16. Slow Days, Longing Looks #2
The problem was, I’d stopped being just a friend somewhere between pulling her out of that snowdrift and watching her laugh at her students’ creative interpretations of biology.
Now I was something else—something more complicated and more invested in her happiness than simple friendship would account for.
“Yeah,” I agreed, because it was partly true. This was nice. It was also exquisite torture, but she didn’t need to know that. “It is nice.”
She went back to her grading, and I returned to pretending to watch Twister. But I was acutely aware of everything about her—the way she tucked her hair behind her ear when she was concentrating, the soft sound of her breathing, the warmth of her presence just an arm’s length away.
I was also aware of the careful space between us on the couch. Just the width of a cushion, but enough to signal that we were still in the realm of friends who were cautiously becoming something more. Enough to maintain the illusion that this was casual and uncomplicated.
It wasn’t safe, though. At least not for me. Every day I spent with her like this, every evening of shared dinners and comfortable silences, every moment of watching her settle into her life here made me fall deeper into something I wasn’t sure she was ready for.
But I couldn’t seem to stop myself.
When she laughed at something one of her students had done, the sound went straight through me like sunlight through a prism, breaking apart into all the colors of joy and longing and hope.
When she absently reached for her teacup and her fingers brushed mine on the way to the coffee table, the contact sent electricity up my arm and directly into the part of my heart that was already entirely hers.
I was in trouble. Deep, serious, probably permanent trouble.
And I wouldn’t change a thing about it.
“I should probably head home,” I said around nine-thirty, though every instinct I had was screaming at me to stay. To find excuses to linger, to stretch these moments into hours, to fall asleep on her couch and wake up to more of this domestic paradise.
“Probably.” But she didn’t move to see me out. Instead, she set down her pen and looked at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read. “Levi?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you. For dinner, for the company, for...all of it. I know I keep saying that, but I mean it. Having you here, having this...” She gestured between us, searching for words. “It makes everything easier.”
I wanted to tell her that she made everything better. That coming into town to the possibility of seeing her had transformed my entire relationship with Everwood, with my own life. That the thought of her smile got me through busy days or restless nights when sleep wouldn’t come.
Instead, I said, “Anytime, Cassie. You know that.”
She walked me to the door, and we had that awkward moment where neither of us was quite sure how to say goodbye.
A hug felt too casual for what we were, but a kiss felt too presumptuous for what we weren’t.
Yet. We ended up in some middle ground—her hand on my arm, my hand briefly covering hers, a moment of contact that felt both insufficient and charged with possibility.
“See you tomorrow?”
“Definitely.”
I drove home through the quiet streets, my truck’s headlights cutting through the falling snow.
The town was peaceful, most windows glowing with warm light, smoke rising from chimneys into the flake-filled sky.
It was a Norman Rockwell moment—made you believe in the possibility of contentment, of simple happiness built from ordinary moments.
But I wasn’t content. Not entirely.
I wanted more of Cassie than shared dinners and stolen kisses on her couch.
I wanted to wake up next to her and fall asleep holding her hand.
I wanted to be the person she called when she was excited about something, the one she turned to when she needed comfort.
I wanted to stop wondering if each kiss meant as much to her as it did to me.
Most of all, I wanted to tell her that I was in love with her. That I’d been in love with her since she’d stepped out of Tim’s tow truck looking fierce and fragile and determined not to need help. That every day since then had just been different variations on the theme of falling deeper.
But I couldn’t tell what she was feeling. Whether the kisses were just affection or something more. Whether she was ready for forever or still figuring out what she wanted.
So, I waited.
Even if it was slowly killing me with its sweetness.
The drive out to my ranch took me past the turn-off to where her cottage sat, still damaged from the storm. I could see the blue tarp in the streetlight, covering the broken roof, a reminder of the night everything changed between us.
Back at my place, I stood at the kitchen window that looked toward the distant glow of Everwood’s lights. Her house was too far away for me to see, but knowing she was there, probably grading papers with that little crease between her eyebrows when she concentrated, was enough.
For now, it had to be enough.