6. A Proclivity for Petty #3
There are so many things I shouldn’t do with this woman, and this feels like a gateway to unlocking them all. Plus, the garden designs are in my upstairs office, along with six years’ worth of secrets covered in her initials.
But I do have the garden sketches on my phone. I saved photos last week when I was going to pitch the concept to the homeowners committee.
I pull up the image and hand her my phone. Our fingers don’t touch in the exchange, but the space between us feels charged, like the air before a storm that hasn’t decided on destruction or just passing through.
She studies the screen with the same intensity she brings to my financial records. Pinching to zoom, tilting the phone, her brows furrowed in concentration as I hold my breath.
It reminds me of those times she talked about—at her kitchen table in the middle of the night. I knew she was watching me, sometimes adding me to her vlog, sometimes just needing a silent companion. That’s when it was innocent between us. It had always been innocent…right up until that dance.
“The pathway radius is too tight for a wheelchair,” she says.
I sit up taller. “What?”
“Here.” She points to my screen. “If Tony wants to visit, this corner won’t accommodate a turning radius. You need at least sixty inches.”
I didn’t even know she knew who Tony was.
She hands my phone back. Our gazes meet in the lantern light, and I have the disorienting feeling of being seen. Not the surface version people usually get, but the underbelly. The part of me that builds and fixes things when no one’s paying attention.
She’s paying attention.
“How do you know that?”
She shrugs, then tucks a loose chunk of hair behind her ear. “You mentioned it once. When you were working on a hospital design for a school project.”
She’s always been paying attention. Fuck me.
“You’re right,” I say. “I’ll fix it.”
“I usually am.” No snark, just facts. She pulls her knees up to rest her chin on them, and I wish I had a blanket to offer her. “You built this place for them.”
“Not exactly.” I chuckle. “My original plan had been for families, but my designs were…well, I priced out a lot of young families. Before I knew it, I had…all of them.” I sweep my hands out to encompass The Haven. “They built this. I just drew the lines.”
“That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”
I don’t know if I do. She remembers the version of me I thought I could be before I left Boston—the one who built and created instead of running—and now she’s trying to decide if that version of me was real.
I honestly don’t know anymore.
Her shoulder shifts, and at some point, I’ve drifted closer to her because the cotton of her sweatshirt grazes my arm, but this time, we don’t move away.
It’s nothing and literally everything. A centimeter of fabric against my bare skin, and it’s the most alive I’ve felt in six years.
“I should go,” she murmurs, but she doesn’t stand. The fabric of her sweatshirt grazes more of my skin, as though we’re both pressing to the other millimeter by millimeter.
“Yeah,” I agree, but slide my elbow closer by half an inch.
Our breathing syncs. The wind picks up, and she shivers once—an involuntary shudder that presses her elbow into my bicep, and that’s what finally breaks us.
She stands.
I follow.
The distance between us returns like a tide rushing back in.
“Good night, Cole.”
Not Mr. Whittaker.
Cole.
It’s just my fucking name. But she says it in the voice she used to use—soft and unguarded. It lands right behind my ribs where I can’t reach to pull it out.
It’s lodged there now. A cramp that reminds me she’ll never be out of my system, no matter how noble I try to be.
“Good night, Junie.” It’s hoarse, deep, wrecked.
She pauses on the first stair at my words but doesn’t turn around. Then she’s gone, swallowed by the dark stairwell to her apartment, and I’m alone on my porch with lanterns and the quiet devastation of a woman who just looked at my work and saw the man I’ve tried to shield her from.
Tomorrow I’ll add lighting to her stairs while she’s working.
Tonight, I’ll fix the garden pathway. Something that took her three seconds to spot while I’ve missed it for six months.
In my office, I sit at my drafting table and stare at the other set of blueprints—the ones I can never show her—and for the first time, the walls of her dream house feel less like a monument to what I lost and more like a confession I don’t know how to make.
Her bedroom light turns on, and my gaze flies to the source as though I have no control.
I’m in so much fucking trouble.
The thought arrives with the weight of everything I’ve been outrunning for almost a decade. It’s not new. It’s not even surprising. It’s just finally, devastatingly honest.
She’s building something here.
Something stable.
Something I already almost took from her once.
Tonight, when her shoulder touched mine, it grew roots so deep I can feel them wrapping around the foundation of every wall I’ve built.
So I turn off my drafting lamp, but I don’t leave. I sit here, staring across the driveway, because her light is still on, beckoning me with whispers of what could have been if only the choice had been mine to make.