Chapter 1 #3
He didn’t let go right away. His hand stayed on my waist for a beat, and then he reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.
Slow. Deliberate. The rough edge of his thumb grazed my cheekbone and I stopped breathing.
Not dramatically. Just quietly, the way you stop breathing when you realize that if you move, the moment will end, and you are not ready for the moment to end.
His eyes held mine. The porch light was on and his face was half-lit and I could see the line of his jaw and the way he was holding himself very still.
His hand came up again. Halfway to my face. I saw the decision happen in real time: the wanting and the stopping and the choice. His hand dropped. He stepped back. He said goodnight. He walked back to his truck. I watched the taillights until the road took them.
I left Wylde Mountain the next day. We didn’t exchange numbers.
We haven’t spoken. I’ve spent all this time telling myself it was the beer, the proximity, the dark, the late hour.
A man was kind to me in a specific way at a specific moment and my nervous system did what nervous systems do, which is confuse safety with attraction.
I believed that for about two months. Month three I started lying to myself on purpose, which is a different thing. Month four I stopped lying and started arguing instead. Month five I decided to quit my job. Month six I packed my truck.
I’m not saying those things are connected.
I’m saying I’m on a mountain road in December and the coffee is cold and somewhere on this mountain is a man with careful hands and a short beard and gray at his temples who said goodnight when he could have said something else.
And I’m here, and he doesn’t know I’m here.
Tonight I’m going to walk into a bar where he will be, and find out if the thing I’ve been carrying for months is real or if I built it out of one warm hand on my waist and an almost-touch in the dark.
Connor told me to come straight to The Burning Tree. “Friday night. Whole crew’s there. Meet me, we’ll grab dinner, it’ll be good.” He said it like it was simple. It is simple, for him. His sister’s visiting. His crew is at the bar. Normal Friday.
For me, it means walking into a room where Graham Brady is sitting.
I pull into the lot. The Burning Tree is warm and bright, noise spilling out every time the door opens.
I can hear the jukebox from the parking lot, something with a bass line and bad intentions.
I sit in my truck for ten seconds. I check my hair.
I check my face. I’m primping in a parking lot for a man who might not remember my name.
He remembers my name. I know he does. That’s the problem.
I go in.
The bar is exactly what it was this summer. Wood and warm light and people who know each other’s names. Connor spots me from across the room and raises a hand, and his face does the thing it does when he sees me, the shift from crew boss to brother, steady to glad.
“Mel. Over here.”
I cross the bar. The crew is at a long table, loud and overlapping and exactly the way I remember them.
Boone at one end, huge and quiet, that must be Nadia tucked under his arm.
Blake across from them, Poppy is probably the one leaning into his shoulder with something cranberry in her hand.
Koda, talking with his hands. I can tell that’s Tate beside him, watching with the expression of a woman who finds her husband both ridiculous and essential.
Noah, reading something on his phone, thumbs moving in a quick reply before he sets it down and goes back to half-listening.
A woman I can’t place is sitting next to Cayden. Dark hair, sharp eyes, the posture of someone who’s comfortable being looked at. Cayden’s arm is across the back of her chair and his face is giving nothing, which I remember being his whole thing.
“Sam, this is my sister Mel,” Connor says. “Mel, this is Sam. She’s Cayden’s.”
“I’m aware I’m Cayden’s,” Sam says, shaking my hand. Her grip is firm and her smile is real. “He hasn’t said so out loud yet, but the evidence is overwhelming.”
I like her immediately. I go around the table, finally getting faces to match the names of the girls my brother’s told me about.
Boone shakes my hand with the gentleness of a man who knows exactly how big he is.
Nadia waves and nearly knocks over a glass.
Koda pulls me into a hug and says I look taller, which I’m not, but Koda says things the way other people exhale: constantly and without review.
Poppy smiles. Blake nods. Noah stands to give me his seat and I tell him to sit back down.
