Chapter Twenty-Five
Following Autumn’s directions, Cox went up two sets of wide marble stairs and turned left at the top. Outside it was obvious that this building had once been a school—it had the boxy, pseudo-stately, red-brick look of an old high school—but inside, it was more like some grand manor in the English countryside. Yet the stone stairways and corridors were still as wide and utilitarian as a school’s.
The heels of his boots clicked as he walked down the second-story corridor, past tall, broad, beveled doors that were decidedly not original. Each one bore a simple brass numeral.
Toward the end of the corridor, a slant of light showed an open door. As he approached, a shadow filled that wedge, and Autumn stepped into view. She wore snug black pants and a loose white top. Her hair was in a ponytail. Her feet were bare. She was so fucking beautiful.
All at once, Cox’s chest tightened like it was being crushed in a vise. Never in his life had the mere sight of another person made him feel like this. Anxiety and excitement and regret and hope turned his blood to a froth. He felt fucking dizzy.
She looked so damn small, framed in that oversized doorway. Overwhelmed, Cox pulled up short. When he stopped, she seemed to shrink more. Her arms crossed her chest, the gesture more protective than judgmental.
She didn’t trust him. Of course she didn’t; he’d thrown her trust in her face.
For a moment, hope flickered, and regret became a weight around his ankles. It was too late; he hadn’t understood what he’d had while he had it, and now it was too late.
Ain’t no such thing as too late, Abigail had told him. There’s only what you decide to do, and what you decide to don’t.
That little bit of wisdom had pushed him almost four hundred miles east, to this moment.
He knew why he was here. He knew what he wanted.
He’d gone over and through every doubt, every second thought, every list of pros and cons well before he’d decided to act, and repeated the whole litany on a loop during the long ride east. By the time he’d reached Indiana, he was finished quibbling.
It did not fucking matter that he’d thought he never wanted anyone in his life this way. It did not fucking matter that he’d thought he was better off alone. It did not fucking matter that he’d always believed he needed no one and could count on no one.
None of that fucking mattered because none if it was fucking true.
Cox couldn’t begin to guess why it took Abigail Freeman, someone so far out on the outskirts of his life he practically needed a map to come face to face with her, to see a truth about him he’d been blind to all his life. But she’d seen it and made him look: he’d built himself a nice, sturdy prison. He’d lived just as dead a life as his mother had since they’d buried Billy; his version of that death had merely been a little more animated. She’d been a ghost; he’d been a zombie.
It had taken the insight of one sweet, odd woman from the hills, and the final end of his mother’s decades-long dying for him to see that he actually wanted to live.
No, it had taken one more thing: the love of a good woman.
He knew what he wanted. He knew why he was here.
He wanted Autumn. He was here to tell her that.
Now he needed to know if she still wanted him.
So he got his boots moving again.
She stood perfectly still, watching him come to her. As he approached, his heart revving with nerves and hope, an emotional blend with which he was wildly unfamiliar, Cox tried to form the right thing to say. What incantation could he conjure to take the worry from her brow and replace it with relief or even happiness?
There was no magic spell, and Cox was no man of words. When he reached her, there was only one thing in his head.
Her arms still hugging her chest, Autumn looked up at him. Her eyes shifted back and forth, searching his eyes for understanding.
Without the words to ask, Cox sought her consent instead with his actions. His eyes fixed on hers, he cupped her cheeks in his hands, slowly, with intent but without force. When his palms touched her velvet skin, she twitched lightly and her breath caught, but she didn’t move from his touch.
Her lips had parted slightly with that sharp intake of breath.
Cox lowered his head. Autumn did not pull away.
When his lips met hers, she released a soft, whimpering sigh into his mouth. When he dropped his hands from her face to send his arms around her, her back softened into his hold. When he drew her firmly to his body, her arms unwound from their self-protected clench and slipped around his waist.
She was hugging him back. Kissing him back.
Wanting him back.
Cox pushed into her mouth, tasting her moan as he found her tongue.
Not even the hope that had propelled him across two states, a hope so new its feathers were still wet, had prepared him for a reunion like this. Of course he’d never imagined simply kissing her before they’d exchanged a word.
