Chapter 14
Beck
Setting coffee down beside her wasn't a plan. That's the part that keeps surfacing.
She was reading on the couch — her feet tucked under her, one of Ivy's blankets across her lap — and I walked through the room and put the mug on the table and went back to what I was doing, and somewhere between the kitchen and the hallway I realized I hadn't thought about it at all.
No calculation. No decision. Just: she takes it with one sugar, and there was an extra mug, and that was the end of it.
That's the part I can't stop thinking about.
I carry it into the shower, through my shift briefing, and all the way into the station, where it continues to surface at intervals where it has no business being while I'm supposed to be reviewing apparatus maintenance logs.
My phone buzzes on the desk. A text from Aiden.
Aiden: How's it going with Lockhart
I stare at it. At some point I told Aiden enough that he felt entitled to have opinions about it. This was my first mistake. My second was not specifying that Derek did not need to be consulted.
Beck: Fine
Aiden: That's it? Fine?
Beck: Yes
Aiden: Beck.
Beck: What
Aiden: You have to actually do something. You can't just exist in her vicinity and hope she figures it out.
I set the phone face-down on the desk. I pick up the maintenance log. I read the same sentence about hydraulic pump pressure three times without retaining any of it.
My phone buzzes again.
Derek: Aiden added me to this thread. You're welcome.
I have no idea why Derek is involved in this conversation and I make a note to address it at a later date, potentially in writing.
Derek: I have thoughts
Beck: I don't want them
Derek: Too late
A link arrives. Then another. Then, because the universe is actively hostile toward me, a Pinterest board titled Romantic Date Ideas for the Modern Man lands in the group chat. Derek has sent a quantity of pins that constitutes a harassment case on its own merits.
I open exactly one of them. It's a photograph of a table covered in rose petals with a string of fairy lights overhead and two wine glasses arranged at artful angles.
There is a handwritten note leaning against one of the glasses.
The note says, in what appears to be professionally calligraphed script, You are my forever.
I close the app. Aiden means well. Derek is a liability. Neither of them is going to help me here.
I screenshot the entire thread. This is exhibit A through Z for future reference if either of them ever gives me grief about anything for the rest of our natural lives. I am building a case. It will be airtight.
I set the phone face-down again, go back to the maintenance log, and this time I actually read it. Hydraulic pump pressure, normal range, no anomalies. Good. At least something in my life is functioning within expected parameters.
Aiden has been in a relationship for over a year. He needed a viral video to get there. This feels like relevant data.
It comes to me mid-shift, while I'm in the apparatus bay going over pre-run checks and not thinking about it at all, which is apparently when my brain decides to work.
Gemma mentioned it once, early on, standing on the back porch with her coffee mug wrapped in both hands and her face tilted up like she could drink the sky.
She'd said it the way she said a lot of things — offhand, conversational, like she was just narrating whatever crossed her mind.
I've never seen the Perseids properly. I keep meaning to find somewhere dark enough, but I've always lived in a city.
She'd moved on to something else before I could respond. I'd filed it away the way I file most things — quietly, in order, accessible when needed.
The Perseids peak tonight. I looked it up weeks ago when a fire safety bulletin came through with a note about dry conditions and increased campfire risk.
I knew about The Overlook, but The Overlook has a parking lot and a historical marker and, on a clear night, approximately half of Copper Ridge.
That wasn't what this was. The ridge above the old forestry road, about a mile past the fire break, has zero light pollution.
I know because I drove up there in the first week after I moved to Copper Ridge, when the silence of the town was still unfamiliar and I needed to confirm that the stars up here were actually different from what I remembered.
They are, for the record. Significantly.
I pull the two camp chairs from the garage and put them in the truck bed before I talk myself out of it. The thermos goes on the seat. That's the whole plan.
I text her.
Beck: Are you working tonight
Gemma: Off until tomorrow night why
Beck: Put shoes on. I'll be there in twenty minutes.
Her response takes long enough that I start the truck.
Gemma: ...that's the whole message?
Beck: Yes
Gemma: Should I be worried
Beck: No
Gemma: Should I bring anything
Beck: No
Gemma: You're very forthcoming
Beck: Twenty minutes, Lockhart
She sends back a single punctuation mark. It might be a question mark. It might be exasperation. It is functionally identical to a yes.
She's waiting on the porch when I pull up, which I take as a positive indicator, and she's wearing a jacket over a worn sweatshirt, her hair loose. She looks at the two camp chairs folded in the truck bed, at the thermos on the seat, at me, and then back at the chairs.
"Are we camping?" she asks.
"No," I say.
"Should I have brought snacks?"
"There's granola bars in the glove box."
She opens the passenger door and climbs in, and the truck smells like her shampoo until the heater kicks in, and I remind myself to focus on the road. "Are you going to tell me where we're going?"
"Ridge above the forestry road."
"Why?"
"Perseids peak tonight."
Silence. I merge onto the highway and don't look over.
"You remembered that," she says finally.
"You mentioned it."
"That was a while ago."
"I know." I keep my eyes on the road. The highway unspools ahead in the truck's headlights, pine trees pressing close on both sides, and the last of the evening light is draining out of the western sky by degrees. "You said you'd never seen them from somewhere without light pollution."
Another silence. This one feels different from the first one.
"Beck."
"What."
"This is very sneaky for a man with no apparent feelings."
