4. Recalibrating
RECALIbrATING
COLE
She turns off her apartment light, and I’m still standing on her stairs like an idiot.
I need to move, but my gaze lingers on her window. It’s been years since I was this close to her. I can’t explain the way my system recalibrates when she’s near—I just know it does, and I’ve spent six years trying to forget it.
Jesus Christ. I even failed at hugging her—at least my second attempt went better.
Spinning on my heels, I jog down the steps.
The lanterns that frame my doorway flicker with life. It was Nana Mae’s one request when she transferred ownership of the land to me so I could create The Haven.
“A porchlight tells you someone cares…someone’s waiting,” she’d said. “It means you can always come home.”
Once more, I check Junie’s window. The curtain drops suddenly. Was she standing there? Watching me?
A memory I’ve actively avoided flares to life.
“Dance with me, Cole.” Her smile tilts to the left, the aftereffects of the champagne I’ve seen her consume for the last three hours.
Not a question—it never is with her. That sharp tongue hides her soft center. It always has. But now? At eighteen? Her confidence is growing. It’s a beautiful thing.
It’s a dangerous thing too. Because as I stare at her now, eyes glimmering with mirth, she could be my downfall.
She’s fucking stunning.
I don’t know how to process the shift in my feelings.
It’s why I’m being forced to leave. She’s too young for me. She’s Nolan’s sister.
She doesn’t know what I’ve done.
And if my little Viper had any idea how Natalie has forced my hand… It wouldn’t be enough for Junie to know that I’d broken up with Natalie. She’d want a full annihilation of Natalie’s life. The chain reaction would ruin Junie’s.
The only thing I can do now is ensure that no one finds out how deeply that fuckup goes. Because if Junie finds out what I’ve done to protect her, I’ll lose her anyway.
“Cole?”
‘No’ is on the tip of my tongue, but that word, no, squeezes off my air supply. I’m drowning on dry land, so when she places her hand in mine, when it feels like the only right thing in my life, when she rests her head against my chest, I dance.
“Don’t ever leave me, Cole.” Her words are sleepy and wrap around my lungs like a noose. “You’re the only good part left.”
That was the final straw. The moment that changed me on a molecular level. The only option I had was to leave and give her the opportunity to live without the baggage I would have saddled her with.
Three weeks later, when Natalie hammered the final nail in my coffin, I left Boston behind for good.
Unfortunately, now I know that leaving didn’t stop the longing. It just gave it six years to grow roots. And now, for the second time, I’ll have to find a way to leave her better than I found her.
But this time, she’ll take all the good I have left in me with her too.
I drag my hand down my face and head home. Friends. I’d offered her friendship even though we both felt it was a demotion.
Hudson appears in the kitchen first, fully dressed in yesterday’s clothes, a laptop bag slung over his shoulder like he’s heading to court and not a regional airport with one terminal and a Cinnabon.
“She still asleep?” he asks, peering out my back door.
“I wouldn’t know.” I slide a mug of coffee toward him.
He takes it, then stares at me over the rim. Hudson has a built-in bullshit detector, the way that dogs detect fear. Silently. Accurately. With full intent to bite.
“Right.” He takes a long sip. “Take care of her, Cole. And I don’t mean fix her and send her on her way. I mean let her be a goddamn mess in your vicinity without trying to solve it.”
I don’t know what to do with that, so I nod.
Fen stumbles in next, wearing one of my shirts and basketball shorts that he can barely keep up and are decidedly not mine. He looks like a child playing dress-up.
“Morning.” He yawns wide enough to dislocate something. “I left a note under Spite-Berry’s door. I told her the welcome banner was Stanley’s doing and that he’s harmless.” He pauses. “Mostly.”
“That was…nice.”
He slaps my back hard enough to make my coffee slosh over the sides. “Take care of our girl.”
Our girl. The words sting in a way he doesn’t intend. But it’s the reminder I need that she was never just mine. We all belong to the same makeshift family that formed out of tragedy and stubbornness.
They load into their rideshare, and Fen waves as though he’s on a Mardi Gras float, while Hudson gives me the middle finger that carries the weight of a threat, a promise, and an IOU.
Then they’re gone. And it’s just me, The Haven, and the object of my infatuation—who is most likely upstairs plotting her revenge.
Junie arrives at 9:06.