On the ride here, he’d tried repeatedly to play out scenarios for how she’d greet him, and he’d failed every time. He wasn’t good at that kind of forward, strategic thinking. Instead, he’d fixated on his inability to see possible futures and realized he’d been living in place his whole goddamn life, reacting but not planning, living in the losses of the past every bit as much as his mother had.
Mixed in with his deep, desperate love and need of her, he’d been so angry at his mother—not only this fresh rage after her suicide but a low, constant simmer for the past two decades, a steady beat of resentment for not being enough for her. Now he knew that he hadn’t been angry at only his mother, maybe not even primarily at her. His rage was for his father, placing duty to country over his family, and he was even angrier at Billy, for his damnable obsession with ‘finishing Dad’s fight,’ only to die in the same fucking war. Leaving him alone with a mother who’d already been half ghost.
Now he was nearly forty years old, older than his father had ever been, and he was as angry as he’d been the day they’d buried his brother. In all these years, he’d come to terms with none of it, learned nothing at all. He’d been carrying a teenager’s fury with him all this way.
That thought fired his nerves and tightened his hold of Autumn. She moaned again, and he lifted her off her feet, stepping to the wall, pressing her to it, leaning into her, slipping his thigh between her legs.
At his side, someone cleared their throat with theatrical emphasis.
Autumn tensed in his arms, and her mouth closed. Cox stepped back, but he couldn’t look away from her.
For a moment, she couldn’t look away from him, either. Her eyes glinted under brows arched high with ... wonder, or confusion, or curiosity, or fear. Or all of them. Her gaze flashed quickly to the side, then returned to him.
“You must be Cox,” said the woman who’d cleared her throat. Cox ignored her.
Autumn smiled. Her lips glistened with their kiss.
“Cox, this is my friend, Ida,” she said, still focused on him. “Ida, yes, this is Cox.”
“Hello, Cox. I won’t say it’s nice to meet you because I don’t know if it is yet. I will say that as best friend, I claim the right to tell you to get your paws off my girl. You haven’t earned back your touching privileges.”
Her tone straddled the line between serious and sardonic. Autumn’s smile grew pert. She was still focused on him.
For Autumn, Cox finally located some words. “Do you want me to back off?”
Her hands slipped from his nape and glided to his chest. Cox thought she meant to push him back, but instead she pushed her hands under his kutte and grabbed fists of his shirt.
“I want to understand,” she said.
Of course she did. But he was only figuring shit out and could hardly order his own thoughts, let alone make words that contained it all. “I don’t know if I know how to explain.”
At their side, her friend Ida made a loud, infuriating buzzer noise. “EEEEHHHHHH!!! I’m sorry, wrong answer! But thank you for playing. We have some lovely parting gifts backstage.”
What the fuck with this stranger shoving her beak into shit not her business? He whipped his head in her direction and discovered a tall, slim, ethnically ambiguous woman with a mane of curly dark hair. Her head cocked, she grinned at him with the clear message You wanna make trouble with me? Try.
“Ida—enough,” Autumn said, her voice low but her rebuke decisive. Cox returned his attention to her, and she sighed heavily. “Will you try? At the intercom, you said you were here because you want me.” He nodded at once, and it brought her smile back. “Okay. Before that can happen, I need to understand what happened before, and I need to understand what exactly it is you want, and if I want the same things.”
Again, Ida made that fucking game-show noise. If he had duct tape with him, that chick would be shutting up right quick.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but that, too, is the wrong answer. Before there’s any explaining or understanding or fucking planning, there’s gotta be a whole lotta groveling. Like, on his knees, kissing your feet groveling.”
Cox wanted to send a threatening look Ida’s way, but he didn’t want to look away from Autumn. He wanted to see in her eyes if she’d demand humiliation from him.
He wouldn’t be able to do that. Moreover, he wouldn’t believe she cared about him if she needed something like that. It would dim his feelings for her—and that was the worst thing he could imagine right now.
He’d humiliated her, he knew that. Abandoning her to his mother’s funeral, sending her away while they stood in the parking lot, after all she’d done to keep him going and handle what he could not, after how hard he’d leaned on her and how strong she’d stood under that pressure? He’d been a colossal asshole and caused her more than heartbreak. No doubt he deserved some humiliation of his own.
