Chapter 21
FINN
Darcy's replies have gone polite.
Me: Mattichogue gossip is no joke. Did you know there's a town Reddit? Don't go there.
Darcy: Thanks for the warning!
Me: Free for dinner tomorrow? Let's make more heads explode.
Darcy: Tomorrow's tough, big grading week. Rain check?
Me: Thursday, then?
Darcy: Maybe. Let's see how the week goes.
That was last night. I've read the thread more times than I want to admit, sitting in the vineyard office with paperwork I keep not doing, and every read lands the same.
Friendly. Warm, even. And closed. Two nights ago she fell asleep naked on my chest with her hand resting over my heart. This morning I got a rain check offer.
Here's the thing, the truth I wouldn't say out loud to anyone: Sunday night was the best night of my life.
Not the best night I've had in Mattichogue.
The best night, period, up against a life I've spent deliberately filling with the sort of nights people write magazine features about.
Monday morning, I walked down her stairs sure to the bone that it was the same for her.
Now I'm not sure about anything. I don't know what to do with that feeling. Uncertain is not a country I've spent much time in.
So I've been doing the only thing a man in my position can do, which is go back over Monday morning looking for what I broke. The eggs were good. She ate the burnt toast and smiled doing it. I never said one word about the off-key singing, and the jokes were right there, ripe for the taking.
As for the sex itself, it was off the chart.
No way to hang a rating on how fucking amazing we felt together.
I know I didn't leave her unsatisfied. Those sexy little noises she made, and the way she cried my name when she came are not things that can be faked.
Hell, I felt how hard she shattered against me.
When she kissed me goodbye she had her hand fisted in my collar, and that was definitely not a woman winding anything down or pushing me out.
So it wasn't the toast, and it wasn't anything stupid I might have done, and it wasn't the sex.
I've been through everything I said and did and I can't find the problem.
Which leaves the version I keep circling and hating. Maybe it isn't anything I did. Maybe Sunday meant one thing to me and another thing to her.
I chew on that all through lunch and it doesn't get smaller.
I could give her the week she asked for. Keep the texts light. Play it cool.
Instead, I put on a pair of jeans and a shirt I can work in, then I load a drill and a box of stage screws into the old vineyard truck.
I used to tell the guys at The Retreat that I'd never met a woman I couldn't leave by Tuesday. It's Tuesday, and I'm driving into town to hang scenery in a high school auditorium on the chance it puts me near her for twenty minutes. So that's where the saying went.
My cover story is safety. The sets we built during the auction weekend go up on the real stage this week, and I don't want that plywood arch anywhere near her kids unless I've braced it myself. That part's completely true. It's just not why I'm going.
Annie answers my text fast: Door by the band room's open. Just come in when you get here.
Darcy's best friend knows exactly why I'm coming today. I'm even pretty sure she approves. It's a small win, but I'll take it.
The auditorium smells like paint and sawdust. The forest is half up on stage, plywood trees in three shades of green, a muslin sky waiting to be hung, and my arch standing center with a lean I can see from the back row.
One of the Oakley twins, Nora, meets me at the stage steps with a clipboard. She looks at me, then at the drill.
"Braces go up first," she says. "Then the backdrop."
I nod like she's the boss. "That's the plan."
"Uh-huh." She writes something down. She glances up at me, a knowing look in her eyes. "Ms. Gable usually stops by the auditorium after grading."
I don't ask how she knew to say that. Seventeen-year-olds see and know everything. I give her a quick wink, then go back to pretending I'm only here to work.
"Braces first," I confirm, and head over to get started.
The work is good for me. Measuring, cutting, bracing. For a while my hands are busy and my head mostly quiets down. Mostly.
Then, sometime later, the doors at the back of the hall open, and my hands stop on their own.
Darcy comes down the center aisle with a stack of papers in her arms and her hair loose, dark waves catching the work lights, and everything in me goes still and pays attention.
She's in her school clothes, a cardigan buttoned over a blouse, completely decent, and a pencil skirt that hugs her hips and draws my gaze to her legs.
It's not a sexy outfit, but it is to me, because I know that body now.
I know the warmth of her back under my hands and the melting sound she makes when I get my mouth on her throat.
I know the deeper moan she can't hold in when I move my tongue over her clit.
Standing on a stage in front of a plywood forest, I want her all over again, immediately, like Sunday night never let go of me.
I'm hard just watching her walk, and there's nothing to be done about it in a room with teenagers milling around, which my body has flatly refused to accept.
She sees me and doesn't stop walking. When she comes up the stage steps she's smiling, and it's real, warm all the way up into her eyes.
"I heard a rumor about safety standards," she says.
"All true. That arch was one slammed door away from flattening a freshman."
"So you came to save the drama club."
"I came to finish what I started." I let that sit with her for a moment.
Her cheeks go pink, and God, I love that I can do that to her.
She sets the stack of student papers on a prop table like she means to stay, and for a while it's easy.
She hands me screws before I ask. She holds the level against the brace, steady, tongue at the corner of her mouth while she watches the bubble in the center.
I drive the screws and let myself look at her now and then, because I've stopped pretending I can resist.
But she keeps a distance I can measure. When I move down the brace, she finds a reason to be at the other end of it.
When my fingers brush hers passing the level, she lets it happen, doesn't flinch, but doesn't lean in either, and afterward she folds her arms while she waits for the next thing to hold.
Friendly. Warm. And an arm's length away, every minute, like there's a line drawn on the stage that only she can see.
Sunday night she pulled me through her front door by my shirt. Today I can't get closer than that arm's length.
