11. Aria
ARIA
Power is out on both sides of the fence, which apparently is the universe's way of telling two stubborn adults to eat dinner together whether they like it or not.
The storm had rolled in fast, the kind that turns the sky the color of a bruise in under ten minutes, and I'd just gotten the last of the groceries into the fridge when the lights flickered twice and gave up entirely.
Lily screamed with delight rather than fear, because to a five-year-old a blackout is basically a holiday, and I fumbled through three junk drawers before I found a flashlight with batteries that still had some fight left in them.
A knock came at the door before I'd even located the candles.
"You have power?" Jake asked, standing on my porch in the rain, a lantern in one hand and a grocery bag in the other, water running off him like he'd walked through a car wash on principle.
"Not a flicker, not a hum. You?"
"Same. Whole street's out, far as I can tell." He held up the bag like an offering.
"I've got a propane burner and steaks that are going to go bad by morning regardless. Figured better to eat them than waste them."
"That's either very neighborly or you just don't want to eat alone in the dark."
"Can't it be both?"
I let him in, mostly because arguing with a man holding steaks felt like a losing position on every front, and Lily abandoned the flashlight the second she spotted him, demanding to know if Noah was coming too.
"He's at Carol's tonight," Jake said. "Sleepover. Apparently I'm no fun during a thunderstorm."
"You seem plenty fun," I said, before I could stop myself.
"Careful. That almost sounded like a compliment."
We set up the propane burner on my back porch under the overhang, rain coming down in sheets past the edge of the roof, and I found enough candles in Rosalind's old junk drawer to make the kitchen look like something out of a movie neither of us had agreed to be in.
"This is the best blackout ever," Lily announced, supervising the steaks from a kitchen stool with the seriousness of a restaurant critic.
"Better than the one at the old apartment. That one just had a flashlight. This one has candles AND a fire outside."
"It's not a fire, bug. It's a burner."
"It's basically a fire."
"It is basically a fire," Jake agreed, flipping a steak with the kind of focus he usually reserved for measuring things. "She's not wrong."
"Thank you," Lily said, with the deep satisfaction of a child who had just won an argument against her own mother.
She ate half a steak with her fingers because the power outage apparently suspended all rules about utensils, narrated the thunder like a sports announcer calling a particularly dramatic play, and declared each flash of lightning either a nine or a ten depending on how close it landed.
By the time the dishes were cleared she'd gone quiet mid-sentence, the specific, sudden collapse only overtired five-year-olds can manage, and crashed on the couch before I'd even finished wiping down the counter.
"She's out," Jake said, glancing over at her sprawled form, one arm dangling off the cushion. "Impressive. My kid takes an hour to wind down after excitement like that."
"She runs hot and crashes hard. Always has." I pulled a blanket over her and turned back to find Jake watching me with an expression I couldn't quite name.
"What?"
"Nothing. You're good at that. Making it look easy."
"It's not easy. It just doesn't show most days."
He didn't argue, just handed me a glass of the wine he'd apparently packed for exactly this occasion.
"You planned this," I said, eyeing the wine glass he'd produced from somewhere in that grocery bag like a magician finishing a trick. "This whole blackout dinner. You had steaks and wine ready to go."
"I had steaks that were going to spoil and a bottle I've had since a housewarming gift nobody ever collected. That's not planning at all. That's inventory management."
"Very romantic. I'm swept off my feet by your inventory management."
"I aim low. It keeps expectations manageable."
We ended up on my back porch steps with the candles flickering in mason jars beside us, rain still coming down steady past the overhang, close enough to touch but not.
Somewhere out past the fence the apple tree bent under the weight of the storm, and I thought, absurdly, of the fruit clause, of contested apples and joint custody of a tree neither of us had asked to share, and how much had shifted since that first ridiculous conversation without either of us really noticing it happen.
"Can I ask you something?" I said, watching the storm instead of him, which felt safer somehow.
"That depends what it is."
"Fair. What happened with Lily's dad? You've never asked, and I've never told you, and I don't know why I want to tell you now except that the power's out and apparently that makes me reckless."
"You don't have to."
"I know. I want to." I turned the wine glass in my hands, watching candlelight catch the surface.
"There isn't much of a story, honestly, which is its own kind of embarrassing.
One summer, a long time ago, and then it was over, and I never even got the chance to tell him what came of it.
By the time I knew, I had no way left to find him.
So it's just been me and Lily from the very beginning.
No dramatic exit. Just a door that never really got the chance to close, because it was never fully open in the first place. "
"That's not nothing to carry by yourself."
"I know that now. Took me longer than it should have." I looked over at him.
"Your turn. Tell me something you haven't told anyone."
