant with great seafood and even better views.
“No way,” she exclaimed. “I love Captain’s Crest.”
Tyler too, played along. “No way? Huh, what a great and totally random guess!”
They shared a grin and, again, there was that moment of rightness.
Tyler turned off the car. “Okay, stay where you are though,” he said.
“Uh, what?”
Cadence, instead of receiving an answer, was left watching as Tyler hurried from his seat, closed the door, and jogged around to her side of the car.
Then he pulled open Cadence’s door and held out a hand to her.
She shot him a surprised, happy grin, and he shrugged.
“Thought I’d be a gentleman about it,” he said, a touch sheepish.
“Well, thank you.” She reached up and took his hand.
Inside, the ambiance in the restaurant was more romantic than Cadence remembered it. That, combined with Tyler’s sweetness and kindness, made her increasingly certain that this was a date.
She was surprised to find that she… kind of liked the idea.
It was better than a first date, actually, she decided a few minutes into their conversation, because she and Tyler didn’t have any of the awkward stop and starts that came from getting to know a new person.
Instead, Tyler launched into a charismatic retelling of some of the zanier customers he’d encountered during his recent electrician jobs.
They had both long since learned that working inside people’s homes meant seeing their quirks up close and personal.
“So this guy had, like, a hundred light switches in his house,” he said, rubbing his neck.
“No way,” Cadence said. “That’s too many.”
“Okay, I didn’t do a complete count, but I made it to like forty before I gave up. This guy had installed switches for everything. And he’d done it all himself, so goodness only knows why, all of a sudden, he wanted a professional to handle the rewiring. Anyway, it was a mess.”
Cadence was chuckling into her wine glass. She’d ordered a Bordeaux in anticipation of the seafood Alfredo she’d ordered. She’d always liked the earthy wine when paired with thick, creamy Alfredo sauce.
Tyler, meanwhile, had ordered an Old Fashioned, something she knew he considered a rare treat. She’d asked him once why he didn’t drink them more frequently, given how much he clearly enjoyed them, but he had countered that he enjoyed them because they were special, not an everyday sort of thing.
She liked thinking that tonight was special.
“You always had the best work stories,” she said, shaking her head into her drink.
To her surprise, Tyler frowned at this.
“Cadence, I want to apologize,” he said somberly. “You talk about me having good work stories, but part of me feels like… like I was bringing work home.”
Cadence frowned. “We all bring work home sometimes, Ty,” she said gently. “That’s life.”
“Sure, but—” He dragged a hand through his hair, rumpling his locks.
“I guess what I meant to say is that I throw myself into my work. And I’m not sorry about that.
I like my job, and I like being good at it.
And I recognize that working hard is what it takes to be good at it.
So I don’t know why I didn’t realize until it was too late that I needed to work at being a husband too. ”
The look he gave her was heartbreaking.
“I think,” she said slowly, “that it’s easy to forget. We read stories that end in ‘and they lived happily ever after’ and think, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s how it’s supposed to be.’ But that’s not real life. Real life is weird and complicated and hard.”
“Gosh, Cadence, please don’t be so nice about it,” he said, sounding miserable.
“I just… I come home to that bland, empty apartment every day and feel so lonely. And I think, ‘okay, just make it homier in here, maybe that’ll help.’ But I don’t want it to be homier.
I want to come home. I want to be with my family.
I—I miss that so much. It tears me up inside.
And maybe it’s selfish of me to ask, but do you think you’d ever be willing to try again? ”
She opened her mouth to reply, but he shook his head and kept going.
“And I don’t mean like a clean slate. I don’t want you to pretend that our past didn’t happen. I just… I really want to try. I want to be better.”
She believed him. She knew what Tyler looked like when he was being distant and knew what he looked like when he was being heartfelt.
This was the latter. Nothing about him as he sat before her reminded her of the man from whom she’d grown so distant.
This was the Tyler from before, and she felt so, so grateful to see him again.
But…
“Ty,” she said quietly. “That’s all great, and I hear you. I believe you. But what if… there’s no reason to believe I’m suddenly going to be able to get pregnant.”
His eyes widened.
“Cadence, no,” he said. “That’s not—” He paused. “Okay, obviously I’d be psyched if we had another kid. But if it was just you, me, and Izzy for the rest of our lives? That’s… it’s everything. It would be perfect.”
She let her eyes flutter closed. It was that or risk a tear slipping free. Because, yes, it did sound perfect.
And yet, she wasn’t sure that grief wouldn’t come between them again.
“Can I think about it?” she eventually managed, only the smallest wobble in her voice breaking free.
She opened her eyes when she felt Tyler grasp her hand.
“Cadence, yes,” he said. “Of course you can. You can take as much time as you need. I want us to be a family again, but I don’t want to go back to the way things were. I want to be better. I want to listen better. And I’m okay with waiting as long as you need.”
Her lips twitched, and his expression lightened a little.
“Fine, fine, you know me too well. I won’t like waiting, but I’ll do it. Because I want you to feel sure. As sure as I feel.”
This time, a tear did escape.
“Okay,” she managed.
“Okay,” he agreed, squeezing her hand once before letting go. She could practically feel him holding back words. He was a fixer by nature. It was what had led him to his job, and it pervaded different parts of his life.
And knowing that made her appreciate his silence all the more. It made her believe even more strongly that he meant what he said about changing.