I work it over while I mark the next cut.
We're in her school. Her students are all over the auditorium, a dozen kids with phones, in a town that had Monday's news fully distributed by lunchtime.
This woman has spent her whole adult life being careful in a place that talks.
Of course she's not going to stand close to me in front of the drama club.
She's probably half-afraid I'm going to try to kiss her right here under the work lights.
She's right to keep a healthy physical distance from me.
I'm thinking about it constantly. Her mouth is right there, for fuck’s sake.
I know what it tastes like now, and every time she leans in to read the level I catch the warmth coming off her skin and lose count of my own measurements.
But I keep my hands on the lumber, because whatever's going on with her, scaring her off in front of her kids isn't going to fix it.
We hang the muslin sky last, the two of us on the ropes with Annie and Nora calling level from the house seats. When the muslin comes tight and the lights hit it, the plywood forest stops being plywood and starts to look a little bit magical.
Darcy steps back and looks up at it with her whole face open. I don't look at the sky at all.
"It's good," she says. "They're going to lose their minds."
"Tell them the arch is load-rated for actors. Not stage divers."
By six, Nora has released us from duty. Annie appears at the band-room door with her keys and a face that's working hard at staying neutral. "Thanks for the free labor, Finn. Come back anytime. We keep a list of handy volunteers."
"Put me on it."
"You already are." She winks at me, then gives Darcy a look before leaving the two of us alone.
Darcy walks over to pick up the papers from the prop table.
"You heading home?" I ask.
"Yeah. I've got these essays to grade."
"Right. Come on, I'll walk you out."
The school parking lot is nearly empty. The light outside is going gold. Somewhere behind the gym comes the distant sound of a custodian's radio playing. There's no one around. No students. No phones. Unless the whole town counts as an audience, and in Mattichogue it might.
The arm's length comes with us anyway.
I don't push at it. I put my hands in my pockets and give her my day instead, because if I can't have her close, I can at least talk to her the way I'd like to be talking to her for a long time. Easy. Intimate. Just us.
I tell her about the vendor video call I was on earlier today when a grown man said "cringe" with full commitment, and how I deserve some kind of medal for not laughing in his face.
I tell her about the prototype tent that's supposed to be rated for a gale and instead folded up on one of my testers in Utah this morning—wrapped him like a burrito with his boots sticking out the end—all of it on video, the best thing I've seen all week.
I tell it all to her the way I'd tell it at her little kitchen table, as if we were a real couple. I don't ask about the texts. And I don't ask why a woman who slept peacefully in my arms two nights ago is standing four feet away like I'm a stove she doesn't trust.
She laughs about the burrito.
Not the careful laugh she's been giving me all afternoon. The real one I haven’t heard enough. It gets away from her before she can reign it in. She hears it happen, and for a second she looks almost caught.
I've been chasing that laugh since high school. Getting it now, in an empty parking lot, after two days of politeness and rain checks does more for me than I'd be able to explain to anyone.
At her car she turns, essays on her hip as she looks up at me. In a couple seconds of silence, I watch her decide something and then decide against it.
"Thank you for today," she says. "It matters to the kids, you know. That you keep coming back."
"I didn't come back for the kids, Darcy." I say it gently, no charge in it, just true. "I'm glad the arch is safe. But you know why I'm here."
Her breath catches, a small hitch I only notice because I never stop watching her. "Finn—"
"You don't have to explain anything. You said it's a heavy week, so it's a heavy week." I shrug. "I had nowhere to be tonight that beats a parking lot with you in it. That's all. No response required."
She looks at me for a long moment, gold flecks catching the last of the light, and whatever's behind her eyes comes right up to the surface and stays there.
"Goodnight, Finn," she says softly. Then, quieter, half lost in the door opening, "Thank you."
I don't know what the second thank you was for. I know it wasn't about the arch.
I stand there and watch her taillights all the way out of the lot, then I drive back to the vineyard on empty roads, being honest with myself the whole way, which is a new habit and I can't say I love it.
She's still in it with me. I'd bet everything I own on that laugh.
But she's pulling back anyway, on purpose.
Something happened between Monday morning and Monday night that made her decide to be careful with me.
I don't know what it was. I keep arriving at the worst version.
That the night that recalibrated my whole life was—for her—a thing she needs to be careful about.
I don't believe it. I can't quite kill the feeling, either.
So I'm not going to push. I'm going to show up tomorrow, and the day after that. I’m going to be worth showing up for, until she tells me to stop or tells me what changed. I've waited out storms in a tent the size of a coffin. I can wait out a grading week.
The estate house lights are on when I pull in to the vineyard. My phone buzzes in the cupholder.
Wyatt: Status check, Bardot. It’s been a week. You know how this ends, right? Damien's gone. Alec's gone. Brad and Gabe are one dinner party away from folding. It comes down to you and me. Two-man race, one very large pot. I've already picked out the boat. Hurry home. The table misses its emcee.
Two weeks ago I'd have fired back something about the boat inside a minute.
Wyatt has never once sent me anything I didn't laugh at.
That's the whole friendship. That's the whole club, honestly, a table full of men keeping everything light because being light around one another is what we're good at.
I read it twice. I don't delete it. I don't laugh, either.
If Wyatt could see me today—hell, if any of them could—they wouldn't bother waiting for the wager to play out. One look at me in that parking lot with Darcy and they'd make me fold on the spot. And they wouldn't be wrong.
I'm all in with her. I've been all in since her staircase and that first kiss we shared. Maybe since high school, and the only person at the table who hasn't shown her cards is her.
I turn the car off and go inside.