Chapter 29
FINN
The Jeep’s engine ticks as it cools outside the bookshop. Darcy stares ahead, silent. Neither of us moves to get out.
The Sunday evening shops on Main Street are dark, sidewalk empty, Mrs. Johnson's flower buckets pulled in behind the glass two doors down. Darcy's hand is still under mine on the gearshift, where it's been for a hundred miles. Her thumb moves once across my knuckles then goes still.
"I had a really great time, Finn."
"Yeah, me too."
She's looking at her own building through the windshield as if she needs to check the address.
The streetlight gilds her profile. The line of her nose with its new sunburn.
Her mouth. The soft, brown hair that I can still feel wrapped around my hand and silky against my cheek while she slept against me.
I could sit here watching her not get out of my Jeep until the town wakes up for work.
I'm good at leaving. It might be the thing I'm best at.
I've broken camp in a whiteout with fingers too numb to work the buckles.
I've walked out of board meetings, base camps, entire countries without one look over my shoulder.
Departure gates relax me. That's not a figure of speech. My pulse drops when they call boarding.
So this is new. The trip is over. The Jeep is parked.
And the part of me that handles departures—the machinery that has run my whole life without a missed start—won't turn over.
I'm sitting at a half-lit curb in Mattichogue with no boarding call anywhere in my body and nowhere on earth I'd rather be.
Sticking around was never the expensive option before.
I'm getting my first honest look at the price.
Merritt is still out west waiting on an answer I keep not giving them.
The parcels are assembled, there's another buyer circling Breckenridge, and a table of investors wants me standing on that land for the next several years of my life.
Everything I've built points in that direction. Hell, I aimed it there on purpose, starting at seventeen, on a ledge Darcy and I just drove down from.
The woman beside me lives up one flight of stairs on this street. It feels like a summit I'm afraid to approach.
God, if Wyatt or the other guys at The Retreat could see me now. The instigator of the Last Billionaire Standing wager, parked at the curb with his heart in his hand, stalling the inevitable.
Even I have to admit the irony is funny. It should be funnier than it is.
"Come on," I say, giving her hand a squeeze before I let it go. "Let's get you home."
I'm out and around the hood before she can touch her door handle.
I drop the tailgate. Her duffel sits right on top where I strapped it, one bag for an entire weekend in the mountains, which is better packing discipline than I've ever had.
She comes around beside me while I'm reaching for it, close enough that her shoulder brushes my arm, and she still smells faintly of campfire under the evening air.
Two days in the woods with this woman and the smell of camp smoke is going to be a problem for me for the rest of my life.
She goes for the strap. I get there first and swing the duffel onto my shoulder.
"Finn. I can manage it."
I shake my head. "Didn't you read the brochure? This was a full-service expedition. Complaints go to management."
She gives me a dry look that has never once worked on me the way she thinks it does, and heads for her stairs.
"One more thing," I call. Her new jacket, off the seat back.
I bring it to her at the bottom step and lay it over her arm.
"Thank you." She gives me a sad smile that says she's not any more eager than I am for our weekend to end.
I've climbed the steps to her apartment before. Never this slow.
She goes up ahead of me, her hips at eye level, and I want her the way I've wanted her all weekend.
That much hasn't changed. I still want to follow her through that door, peel her out of everything she's wearing, and take my time with her.
But time is the one thing I didn't pack enough of.
She has her life here and I have mine somewhere else.
I came back to my hometown eager to leave even before I set foot out of my car.
Now, I'm wishing like hell I never have to go.
Darcy's only three feet in front of me on the stairs and I already miss her.
She glances over her shoulder at me. "I'm going to feel that mountain tomorrow."
"Tomorrow you'll be fine. Day two is the one that gets you."
Her answering laugh sounds a little sad. "Wonderful. Is there a cure?"
"There's one." I shift the duffel strap on my shoulder. "You go back up."
She looks back at me again, and her mouth tilts. "Of course that's your cure. More mountain."
"Works every time."
She turns and keeps climbing, and I follow her up with my own trail wisdom sitting wrong in my chest.
Day two is the one that gets you. I wasn't wrong about that.
Tonight is going to feel fine, because tonight has her in it.
The ache from this weekend won't land until tomorrow, or the day after, once she's back in her classroom and I'm wherever I decide I'm supposed to be while I wait for any excuse to see her again.