“Listen,” he said, rapping his knuckles smartly against the table.
“Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to have a really good dinner.
We’re going to not worry about anything more than tonight.
After we eat, we’re going to do that thing where we pretend that we don’t want dessert, and then we pretend that we are going to share one, and then we decide to get two and split them. ”
She smiled. “It just feels like you’re getting twice the dessert than if you ate one whole one,” she said. It was a comfortable conversation, one they’d had a thousand times, and it made her feel far calmer than she had only moment before.
“Exactly,” he agreed. “After that, I’ll drive you home, and I’ll give you space to think.”
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
He mimed locking his lips and throwing away the key, which Cadence assumed was a sign that they were no longer talking about heavy topics.
Their food arrived mere moments later, and their conversation flowed from topic to topic. They had a cheerful debate over whose dinner was more delicious, Cadence’s seafood alfredo or Tyler’s wood-fired steak and side salad.
“You are nuts,” she said, pointing at him with a fork, “it’s a seafood restaurant. You order the seafood!”
“We live in a seaside town,” he countered, laughing. “If I only ate seafood at seafood restaurants, I’d never eat anything else.”
“You’d be happy though,” she said, biting down on a perfectly grilled prawn to punctuate her statement.
“I’m happy right now,” he returned, taking a bite of steak.
She really had no argument for that.
After every bite of their respective meals were eaten, a few tastes of the other’s plate even swapped, like it was old times, the two settled back in their chairs.
“Okay,” Cadence said. “I know we already talked about this, but dinner was so good… do we really need dessert?”
Tyler hung his head and shook it back and forth like he was disappointed, but the teasing smile about his lips gave away his true emotions.
“Cadence,” he said. “Cadence, Cadence, Cadence. Yes. We do really need dessert. Sheesh.”
And so they did, in fact, order desserts.
Cadence chose a poached pear crumble that came with a full piece of the fruit at the center, its flesh so perfectly cooked that she scarcely had to touch it with her fork before the fruit split.
Tyler opted for a chocolate hazelnut tartlet, which came with a fluffy cloud of house-made whipped cream on top, with just the tiniest sprinkle of sea salt to heighten the impact of the dessert’s sweetness.
And, as planned, they swapped halves, then enjoyed a rousing debate about which dessert was more delicious, each person changing sides practically bite by bite.
As the night drew to a close, Cadence found herself eating more and more slowly, partially because she was so well sated by her meal, but mostly because she was increasingly reluctant for the night to end.
Eventually though, she could stall no longer. The restaurant was gradually emptying, and they’d had the last bites of food and final sips of drink nearly a quarter of an hour ago.
“Shall we?” Tyler asked, sounding as reluctant as Cadence felt.
She tried not to let her face reveal too much of her feelings.
“Yeah, I guess we’d better head out,” she said.
As they drove back to Cadence’s house, a taut silence stretched between them. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence necessarily. It was more… anticipatory.
Something had changed this evening, Cadence reflected. She didn’t entirely know what it was, not quite yet, but she recognized the shift. And she knew instinctively that Tyler did too.
They pulled into the driveway they’d once shared, then paused again after Tyler turned off the car, as if they feared that doing anything would break the spell between them. Eventually, however, they gathered their things and made their way to the front porch.
Cadence knew she should reach inside her bag for her keys, but instead she just looked at Tyler, lit as he was from the warm glow of the front porch light. He looked very young, somehow, and that lit up an ache in Cadence’s chest.
“Cadence,” he said, his tongue darting out to touch the corner of his mouth nervously. “Do you… I mean, would it be all right… can I kiss you?”
He stumbled over the words, which Cadence found endearing and rather comforting. He was as nervous as she was, after all. She wasn’t alone in this.
And that sense of communal emotional experience led her to nod.
“Yeah,” she said softly. “I… think I’d like that.”
Tyler looked like she’d given him the greatest gift of his life. His joyous smile was the last thing she saw before he pressed his lips to hers.
It was a chaste kiss, far more limited than many they’d shared in their relationship. It was only a second or so longer than a peck. Logically, Cadence knew that.
But the emotional tidal wave it caused in her made it as impactful as if she and Tyler had stood there kissing for hours.
Part of her wanted to do just that, wanted to weave her fingers though Tyler’s sandy locks and hold him close to her, to never let him go.
Another part of her wanted to shove him away before her heart became even more compromised.
In the end, she did neither. She just rode out the wave of feeling that came from the brief kiss, then tried to blink back the tears that threatened to spill from her eyes.
“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” Tyler said when he pulled back and saw her conflicted expression. “We don’t have to do it again if it was so terrible.”
She knew he was making the joke to make her feel better as well as to cover up his own worries.
She feared she had gotten out of the habit of thinking about Tyler’s feelings when it came to matters between them, but now, with his nerves and hope staring her right in the face, she couldn’t avoid the reminder that his life had changed dramatically when they’d separated too.
But she was in no mood to joke.
“I know, Ty,” she said, voice sounding watery. “I just… I can’t yet. Thank you for tonight. It was amazing, really. But I have to go.”
And then, before he could say anything more, she snatched her keys from her bag and let herself in the house, where she could hurry upstairs and clutch her feelings to her chest and wonder if she’d made a terrible mistake in opening up her heart to this man once again.