Chapter 21
Sawyer
The storm caught them halfway back down the path, close enough to the guest house that they made it inside dry-is rather than soaked, but the sky had gone from lying about the day to fully committing to the lie within the space of about fifteen minutes, and by the time Sawyer got the door shut behind them, rain was coming down hard enough that the golf cart trail they'd need for the actual wedding was already running like a shallow creek.
"So much for the forecast," Josie said, wringing water out of her ponytail, laughing in a way that had none of the tension he'd have expected from a woman whose entire season kept getting rearranged by weather she couldn't control.
"In fairness, it did warn us. Just about six hours later than it should have.
" He set his camera bag down carefully out of the damp, checked the lenses out of habit, and became abruptly, acutely aware that they were now alone in a small guest house with nowhere else to be for however long this storm decided to camp out over the lake, no crisis to manage, no cake to catch, nothing left standing between them and the conversation that came after a first kiss except two dry towels and an entire day.
"Del's going to have opinions about this," Josie said, checking her phone, which had exactly one bar of signal and a weather radar app that showed the whole system parked directly over their section of the lake with no obvious intention of moving.
"What's she saying?"
"Nothing yet. I haven't told her we're stuck." She set the phone down, and something in her expression shifted, amused and a little unguarded. "I will. In a minute. I just wanted thirty more seconds of this being just ours before it becomes a logistics conversation."
He liked that answer more than he probably should have. "Thirty seconds. I'll time it."
She laughed, and the guest house's small front room, all worn couches and a woodstove nobody had lit yet, went warm in a way that had very little to do with the actual temperature.
They spent the storm's first hour on practical things, because that was the register they both knew how to operate in most comfortably — Del's texts once Josie finally sent them, the confirmation that the storm was expected to sit over the lake most of the afternoon, the mutual, unspoken agreement that driving back into town on flooded roads before it cleared wasn't worth the risk.
Sawyer lit the woodstove because the guest house had gone cool with the rain, and Josie made tea from a box she found in the cabinet, and for a while they sat on opposite ends of the same couch with mugs going cold in their hands, talking about nothing in particular — her grandmother's lemonade recipe, his father's marina, the specific catastrophe of trying to photograph a wedding in wind, the goat that had apparently become something of a minor celebrity in town since the Nguyen wedding.
It was easy in a way Sawyer hadn't expected, given everything that had happened at sunrise.
He kept waiting for the awkwardness to arrive, the morning-after uncertainty he'd braced for without fully admitting he was bracing for it, and it just — didn't. She'd shifted closer sometime during the second hour, not dramatically, just enough that her knee rested against his, and he found himself more aware of that small point of contact than he'd been of almost anything in years.
"Can I ask you something," Josie said, somewhere in the storm's second hour, tea long gone cold, rain still steady against the windows.
"Anything."
"Are you scared of this?" She said it plainly, no games in it, looking at him directly. "Not the season. Not Lang, or the business, or any of that. This. Us. Because I am, a little, and I'd rather know if I'm the only one."
He thought about lying, or at least softening it, the old instinct to stand at the edge and describe instead of stepping fully in. He didn't.
"Yeah," he said. "I am."
"Why?"
"Because the last time I let myself get close to this exact kind of thing, I found out I was better at photographing it than actually living inside it.
And I've spent two years telling myself I've changed, and some days I believe that completely, and other days I look at what's happening between us and wonder if I'm just going to do the same thing again — stand slightly outside it, documenting it, telling myself I'm present when I'm actually just watching from a professional distance.
" He said it plainly, the honesty easier now than it had been with Milo, easier than it had been with his father, because this time the person hearing it was the person it was actually about.
"I don't want to do that to you. You've had enough people in your life who were careful with you instead of actually in it. "
Josie was quiet for a moment, turning her empty mug slowly in her hands.
"I'm scared of something similar," she said finally.
"Not the same shape, but similar. I've spent two years building a version of myself that doesn't need anyone else to hold anything up — the venue, Eleanor, all of it.
I got very good at being the person other people leaned on, and not very good at letting anyone see when I needed something back.
" She glanced at him. "I don't know how to do this without it becoming one more thing I have to manage perfectly so it doesn't fall apart.
I've never been good at just — letting something be uncertain and staying in it anyway. "
"So we're both bad at exactly the thing we're trying to do."
"Seems like it."
"That's either a terrible sign or a genuinely good place to start from.
" He reached over, took the mug out of her hands, set it on the low table so there was nothing left between them to hold onto instead of each other.
"I don't have a version of this where I promise you I've got it all figured out.
I don't. But I know I drove four hours back to this town at the start of the season dreading seeing you, and somewhere in the last two months that turned into driving four hours back because I couldn't stop thinking about seeing you, and I know which version of that I want to keep being. "
"That's a start."
"It's what I've got."
She moved first this time — closing the space between them slow and certain, no storm or cake table required to explain it away, and when she kissed him it felt different from the sunrise, less like the release of something they'd both been holding back and more like a choice, deliberate, both of them fully awake to what they were choosing.
They talked for hours after that, the storm never quite letting up outside, the woodstove crackling low and steady, working through pieces of themselves neither of them had handed anyone in a long time — his mother, the year after she passed, the way his father had gone quiet and busy instead of grieving out loud; her grandfather, gone before she was old enough to really remember him, the orchard rows he'd planted that she still walked every morning like a kind of conversation with someone she'd never gotten to properly meet.
It wasn't performance, either of them. It was just two people, stuck together by weather neither of them controlled, finally doing the slow, unglamorous work of actually being known by someone instead of just admired from a professional distance.
By the time the storm broke, close to eight that evening, the sky clearing into the same impossible clean black it had gone after the Caldwell storm, Sawyer sat on the guest house porch with Josie's head against his shoulder and understood, with a clarity that didn't feel frightening anymore, that he wasn't standing at the edge of anything this time.
He was, for the first time in longer than he wanted to admit, fully and uncomplicatedly inside it.
"We should head back," Josie said eventually, not moving. "Del's going to send a search party if I don't answer her next text."
"In a minute."
"That's what I said about the tea, and that was six hours ago."
"I'm aware." He pressed a kiss to the top of her head, unhurried, entirely certain of it in a way he hadn't let himself be certain of anything in two years. "I'm allowed a few more minutes before the rest of the season gets its say."
She laughed, soft, and didn't argue, and they sat there together a while longer, the lake gone quiet and silver beyond the trees, the whole complicated summer still ahead of them, unresolved and uncertain and, for the first time all season, something Sawyer found himself looking forward to instead of bracing against.