The only cure I've ever trusted for an ache like this is the one I just handed her. Go back up. More mountain. Keep moving. That's been my answer to everything I've ever felt, and she knows it.
Some answer. The man whose fix for everything is perpetual motion is stretching a one-minute climb into a career.
The bag could have gone up in her hand. The jacket definitely could have.
And underneath the wanting sits the flat fact I keep stepping over: when that door closes tonight, I don't know what comes next.
I don't mean just tomorrow. I mean next.
I'm a man who plans in his sleep. I have contingencies for my contingencies and gear lists for weather extremes that haven't been invented yet. For the part of my life that starts back at the bottom of these stairs, I've got nothing. No route. No next camp. Nothing on the map at all.
Normally this is where the act comes in. Somewhere around now I'd reach for my usual fallbacks, the grin, the line, the easy dismount that sends everybody home laughing. It has carried me out of worse rooms than this.
I reach for it now and come up empty. Not broken. Just not there. The booth is dark, the emcee has wandered off, and behind all of it there's only the truth, which I have no plan for saying out loud tonight.
She reaches the landing, works her key into the lock, and pushes the door open on her dark apartment.
Her keys land in the bowl somewhere inside.
She turns around instead, and there she is.
Hair loose and wild from mountain weather, her face flushed, the last of the dusk caught in her eyes.
She looks more beautiful to me right now, trail-worn and lit by one bad overhead bulb, than she has ever looked.
A moth is already making a fool of itself around that bulb, and I understand the moth completely.
"Where do you want your bag?"
"Right inside the door is fine."
I lean past her and set it down across the threshold, and her hand comes up and rests flat on my chest while I do it. Not pushing. Not pulling. Just there, warm through my shirt, right over a heartbeat that picks up hard enough she has to feel it.
I straighten up. She's close now. If I lean in I could kiss her before the duffel finishes settling, and every nerve I own is lobbying for it.
I keep my hands to myself instead. There's an order to tonight.
The bag, the goodbye, the stairs. And now I'm out of things to carry.
Out of stairs. Out of jobs to do for her.
She's watching me. Patient. Amused around the eyes, possibly at how long the delivery portion of this evening has run.
And here it is. The clean dismount. Say the good line, kiss her once, and get myself down those stairs while I still know how.
Drive to the guesthouse. Figure out the rest of my life in the dark.
I find the line. It's a good one. It might be the best one I've got.
"On behalf of Bardot Adventures," I say, "thank you for choosing us for your first ascent. Your guide reminds you that trail taxes are nonrefundable, and hopes you'll consider us for all future summits."
Her mouth curves into the slow smile, the private one. "Five stars," she says. "The guide exceeded expectations. The sleeping pad is getting its own review."
"That's fair."
And that's the note. Warm, easy, everybody walks away grinning. All that's left is the kiss. The short kind. The period at the end of a good weekend.
I take her face in my hands and kiss her goodnight.
For one breath, it's exactly what I meant it to be.
Then her fingers find my collar and hold on, and her mouth opens under mine, and whatever I meant to do or say next is gone.
I pull her in. My hands relearn her, the curve of her waist, the small of her back, the warm skin under the hem of her shirt, and the quiet moan she releases into my mouth takes the last of the act with it.
I kiss her jaw, the soft place below her ear, then come back to her mouth because leaving it was a mistake.
Her fingers slide from my collar up into my hair and tighten, and the sting of it runs all the way down my spine and keeps going.
I'm hard against her hip and she knows it, and instead of easing back she presses in, and the sound I make against her lips is nothing short of feral.
My act is gone, all of it, the booth and the exit music and the man who ran them. What's left is her body coming up against mine and her breath going ragged, and I want her past anything polite. Past the performance. Past every clean exit I have ever made.
Nothing about this kiss has the shape of an ending. Nothing about this weekend does either, and I'm the one who's supposed to walk down those stairs and put a door between us anyway.
She pulls back just far enough to look at me. Her hazel eyes are dark. Her mouth is soft and swollen. Her fist stays closed in my collar.
"That was some goodnight kiss," she says, barely above a breath.
"I don't want to say goodnight. I don't have a single joke left in me, Darcy. That has never happened before."
Her breath catches. Her eyes move over my face, reading me the way she reads everything, and whatever she finds there must be enough.
Her grip tightens on me.
She steps backward through her open door, pulls me over the threshold with her, and kicks it shut behind us.