But he hadn’t been trying to hurt her. She would have to try to ‘get him back.’ He didn’t think he’d be able to trust her if she did that. He meant to make it up to her, with interest, but he needed her to trust that he would. There was no trust anywhere in revenge.
So he focused on her and tried to find her intention behind her eyes.
With a sigh, she released her clench of his shirt. She patted the cotton smooth again and said, “We need to talk, Cox. About a lot of things.”
He nodded. On that, they agreed.
He hoped he had the words.
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~oOo~
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Ida hooked her bag over her shoulder and wagged her finger at Cox. “Autumn wants privacy with you, so I’m leaving. But you need to know I’m not scared of you, and that girl right there is my ride or die. You might be a big, hot, scary biker, but I fight dirty.”
In the ten minutes since Autumn had pulled him into her apartment, Cox had decided Ida was one of the rare not-shitty people in the world. She didn’t like him at all, but her animosity was why he’d warmed to her. She didn’t like him because he’d hurt her friend, and she was not letting him off easy for it. He admired that kind of loyalty.
So he answered her puffed-up threat with a somber nod. “Heard.”
Shifting her focus to Autumn, Ida shook her finger again. “And you! Be smart, but don’t be chicken. Figure out what you want and how to have it. You get that backward way too much. And call me when you two fools figure this out.”
With that, she wrapped Autumn up in a hug, kissed her cheek, and sailed from the apartment.
And they were alone.
For Cox, the week she’d stayed with him was such a numb blur, this moment right here felt like the first time they’d been alone since the night he’d stayed at the inn with her. That night seemed ages ago and also like last night.
She was watching him, her arms crossed protectively over her heart again. A span of six or eight feet, the length of the fancy marble island in her kitchen, separated them.
All he’d seen of this apartment was what was visible from the front door, but even that limited perspective made him a little uncomfortable—and also impressed. Autumn was apparently loaded.
This two-story apartment in a redesigned old school building was ultramodern and bright. Extremely urban. The staircase alone, a wide, curved sculpture of a thing, belonged in a museum. Nothing in Signal Bend came anywhere close to architecture like this.
He grabbed that thought and choked it out. Thoughts like that had not pushed him all the way to Indiana, and now that he was here, he was interested only in going for the thing that had pushed him here.
“What did she mean, you get it backwards too much?” he asked, because they were the words he had just now.
A faint pink hue arose on her face, and she chuckled softly. “Ida says I’m afraid to go for what I really want and figure out what I need to do to get it. In her opinion. She says I try to figure out what I can have and then work on making myself want that.”
“What do you really want?” His chest did a weird thump as he asked.
For an uncomfortably long time, Autumn contemplated him silently. He stood, held her gaze, and let her look as long as she needed.
Then, with a great heave of breath, she turned and grabbed the tequila. “You want a drink?”
Cox went to her and took hold of her arm. “After we talk. I want to know what we say here is real.”
Somehow, that was the wrong thing to say. She snatched herself free of his grip and wheeled on him. “And why should booze matter? We said plenty to each other stone-cold sober, you said plenty to me sober, and that didn’t make anything you said any more true, did it?”
Cox didn’t remember enough of that week to recall anything significant he’d said to her before he’d told her to go away. All he remembered was needing her and always finding her when he did, until he’d sent her away. He remembered being able to breathe when she was with him. But if he’d made promises to her, he didn’t remember them.
Her flash of anger, though, ignited his hope. She was still angry, still hurt. She hadn’t gotten over it, over him. The wound he’d made was still fresh, hadn’t hardened into a scar.
That meant he could heal it.
He said the most important thing he could think to say: “I’m sorry.”
She blinked. After a long moment’s consideration, she took a breath and asked, “What are you sorry for, Cox?”
“Hurting you.”
She opened her mouth to respond, and he sensed the challenge coming—those two words were not enough. So he hurried on before she could interject, pushing words from his mouth as fast as he could find them.
