12. Jake
JAKE
I have built entire houses with less trouble than I had asking one woman to dinner.
Two days had passed since the storm, since the candles, since a kiss that had rearranged something fundamental in my chest and then left me standing on her porch afterward like a man who'd forgotten how his own legs worked. I had said goodnight. She had said goodnight.
Neither of us had said anything about what came next, and somewhere in that stretch of quiet, the silence had calcified into something I didn't know how to break without sounding like an idiot.
I saw her the next morning across the fence, both of us pretending to be very interested in our respective yards. She waved. I waved back.
Noah looked at me like I had personally embarrassed the entire family.
"Morning," I called over, which was, objectively, the least I could have said.
"Morning," she called back, equally unhelpful.
We stood there another few seconds, two grown adults who had kissed each other senseless during a thunderstorm forty-eight hours earlier, now apparently reduced to the vocabulary of strangers passing on a hiking trail.
She examined a perfectly healthy rose bush with more intensity than any rose bush had ever required.
I found sudden, urgent interest in a fence post I'd already checked twice that week.
Lily solved the standoff by launching herself at the fence and demanding to know if Noah wanted to see a bug she'd found, and both kids vanished into the garden, leaving Aria and me alone with the wreckage of our own cowardice.
"So," I said.
"So," she agreed.
Neither of us said anything else. I retreated to my own yard like a man fleeing a burning building, which, considering how badly that conversation had gone, was probably an accurate comparison.
Deacon found me an hour later on the Whitfield job, already grinning before I'd said a word. Carol had clearly gotten to him first, which meant the whole town probably knew more about my love life than I did.
"You kissed her," he said, not a question.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Carol saw you two on that porch through her binoculars, Jake. She wasn't subtle about telling me."
"Carol needs a hobby that doesn't involve surveillance."
"Carol's hobby is you, apparently, and I for one am grateful for the entertainment." He set down his nail gun and looked at me with the particular patience of a man settling in for a good show.
"So. When are you taking her out?"
"I haven't asked her yet."
"It's been two days."
"I'm aware of how long it's been, Deacon. I've got a calendar same as everyone else."
"Two days, Jake. In relationship time that's basically a decade. She's going to think you regret it."
"I don't regret it."
"Does she know that? Because standing across a fence saying morning at each other isn't exactly a declaration of intent. Just ask her to dinner, Jake. It's not complicated. Words, in a row, forming a sentence. You've done harder things."
"I built you an entire deck for free once. That was harder."
"That deck took me four separate arguments and a threat to quit to get you to finish. This is one sentence. Try the sentence."
I threw a scrap of lumber in his general direction, which he dodged with the ease of a man who had been dodging my temper for eleven years and had gotten very good at it.
I tried again that evening, walking over with something that almost resembled a plan, and made it exactly as far as her front gate before the goose that had apparently claimed the whole block as its territory decided I was a threat worth chasing down personally.
It chased me back to my own driveway with a level of commitment I found downright insulting, wings out, hissing like it had a personal grudge, and by the time I'd shut my own gate behind me my dignity had taken a hit no amount of contracting experience could repair.
Aria watched the whole thing from her porch, arms crossed, doing an admirable job of not laughing.
"You could have helped," I called over, breathing considerably harder than the situation strictly warranted.
"And miss that? Absolutely not."
"That goose is a menace."
"That goose has better follow-through than you do right now, and he's not even trying to ask me to dinner tonight."
"I was going to. Before the ambush."
"Sure you were."
"I was!"
"Regroup, Hartley. Live to fight another day." She was grinning now, unmistakably, and even through the sting of losing a footrace to a waterfowl I found myself grinning back, because apparently that was just what happened to me around her now, whether or not I'd planned on it.
Deacon's voice kept needling at me the rest of the night, the way it always did once he'd landed a point.
Try the sentence, he'd said, like it was nothing.
I tried the sentence, several times, on the drive home, in the shower, standing in my own kitchen with a phone in my hand and absolutely no intention of using it like a coward would.
Would you like to have dinner sometime sounded like a job interview. I was wondering if you're free sounded like I was asking her to help me move furniture. Hey, so, dinner?
made me sound like I'd forgotten how words worked entirely, which at that point wasn't far from the truth.
I typed four different versions of a text message and deleted every single one, because nothing I wrote sounded like a man who had kissed her in a thunderstorm and meant it.
The fifth attempt just said hi, which I deleted so fast I nearly threw the phone across the kitchen out of pure embarrassment at myself.
Noah watched the whole performance from the kitchen table, sketchbook open, one eyebrow raised in an expression that looked remarkably like his father's when he thought someone was being ridiculous, which was, admittedly, a fair assessment of the evidence in front of him.