Something flickered across his face, quick and complicated, and for a second I thought he was going to deflect the way he always did, close the door quiet instead of loud. He didn't.
"I talk to Emily sometimes," he said.
"Not out loud. In my head. Ask her things about Noah I don't know the answer to. I've been doing it for two years and I never told anyone that, not even Carol."
"That doesn't sound crazy. That sounds like grief that hasn't figured out how to leave the room yet."
"It felt crazy for a long time. Like I was keeping her here against her will, making her keep parenting from wherever she is." He looked down at his glass.
"Lately I've been doing it less. I noticed that a few weeks ago and didn't know what to do with it. Felt like betraying her by getting better."
"Getting better isn't a betrayal, Jake."
"I know that. Knowing it and believing it aren't the same thing." He glanced at me, something raw sitting right at the surface of his face for once, none of the careful distance he usually kept between himself and anything that mattered.
"You make it easier. I don't know what to do with that either."
"Is that a good thing or a bad thing?"
"I genuinely don't know yet. Ask me again in a week."
"I'll put it on the calendar." I turned my glass slowly, watching the candlelight bend through it.
"For what it's worth, I get the guilt. Not the same version, but a version. Every time I let myself be happy here, some part of me waits for the other shoe. Like joy has to be paid back eventually, with interest."
"Has it? Been paid back, I mean."
"Not yet. I keep waiting anyway."
"Maybe that's the part we should both stop doing."
"Easy for you to say. You've had plenty of practice not listening to your own good advice."
That got a real laugh out of him, short and surprised, the kind that seemed to catch him off guard every time it happened, like he still wasn't used to the sound of himself doing it.
The rain kept coming, steady and warm the way summer storms are, and somewhere behind us Lily's breathing had gone slow and even on the couch, and it felt like the whole world had narrowed down to this porch, these candles, this man looking at me like I was a question he'd finally decided to stop avoiding.
"I moved four hundred miles to get away from needing anybody," I said quietly, watching the rain instead of him because it felt easier to admit things to weather than to a face.
"I had a whole plan. Be self-sufficient. Raise Lily on my own terms. Not depend on a man for anything ever again."
"How's that plan going?"
"Terribly. It's going terribly, Jake."
He laughed, low and surprised, and the sound of it did something to my chest that no amount of practical planning had prepared me for.
"Mine wasn't going much better," he said.
"I had a whole system. Measure everything twice. Don't get attached to things you can't control. Very sound system. Very airtight."
"What happened to it?"
"You fell through my trellis and ruined it in about four minutes."
"I did not ruin your system. Your system was already held together with duct tape and denial, and we both know it."
"Fair." He set his glass down on the step between us, close enough that our hands were nearly touching, and I found myself watching his fingers, the same careful, deliberate way he did everything. "Carol told me not to waste this."
"Waste what?"
"You. Us. Whatever this is that I've been too scared to name for weeks."
He said it plain, no deflection this time, no joke to hide behind.
"I've been calling it caution. It's not caution. It's fear, and I'm tired of being afraid of the one good thing that's happened to me in two years."
I didn't have a clever line ready for that, which almost never happened to me, and I sat there with my heart doing something complicated and unhelpful while the rain kept falling and the candles kept burning down between us.
"I'm scared too," I said. "In case that's not obvious."
"It's not obvious. You hide it well."
"I've had practice."
"So have I." He was quiet for a moment, the rain filling the space where his next words hadn't arrived yet, and when he spoke again his voice had dropped into something lower, more careful, like he was setting down something breakable.
"I don't want to be careful with this anymore. I've been careful with everything since she died, and I'm tired of it."
"Careful got you this far."
"Careful got me exactly as far as my own front porch and no further.
I'd like to try something else." He reached over and moved a strand of hair off my face, slow enough that I had every chance to stop him and didn't want to, his fingers rough and warm exactly the way they'd been the very first day, back when I still thought that was just a coincidence worth noticing and nothing more.
"I keep thinking I've met you before. I know that sounds insane."
Something in my chest went very still, a door creaking somewhere I hadn't let myself open in years, and for one dizzy second the candlelight and the rain and his hand on my face all tilted sideways into something that felt less like a first time and more like a memory I couldn't quite reach.
"It doesn't sound insane," I said, barely above a whisper. "It sounds like something I've been trying not to think about too."
He didn't ask what I meant. He just leaned in, slow enough that the whole storm seemed to hold its breath around us, and I met him the rest of the way without deciding to, the way you don't decide to fall, you just find yourself already falling and it's too late to do anything but land.
He kissed me like he had been planning it for six years, which made no sense, and I kissed him back like I had too, which made even less.