“I was angry about my mom. So fuckin’ angry. And sad and scared and just ... just fucked in the head. Shit was churnin’ around inside me like a tornado, throwing my whole life around, and I couldn’t see or think or feel anything but the wind and debris. You got caught up in that storm with me, and I’m fuckin’ sorry, Autumn. Even while I was holdin’ onto you, needing you, I didn’t see what that meant. I just felt ...” The flow of words trickled to a stop, and he wasn’t sure how to finish. “I don’t know. I guess I was trying to dig a hole in the ground and lay down in it, and you were in the way.”
That was all he had. If it wasn’t enough, he wasn’t sure where he’d go next.
Autumn stared at him. Again, he tried to wait her out, let her have all the time she needed.
Finally, with a little coughing noise that might have been a halfhearted chuckle, she murmured, “It’s either grunts or poetry with you.”
She thought his rambling attempt at sense was poetic? Was that a hopeful sign? He didn’t know.
“I guess,” he answered, testing the waters. “Is it enough?”
With two steps, she halved the remaining distance between them. Then she set her hand on the island and pushed it toward him. He took that as an invitation and set his hand on hers, folding his fingers around hers.
“What do you want, Cox?” she asked, echoing the question she’d sent through the intercom. His answer had prompted her to let him in.
He gave her the same answer. “You.”
This time, it was not the password to access.
Instead, she asked, “What does that mean?”
Again, he didn’t try to plan his words in advance. He had the sense that Autumn would take any hesitation as reluctance, so he started talking before he knew what he would say.
“The whole ride here, I tried to see in my head what you’d do or say when I got here. I tried to be ready for whatever you’d throw at me, but I couldn’t do it. No matter how hard I tried to focus and make myself see it, it wouldn’t come. And somewhere along the road, I realized that that’s been my problem my whole damn life. I don’t look forward. I’ve been standing in place, like I got buried when Billy did. Since he died, I’ve been thinking of my mom like she died that day, too, and just forgot to lay down. But it took me all this time to see I did the same damn thing. Just made more noise about it.”
She’d started nodding gently as he’d spoken. Now, when he paused for a breath, she cut in and said, “That seems like an important insight. I’m glad you’ve had it. I hope it helps you deal with everything you’ve lost. But, I’m sorry, I don’t see how that answers the question I asked.”
“I know. I’m workin’ my way to it.”
“Okay.”
“You asked what I wanted. That’s easy: I want you. I never thought I would want somebody like I want you, and if I’m honest, I don’t understand everything I’m feelin’. But I know I want you with me. I want to feel like I feel when I’ve got you, and I want to be able to make you feel like you make me feel.” Getting lost in his own speech, he shook his head. “Fuck. I’m not makin’ sense.”
Shifting his hold to weave their fingers together, Cox drew Autumn closer. She came easily, all the way to him until he could wind his arms around her. “I think the thing I feel with you is happy. Even after my mom died, I think I felt something like happy when I was with you. It was the only time all the shit spinning around inside me settled. I think of it like being able to breathe, but I think it’s really being able to live. I know I’m never gonna be good enough to give you something as powerful as that, but I want to be able to make you happy. I think ... before everything, I think you did feel like that with me. For a minute, before I fucked it all up.”
Unshed tears flooded Autumn’s eyes. “Monumental,” she whispered.
He remembered that: the moment he’d first felt love for her. He hadn’t recognized it then; at the time, all he’d known was the feeling of the plates of his identity shifting. Monumental had been the only word he could find to come anywhere close to the feeling shaking him to his core.
Now he understood that a much smaller word held the full truth: love.
He took the greatest risk and gave life to that truth: “I’m in love with you, Autumn.”
She closed her eyes; a tear escaped through her lashes and slipped down her cheek. Cox bent and put his lips to that salty drop. When she felt her relax into his embrace, he trailed kisses to her ear and whispered again, “I love you, city girl.”
Her hands slipped up over his shoulders, her arms locked around his neck, and she began to climb him.
He had her. Holy fuck, he hadn’t killed it before it could live. She wanted him, too. Still.
Chuckling with relief and love, he lifted her and set her on the island. He cupped her face and leaned back a little. “What do you want?”