Not on the hour. Not a quarter past. 9:06. Which tells me she’s making a point. Junie always has a point. She was late one minute for every year I’ve been gone, but not late enough to be considered unprofessional.
Unfortunately for her, I was trained on Junie’s spite years ago. This is classic Juniper Mercer—and I’ve fucking missed it.
She walks into the kitchen with wet hair that makes her dark blond strands appear brown and a to-go cup of coffee that still has steam rising from the top.
I don’t linger on how her jeans cling to her ass, the shirt that’s tailored to the perfect curves of her body, or how her wardrobe choice today feels like a test. One I refuse to comment on. But it’s her I dare you to mention my tardiness expression that makes me feel alive.
Game on, Junie. Game fucking on.
“Good morning, Juniper.”
She flinches on her name. She never did like me calling her Juniper, and it appears that hasn’t changed either.
She lifts her coffee in acknowledgment. No words. Just vibes. Hostile ones at that.
Nana Mae, who’s been lying in wait like a woman who was born for this exact moment, rounds the corner, holding a laptop and a banker’s box stuffed with folders.
“There she is. Morning, sweetheart.” Nana Mae deposits the box on the kitchen table with a thud that rattles the salt and pepper shakers.
“These are the financials for the last eighteen months. The laptop has our accounting software, which I use loosely because the last person who managed it, Devin, had the organizational skill of a squirrel on drugs.”
Junie’s gaze flicks to me, then back to my grandmother. “Devin?”
“My nephew.” Nana Mae’s tone could frost glass. “He was Cole’s CFO until about six months ago when he decided that vacationing was a viable career path. But that’s neither here nor there.”
It’s very much here and there, but I let Nana Mae steer.
“Fix this, dear. Cole operates out of his home office because he insists on living in the model home, so we’ve set you up in the conference room, which is really just the formal living room at the front of the house.
” Nana pats Junie’s shoulder. “Cole, don’t you have a meeting with the landscape committee? ”
My gaze cuts to Junie. I expected Nana Mae to put Junie to work, but I didn’t expect her to just dump her into the middle of a landfill. Not with…everything going on in her personal life.
But it’s a clear dismissal because there is no landscape committee meeting. Nana Mae is operating on the principle that Junie and I in the same room for extended periods will either result in a homicide or a romance, and she’d like to control the variable.
“I’ll check in with you later,” I mumble with no idea who it’s aimed at.
“Looking forward to it, Mr. Whittaker.” Junie displays the smile she uses when she’s lining up a kill shot.
Mr. Whittaker. Christ. This won’t end well.
I grab my keys and get the hell out of my own kitchen before I say something I’ll regret.
Since there’s no meeting, the only place for me to go is the clubhouse. As I’m walking the path there, I check in with Frank about his gutters and make a mental note to clear them out when he and Dollie are at church next Sunday.
Then Stanley nearly takes me out with his golf cart while trying to show me his new dashcam footage.
He only hightails it away from me when Marley, the self-appointed social coordinator, walks up to give me a seventeen-minute update on the parking situation here at the clubhouse, which is not a situation, because there are only ever twelve cars and forty spots.
By the time I make it back to the house, at least two hours have passed, and Junie has taken over the conference table like a five-foot dictator staging a military operation.
The banker’s box is gutted, its contents organized into neat stacks.
Her laptop is open and projecting three different spreadsheets to various screens.
She has a pen between her teeth, one in the knot in her hair, and another tapping aggressively against the wood grain of my table, all while she mutters.
Mutters.
I lean against the doorframe to take it all in because walking in there feels like stepping into something sacred. Her blue eyes are electric. The exhaustion from last night has been replaced with something I haven’t seen in way too long.
Focus. Purpose. The quiet ferocity of a woman who was built to succeed.
“Did he pay this invoice twice?” Junie says, I think to herself. The pen clicks against her teeth. “Who reconciles accounts like this? Animals?”
She still hasn’t noticed me, and I’m not announcing myself because watching Juniper Mercer in her element is the most dangerous thing I’ve done in years, and I can’t stop myself.
This is the girl who made a perfect score on her statistics final and then got pissed because she got a B plus in pottery. The woman who mapped out a five-year career plan in a Google spreadsheet with color-coded tables. Numbers are her love language, and right now, she’s speaking fluently.
My chest does something between aching and expanding. Something that feels like pride in a person I have no right to be proud of.