"I have feelings," I say. "I just don't narrate them constantly. Unlike my daughter."
She makes a sound that is distinctly a laugh she tried to swallow and failed at. "I'm putting that on a coffee mug."
"Please don't."
We drive the rest of the way with the windows down and the cold mountain air coming through.
Gemma finds the granola bars, confirms there are two, hands me one, and keeps the other.
The old forestry road is rough enough that the truck earns its paycheck, and she braces against the dash with one hand and eats her granola bar with the other, completely unbothered.
"Does this road go anywhere besides here?" she asks.
"Fire break access road. Ends at the ridge."
"How do you know about it?"
"I drove every road above town the first week I moved here." She looks at me. "Habit," I say. "New territory."
"That's very captain of you."
"It's useful. Tonight, for example."
"Empirical evidence," she says. "Very you."
The ridge opens up without warning, the tree line dropping away to a wide flat clearing with nothing above it but sky. I cut the engine and step out, and the cold hits clean and immediate, carrying the smell of pine and dry grass and nothing else. No town noise. No light except what's overhead.
Gemma steps out of the truck and tilts her head back and goes completely still.
"Oh," she says quietly.
The Milky Way is a smear across the middle of it — not the faint suggestion you get from a city, but the actual thing, dense and luminous, and even before the peak of the shower the stars are pressing down so close they feel structural.
"Yeah," I say.
I get the camp chairs from the truck bed and set them up side by side, facing the open sky.
Pour coffee into the thermos cap and the second cup I brought and hand her the good one — the cup, not the cap — because I am trying here, and she accepts it without comment and drops into her chair and tips her face up again like she can't stop looking.
I sit in the other chair, drink my coffee from the thermos cap, and wait.
The first meteor comes across low and fast, a thread of white light that's gone before you can track it.
"There," she says.
"I see it."
Another one, brighter, crossing higher overhead.
Then a pause, then two more in quick succession, and Gemma makes a small involuntary sound, low enough that she probably doesn't mean it to land.
It happens when she sees something she likes.
I've noticed it before — over Ivy's dinosaur drawings, over the best pour from Peak Grounds when Micah gets the ratio right.
I set down the thermos cap.
"Gemma."
"Mm." She's still watching the sky.
"I want to say something and I'm going to do it badly, so I'm asking you to stay in the chair."
That gets her attention. She turns to look at me, her face lit by starlight and nothing else, and her expression is careful in the way it gets when she's not sure whether to smile or brace.
"That is genuinely alarming," she says.
"I know." I look at her directly. "I don't know how to keep this casual. That's not how I'm built. Whatever this is, whatever's been building since you moved in — I'm not keeping it at arm's length anymore. That's the first thing."
She doesn't say anything.
"I know that's inconvenient," I continue. "Given that everywhere you've lived, you've left before the boxes were fully unpacked. And I know Ivy complicates this, because she asks about you when you're not here. That's not a small thing."
"Beck—"
"Let me finish."
She closes her mouth. Overhead, three meteors cross in the space of a second.
"I'm asking you clearly whether you want to try this. For real. Not the thing where we sit on the porch and I make coffee and we pretend the tension isn't a third person in every room." A pause. "That's the whole ask."
The silence is long enough that I hear the wind move through the grass at the edge of the clearing.
"I don't know how to stay," she says finally.
There's no brightness in them and no deflection.
"I know that," I say.
"I've left everywhere I've lived. I left Denver. I'll probably—" She stops. Tries again. "I don't know if that's who I am or if it's just what I've done. I can't promise you I know the difference."
"I've been careful and controlled since my marriage ended and before that, probably. I'm very good at holding things at distance." I reach across and find her hand in the dark, wrap my fingers around hers, and hold on. Another meteor crosses overhead. "So we're both terrible at this."
"Maybe we figure it out together."
The silence after that one is different from all the previous silences. She turns her face up to the sky again, but her hand tightens around mine.
"That's an objectively bad plan," she says.
"I know."
"I'm on board," she says. "I'm terrified, but I'm on board."
A meteor drags across the sky overhead, longer and brighter than any of the others, and it burns out slow, trailing light for a full second before it goes dark. Gemma makes the sound again, low and unguarded, and this time I feel it somewhere behind my sternum.
We stay until the cold works through the jackets and the thermos is empty and the meteors are coming slow but steady, and then she stands and says, simply, "Let's go home," and I fold the chairs back into the truck without overthinking what she means by it.
The drive back is quiet, warm from the heater, her knee angled toward mine in the dark cab.
When I pull into the driveway and cut the engine, Clarence is sitting on the porch step.
Not on Gemma's side — on mine. He looks at the truck, then at her, then back at me with the expression of a creature who has been waiting on this particular outcome for some time and finds our pace unreasonable.
Gemma looks at him. "He's judging you."
"He judges everyone."
"No," she says. "That's specifically a you look."
She gets out of the truck. Clarence watches her come up the walk, stands, stretches with complete indifference to the scene he's orchestrating, and falls into step beside her toward the door. She looks back at me over her shoulder and says, simply, "Let's go home," and I watch her go inside.
Standing on my own porch, watching her disappear through the door, I make a decision.
Careful and controlled for years. Measured. Managed. The perimeter intact, the damage contained.
I'm done being careful. The question is whether she'll let me prove it.