"I know," I told him. "I know how this looks."
He held up his sketchbook. It was a drawing of two stick figures standing very far apart with a fence between them, both of them frowning.
"That's not funny."
He tilted his head, entirely unconvinced, and tapped the fence in his drawing twice for emphasis.
"Okay, it's a little funny."
I decided the text message was a coward's way out and resolved to walk over there and say it to her face, like an actual adult, which felt braver right up until I was standing at her gate with my hand raised to knock and no plan at all for what came after that.
She opened the door before I could knock, which meant she had probably seen me standing there like a man rehearsing for a play he had not been cast in.
"You've been standing there for a while," she said.
"I was building up to it."
"Building up to knocking?"
"More like building toward an actual conversation. Knocking was step one. I hadn't made it to step two."
She leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, something amused and careful in her expression at the same time, like she was giving me room to get where I was going without rushing me there.
"Take your time," she said. "I've got all evening."
"Right. Okay." I cleared my throat, which did nothing useful.
"So I've been thinking, about the other night, and I wanted to say that I don't regret it, in case that wasn't clear from all the extremely articulate fence waving."
"It was not clear. The fence waving suggested the opposite, honestly."
"That's fair. That's on me." I dragged a hand through my hair, which was a habit I only had when I was genuinely rattled, and hers was the first face I had let myself come undone in front of in longer than I could remember.
"What I'm trying to say is that I would like to take you to dinner. An actual dinner. Restaurant, table, the whole thing, not steaks on a propane burner during a power outage, though for the record I stand by the propane burner."
"Duly noted."
"And I know that probably sounds like an obvious thing to say after what happened, but I wanted to say it properly instead of just assuming, because assuming felt like the kind of thing that gets a man in trouble, and I've already spent two days being an idiot about this so I figured I'd try to be slightly less of an idiot for this part specifically, and what I'm asking, badly, very badly, is if you would like to... "
"Yes."
"...have dinner with me sometime, if that's something you'd..."
"Jake. Yes."
"You didn't let me finish the sentence."
"I didn't need to. I got the important part somewhere around dinner and articulate."
"I had a whole ending planned. It had a joke in it and everything."
"Save the joke for the actual dinner. Consider it incentive."
Somewhere behind her, Lily's voice rang out demanding to know if Noah could stay for the bug investigation to continue after dark, and Aria glanced back over her shoulder before returning her attention to me with an expression that made every single one of the last two days worth it.
"So," she said. "When?"
"I hadn't gotten that far. I was mostly focused on not passing out during the asking part."
"You did remarkably well for a man who apparently rehearsed in his kitchen."
"How did you know that?"
"You've got the exact look of a man who talked himself into it at his own counter. Very particular. I'd recognize it anywhere."
I found myself laughing, the kind that came easier than it used to, the kind Carol would have said I'd been saving up without noticing, and something in Aria's face said she liked the sound of it as much as I liked being the reason for it.
"This weekend," I said. "If that works. There's a place two towns over that isn't steaks on a propane burner, though I want it noted for the record that the propane burner set a very high bar."
"The propane burner will be a hard act to follow."
"I have faith in the restaurant."
"Good. So do I, apparently, since I already said yes before you finished explaining what I was agreeing to."
"You gambled on my dinner plans sight unseen. That's either very trusting or very reckless."
"With you specifically, I've decided it's the same thing."
"I'll pick you up myself. Real clothes, not overalls, I promise. You can hold that against me if I break the promise."
"I'll be taking detailed notes." She tilted her head, studying me the way she did when she was deciding whether to let a joke land or push past it. "For what it's worth, I'm glad you didn't send the text."
"You knew about the text?"
"I know you well enough by now to know there was definitely a text, and that it was definitely deleted at least four times."
"Five, actually."
"Five." She laughed, the real one, the one that had started this whole mess of a summer in the first place.
"I'm oddly proud of you for the in-person attempt. Even with the goose."
"Especially with the goose. I earned this dinner."
"You did. Barely, but you did."
Behind her, Lily's voice rose again, something about the bug needing a proper habitat before nightfall, and Noah's sketchbook could be heard flipping open somewhere on the porch steps, both kids already deep into whatever elaborate project had replaced the last one.
Aria glanced back at them, then at me, something soft settling into her expression that had nothing to do with jokes at all.
"This weekend," she said again, like she wanted to hear it twice to be sure of it.
"This weekend," I confirmed, and meant it more than any sentence I'd managed all day.
She said yes before I finished the sentence. I have never been so relieved to be interrupted.