Chapter 12
Beck
She didn't pull away.
That's what I keep coming back to. The porch, the dark, her hand warm in mine — and she didn't pull away.
I've been turning it over since, the way you work a problem you already know the answer to and are just waiting to admit, and somewhere in the turning I arrive at a conclusion: I need to do something about this.
This is my first mistake.
That's what I keep coming back to. Not the months of coffee and Ivy's commentary and the particular way Gemma says goodnight like she means it — those I'd catalogued and filed away under reasons not to do something stupid.
The hand in the dark is different. The hand in the dark is the thing I can't put down.
So, naturally, I decide to do something about it.
The second mistake is asking for advice.
Aiden hears me out with the focused expression of a man who takes this kind of thing seriously, which is the part that should have warned me off.
Derek leans against the apparatus bay wall with his arms crossed, boot heel hooked on the bumper of Engine 7, already wearing the look of someone who sees an opportunity for chaos.
"Okay," Aiden says. "First question. Have you told her you like her?"
"I'm asking her on a date," I say. "That's implied."
"Not always," Derek says.
"It's a date. It is, by definition, an expression of—"
"Beck," Aiden says, patient as a man who has clearly thought hard about this before, "women like to hear the thing. Not infer the thing. Hear it."
"We're going on a date. She'll hear it."
Derek shakes his head slowly, like a doctor reviewing a difficult chart. "Where are you taking her?"
"Valentino's."
Both of them go quiet.
"What?" I ask.
"That's..." Derek starts.
"A lot," Aiden finishes.
"It's the nicest restaurant in town," I say. If you're going to do something, you do it properly.
"It's where people go to propose," Derek says. "Or to tell someone they have a terminal diagnosis and feel bad about it."
"It says something."
"It says 'I've been thinking about this for a long time and I may have feelings I don't know how to process,'" Aiden says, and then pauses. "Actually, for you, that might be accurate. Never mind, it's fine. Go to Valentino's."
"Valentino's," I say firmly, because I am a grown man with a plan and I am not crowdsourcing my romantic life from two men who once got lost on a training hike close enough to the station.
I knock on her door that evening. She opens it with Kevin tucked under one arm and a look that says she was in the middle of something.
"I'd like to take you to dinner," I say. "Out. A restaurant. Not here, not as—" I stop. Start again. "I'm asking you on a date. Tomorrow night. Seven o'clock."
She looks at me for a moment. Kevin is still under her arm. "A date," she says.
"That's what I said."
"Not just dinner."
"Correct."
She sets Kevin on the small table by her door and leans against the frame, and there's something in her expression I can't fully read — warmth, mostly, and something that might be the effort of not smiling too wide. "Okay," she says. "Yes."
"Good," I say. The tension I've been carrying in my shoulders since I raised my hand to knock releases all at once, which I am not going to think about.
She's still smiling when she closes the door.
I iron a shirt. I put on a blazer, which I haven't worn since the Seattle farewell dinner and which, if Ivy were here, would earn me a "principal, but nicer" and a thumbs up.
I knock on Gemma's door with something that is not nervousness, because I don't get nervous.
My jaw is tight and my hands won't fully relax, but those are two things that have nothing to do with each other.
Standing on her porch, I realize I should have brought something.
Flowers. Wine. A small decorative dinosaur, which is insane, but the thought arrives fully formed and I can't un-have it.
I have brought nothing. I am standing here in a blazer with empty hands like a man who did not think this through, which is exactly what I am.
She opens the door in a green dress the color of new leaves, her hair down instead of pulled back, and my brain does something unhelpful and immediate that I shut down before it can fully develop.
She's smiling at the blazer with warm eyes and says, "You look really nice, Beck," like she means it and isn't performing the meaning, and I nearly walk into the doorframe.
We drive to Valentino's.
The front door has a handwritten sign taped to the glass that reads: Closed for Private Event — Alvarez-Park Wedding Rehearsal Dinner. Thank you for your understanding!
The Alvarez-Park wedding rehearsal dinner.
I stand on the sidewalk in my blazer, the cold mountain air cutting straight through it, and stare at that sign for what is probably too long.
Gemma stands beside me. She reads it. She makes a sound — a small, controlled sound — and when I look at her, her lips are pressed together so hard they've gone white at the edges.