It’s easy. It’s warm. It’s the crew, and the crew is the best thing about this mountain besides the mountain itself, and I am performing ease with every cell in my body because at the end of the table, on the far side, beer in hand, is Graham.
He looks the same. That’s the first thing. The dark hair, the short beard, the gray at the temples that shouldn’t do what it does to me but has been doing it in my memory all this time. His posture hasn’t changed since I walked in. His beer is at the same angle.
I get to him.
“Hey, Graham.”
“Mel.”
One word. Level. Polite. And wrong. The temperature of it is wrong. Too careful, too measured, too precisely calibrated to sound like nothing. Or I’m imagining things. Take your pick.
I hold the look a beat too long. I know I do. His eyes meet mine for one second, dark and steady and completely controlled, and then they move to his beer, and the second is over.
I sit down between Connor and Noah. Noah asks me about my drive.
I tell him about the coffee I forgot to drink and the weird warm front and he laughs and tells me he’s reading a book about weather patterns in the Northern Rockies.
He starts explaining how the warm front is interacting with the jet stream and then stops himself.
“Sorry. My friend Leena and I go back and forth on this stuff. I forget not everyone wants the full forecast.” I lean my chin on my hand and engage because engaging is what I do and because if I don’t engage with Noah I’m going to look at the end of the table where Graham is sitting and I am not going to do that.
I don’t need to look. I can feel where he is the way you feel a door you left open in a cold house. The draft finds you. You don’t have to turn around to know it’s there.
Three minutes pass. Maybe four. Graham finishes his beer. He sets it down with careful precision. He stands.
“Early morning,” he says, to no one in particular.
He puts cash under his glass. He nods at the table. He does not look at me. And he walks out of The Burning Tree with a steady, unhurried gait.
The door closes behind him.
I do not watch him go. I am looking at Noah. I am listening to Noah talk about barometric pressure and jet streams and I am smiling and I am nodding and my hand, the one in my lap where nobody can see it, closes into a fist. One second. Then it opens.
From the corner of my eye, I catch two women exchanging a glance. Sam and Tate. A look that takes half a second and carries the weight of a full conversation. I don’t know what they saw. I know what I felt.
The evening goes on. Connor buys me a beer.
Koda tells a story that involves a chainsaw, a raccoon, and a dare he should not have taken.
Poppy laughs so hard she spills her drink.
Sam leans over and tells me the raccoon story gets worse every time Koda tells it, and Koda says that’s because the raccoon gets smarter every time he tells it, and Tate says the raccoon was smarter than Koda to begin with, and the table erupts.
I am present for all of it. I am warm and easy and Connor’s little sister who’s back for a while, and underneath I am a woman who just watched a man leave a bar rather than sit in it with her, and the chair where he was sitting is empty now and nobody has moved into it and I am not looking at it.
I follow Connor to his place. The cabin is warm, lived-in. Sadie hugs me at the door. Ember sniffs my hand and decides I’m acceptable. I take my bag to the guest room, and Connor says goodnight the way Connor says everything: once, with his whole chest, no follow-up required.
The room is quiet. The mountain is outside the window, dark and huge and patient. Somewhere on it, on a ridge I could see if it were daylight, is a man who said my name once tonight and left.
I came here with one question. Did I imagine it? Was the summer real, or was it adrenaline and a dark truck and a man who happened to be kind at the right moment?
A man who doesn’t feel anything doesn’t leave, right?
A man who feels nothing stays, makes polite conversation, finishes his beer at a normal pace, says goodnight to the table and means it.
Graham Brady finished his beer in three minutes, put cash under his glass, and walked out of a bar because I sat down at his table.
He didn’t rush. He didn’t stumble. He performed a clean, composed exit, and the performance is what gives him away, because a man who doesn’t care doesn’t need to perform.
That’s not nothing. I’m certain of it.
I sit on the edge of the bed and look at the dark window. I don’t know whether the answer I just got makes things better or worse, but I know what it is, and I’m done pretending I don’t.
It wasn’t adrenaline.