4. Tempering #4
Tell her you're not ready. Tell her it's not her.
Tell her she deserves somebody whose whole heart and mind is available and that yours has got a tenant in it that won't vacate no matter what you do.
Tell her the week was a mistake not because of anything she did but because you thought time and distance and a beautiful woman with honest eyes could do what apparently neither time nor distance nor beauty had been able to do since February.
Tell her.
I looked at her across the candlelight. At the patience she was extending me that I hadn't earned. At the way she was sitting with her hands folded around that bowl of ice cream I'd made like she was trying to hold onto something warm in the middle of all this cold.
She was a good woman.
That was the part that made it worse. Because if she'd been difficult or careless or dishonest I could have filed this whole week under a mistake and moved forward without the weight of it.
But Madeline Dubois was sitting across from me in the middle of a storm on an island she'd been vacationing on with her family her whole life, eating dessert I made her at eleven o'clock at night, asking me with every bit of dignity she had to just tell her the truth.
The truth was I had boarded the ferry to Everhart Hollow with the best of intentions and a genuine desire to feel something uncomplicated for once.
But, somewhere between our first day here and Dale Brown’s face when I walked in without the person he expected and a package of short ribs that reminded me of everything I'd been trying not to think about, I was losing my grip.
The truth was her name had come up nine times in that market and I hadn't been the same since. Hearing her name out of Madeline’s mouth, made it even worse.
The truth was that I was sitting across from a woman who wanted me, badly, and all I could feel was the hollowness of wanting someone who wasn't in the room. Life felt like a full table with an empty chair nobody else can see. There's no lonelier arithmetic than that.
Tell her.
Truth was, at this table, I was being everything my grandfather taught me not to be.
He taught me to protect women, not hurt them – not physically, not emotionally, not ever.
Yet, here I was letting Madeline sit across from me feeling like a wife catching her husband in something, when all she'd actually done was want something I hadn't figured out how to give her yet.
She wasn't wrong to want it. She wasn't even wrong to fight for it.
She just couldn't see the glass standing between her and the thing she was reaching for, and I was the one who'd put it there and hadn't said so.
I wanted to be everything Madeline wanted and needed. I could be that. I really believed, sitting there, that some version of me existed who could be exactly that man for her.
But at what cost?
Tell her.
This time the voice at the pass won. I couldn't do it. Couldn't take this woman upstairs and let her hand me her body while half of me was still in my car sitting in front of Aurelia’s mama's house.
I had unfinished business, and I'd spent four days and three nights treating this woman like the cure and calling it a vacation.
Push through, some tired part of me kept saying.
Enjoy yourself. Give her the night she asked for.
And the rest of me, the part my grandfather helped to raise, knew exactly what that would make me.
So it had to be now, plain, across melting ice cream, and if she threw the bowl at my head I'd stand there and take it, because a dessert in the face heals by morning.
Falling deeper into a man who isn't equipped to keep you takes years, and I'd watched what the long version does to a woman. I saw Asher do it to Aurelia, I didn’t want to be Madeline DuBois’ long version.
I set my spoon down. Her eyes came up, and something in her face seemed to already knew the weather was changing.
"Madeline —" I started.
The doorbell rang.
I looked toward the front of the house, then back at her.
"Expecting someone?"
"No. I—"
The bell rang again. Twice, quick, the second ring stepping on the first.
I pushed back from the table and stood, looking down the dark hall toward the front of the house while the storm wailed against every window at once.
"Could be a neighbor. Storm like this, somebody might need help. Generator could be down, tree through a porch. Head on upstairs. I'll be up soon as I sort it."
"I'll be waiting," she sighed. "Don't take long."
She pushed back from the table, and I felt the weight of what I'd just let her believe settle across my shoulders like a coat I hadn't agreed to wear.
Because upstairs now had a promise in it, and I'd been one word into taking that promise apart when the bell rang.
Now I'd have to climb those stairs later and carefully break this woman's heart at the right temperature, so it would heal right.
She was passing me on her way to the stairs and I caught her hand without planning to. I pressed my lips to her forehead and held them there a second, her perfume and dinner all mixed in the air between us.
And somewhere under my own ribs, a cold current went through, because my mouth knew this gesture.
Had done it before, exactly this, a woman's forehead, a held second, everything unsaid pressed into it.
February had ended this same way. I was kissing her the way I kiss women goodbye, and I hadn't decided that, my body had.
She glanced toward the front of the house, then back at my face, and then she turned. I listened to her go up and counted the seconds until I heard the bedroom door close softly above me. Then the bell rang again.
Whoever was out there had been ringing long enough. Had to be urgent, they really needed something. One of the Allens, maybe, or the Henleys from down the beach.
Yet somewhere between the dining room and the front door, my pulse changed.
My hands went loose at my sides the way they do before trouble.
The hairs on my forearms lifted. Every system I own went to its station, and none of them would tell me why, or all of them were telling me and I was declining the call.
"Be right there," I called, swallowing the discomfort that I felt.
The bell rang once more before I reached it.
I unlocked the door. "How can I—"
My voice stopped existing somewhere in my chest as I pulled it open.
"Mrs. Donovan?" I asked, rain blowing sideways behind her, my elderly neighbor standing on my porch closing up her umbrella like she had all the time in the world.
She had to be pushing eighty, small under a raincoat two sizes too big, silver hair pinned up under a plastic bonnet that had done exactly nothing against the wind.
Her reading glasses hung crooked around her neck on a beaded chain, fogged over from the humidity.
"Dillion," she smiled, and there it was, that same warmth she'd been handing out to every kid on this island since before I could walk. "How are you, baby?"
I looked past her into the dark, searching for a second figure that wasn't there. "Mrs. Donovan, what you doing out in this storm?"
"Came to play mahjong with cha mama like I always do." She smiled, water still dripping off the umbrella's ribs onto my porch boards.
"Mrs. Donovan, that's next Tuesday. Remember, my mother doesn't come till the third of July, and then y'all meet every Tuesday at 2pm to play, like always."
"Oh, right." Something flickered across her face, close to embarrassment. Her memory had been slipping for a while now, and it was hard to watch, though we loved having her over. "Silly me. I'm all turned around."
"Plus it's late. You walked over in this?" I asked, glancing past her toward the road. "Where's Penny? She know you left?"
I already knew the answer wasn't going to be good. This woman had no business outside in a storm at this hour, chasing a day that didn't exist yet. She looked around like a child caught somewhere she shouldn't be.
"Come in, let me give her a call." I reached for her to help her inside.
"No, no. I'm just next door, I can make it back without the fuss."
"Mrs. Donovan –"
"Please." She pleaded, "I don't want them treating me like some senile old lady."