He could see her brain working as she gazed at him. He was ready for any answer she gave him. If she said she didn’t want him, he knew how to live in emptiness. He’d leave, ride back to Signal Bend, and finish out his days. But there was a chance that even without Autumn, he might be ready to try to find something worth being around for. The stone inside him had shifted and loosened enough that he could experience love; maybe it wouldn’t seal completely up again, even if he’d blown his chance to be loved like this.
If she said she wanted him, things got murky and complicated; he couldn’t conjure an image of how they’d work. But damn, he’d fight dragons to plot that part of the map.
“I want you,” she said, combing her fingers through his hair, and Cox swallowed down a lump the size of his heart. “There’s a lot of stuff to work out,” she continued, “between us, emotionally, and also practically, logistically. I’ve got big changes happening with work.”
He heard every word, knew they were true and important, but he didn’t care about the obstacles. He wanted her and she wanted him. He would find a way.
Aloud, he responded to the last thing she said. “You’re moving to St. Louis. I know.”
She nodded. “And you and I? I mean, we haven’t really had a relationship at all yet. I don’t want to make any big moves on the basis of this single conversation, after everything else.”
With a flash of insight, Cox understood what his job was here: to listen, to take her worries seriously, and to be supportive. While he was determined to storm through brick walls to make this happen, Autumn was a thinker and needed to examine every obstacle before she took it on.
So he said, “There’s a lot of threads to untangle, yeah.”
“It’s too soon to ... I don’t know. It’s too soon.”
A new thread of worry began to wrap around Cox’s hope, but he also heard that he was right: she was telling herself the same things she said to him. She wasn’t looking for reasons they wouldn’t work, she was looking for ways around the reasons.
“It’s too soon to commit,” he offered. When she nodded her agreement, he asked, “Can we commit to trying?”
Her smile at that was big and bright and bursting with relief, and oh god, she was beautiful. He’d never known anyone anywhere who made him feel like this; he wished he could embed her in his chest and never be apart from her.
“I can do that. I mean, Ida’s always saying I need to decide what I want first and then figure out how to get it. I want you, and you want me, so let’s figure it out.”
A shower of sparks went through Cox, that buzzy, breathtaking feeling he was beginning to understand was happiness. Love. Hope. They’d broken through the rocky face of his heart like the first shoots of intrepid trees, determined to grow where before there was only cold stone.
He grabbed her close and kissed her, saying in that way all the words that had so often eluded him, all the words that had never before occurred to him, all the feelings, needs, even dreams, that were fluttering to life as she held him.
“I love you,” she whispered against his beard, and something exploded inside him. He clenched her so tightly she gasped and went rigid.
“Sorry,” he muttered, easing back. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” She stroked his cheek. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, just ... nobody ever said that to me before. I ... sorry.”
It wasn’t easy to maintain eye contact after that admission, but he focused on the love in her eyes and let her look.
“We have a lot to talk about, you and I,” she said.
Cox nodded. He didn’t want to talk about any of it—but that wasn’t actually true. He didn’t know how to talk about it, it made him uncomfortable to think about talking about it, but he wanted her to know him. All of him. And he wanted to know every corner of her.
He wanted to love her and be loved by her. Both their maps, filled in all the way to the edges until they joined into one.
“But I don’t want to talk right now,” Autumn said, pitching her voice low, like a purr.
Cox’s brain did a screeching drift. He’d been preparing for a long, angsty conversation, with her tears and his regret, and, at best, her hesitant agreement to try again, moving slowly.
Maybe she meant she wanted him to leave, but the tone of her voice suggested a different intent.
Unsure, he asked. “What?”
She hooked a finger into the placket of his shirt. “I don’t want to talk right now,” she repeated in the same come-hither tone. She wasn’t asking him to leave.
Cox grinned so wide his cheeks ached. “You got a bed in this dump?”
Her eyes went wide as she laughed. “Oh my god, did my grumpy guy just make a joke?”
My grumpy guy. He liked that.
“I’ll save my funny side for you.”
“You’d better. That’s a precious resource. I’m not sharing.” Hooking her arms around his neck again, she jumped without warning off the island, trusting him to catch her. He did.
“Bed’s upstairs,” she cooed. “Giddy-up.”
Cox turned and headed toward that fancy damn staircase.