Her shoulders are doing something she's fighting.
"Don't," I say.
"I'm not," she says, voice level.
"You're about to."
"I'm absolutely not about to—" She turns away and her shoulders give up entirely, shaking with the kind of laughter she's muffling behind both hands, and the sound that escapes anyway is somewhere between a laugh and a cough.
"I'm sorry," she manages. "I'm so sorry.
The sign is just very — it's a very informative sign. "
"Gemma."
"The calligraphy is really nice."
The Alvarez-Park wedding rehearsal dinner is doing exactly nothing for the particular kind of humiliation that comes from standing on a sidewalk in a blazer with a reservation you can no longer use. "We're leaving," I say.
The Watershed hits us with a wall of warmth when we push through the door — wood smoke, draft beer, the chili Big Jim makes on shift nights, and the particular noise of a good portion of the Copper Ridge Fire Department having a perfectly normal evening that is about to become less normal.
The jukebox is doing something mournful with a steel guitar.
A mounted largemouth bass watches us from above the bar with an expression that can only be described as resigned.
We walk in together.
Big Jim looks up from behind the bar, sees us, and his whole face transforms into an expression that can only be described as triumphant. The bar rag stops moving.
"WELL," he says, at a volume that was not necessary and that silences the nearest table completely. "LOOK WHO IT IS."
"Jim," I say, low.
"Beck Delano and Gemma Lockhart," he continues, undeterred, gesturing with the bar rag toward the room at large. "All dressed up. Must be on a DATE."
Someone at the pool table whoops. A booth near the back erupts. Gemma's hand comes up and covers her face, and the tips of her ears have gone pink.
"We're getting a table," I tell Big Jim, using the voice I use on new recruits who have done something inadvisable.
"Of course, of course." He waves us toward the corner booth with the enthusiasm of a man presiding over something he personally arranged. "Best seat in the house."
We slide in across from each other. The corner booth that the entire bar can see, under a light that is doing its level best to illuminate us like a stage.
Gemma's recovered enough to look at me over the top of her menu, eyes bright and dancing with an emotion I am choosing to interpret as sympathy.
"You doing okay?" she asks.
"Great," I say. "Having a wonderful time."
She bites her lip. Hard. Her menu trembles slightly.
The bread basket arrives with a folded notecard tucked between the rolls.
Gemma unfolds it. Reads it. Her face does something extraordinary — a sequence of expressions that cycles through surprise, delight, and helpless hilarity in under two seconds.
She presses the notecard flat against her collarbone, composing herself, and then slides it across the table.
Beckett, it reads, in neat loopy handwriting I recognize from the notes she leaves when she watches Ivy — ate well, no dinosaur arguments, went to bed easy. This one reads: She's lovely. Don't mess it up. — Rosa Delgado.
"Mrs. Delgado is here?" I ask.
Gemma points, discreetly, toward a corner table where Rosa Delgado sits with two other women from the garden club, all three of them watching us with the undisguised interest of women who have seen this kind of thing before.
Mrs. Delgado raises her water glass.
I put the notecard face-down on the table.
Then Hazel Park materializes beside us with a phone raised at a documentary angle, wearing the expression of someone who has been hoping for this moment and has been carrying the phone charged and ready just in case. "Hi! Oh, this is so cute. Can I just—"
"No," I say. In Seattle, a person could have a meal without their entire social circle materializing with opinions and documentation. I am noting this for the record.
"Just one—"
"Hazel."
She lowers the phone two inches. Not all the way. Just enough to maintain plausible deniability. "I'll text you the photos," she says, and retreats.
Gemma puts her head down on the table.
Her shoulders are shaking. Not the controlled, polite shaking from the sidewalk outside Valentino's, but the full-body, helpless, tears-are-involved kind that she's muffling against her forearms. When she comes back up, her eyes are wet, her cheeks are flushed the same pink as her ears, and she looks more alive than anyone has a right to look under a bar light with fish on the walls.
"Say it," I tell her.
"I'm not saying anything," she gets out between breaths.
"You're saying all of it without using words."
"Beck." She presses her knuckles to her mouth, but her eyes are still laughing at me over the top of her hand. "I'm having a really great time."
"You're crying."
"Happy tears," she says, and her breath hitches on a fresh wave.