24. Derek
DEREK
Rachel's text came through a little after two, while I had both hands full of a busted regulator on truck two and no good reason to be checking my phone at all.
In town for Katie's wedding. Ran into your Leah at the coffee shop today. She's wonderful, Derek. I mean that. Go easy on both of you tonight, whatever "easy" looks like for a man like you.
I stood there with the wrench still in one hand, thrown by a name from one life showing up in the middle of another. Rachel hadn't set foot in Pinewood Ridge since the year she left it, and I'd just assumed she never would again.
Katie's wedding had been on the department calendar for months, one more small-town event I'd catalogued and mostly ignored, and it had never once occurred to me that Rachel might be connected to it closely enough to actually show up.
We hadn't spoken in almost a year, a handful of careful, spaced-out texts on birthdays and one stilted phone call after she got engaged, both of us working hard to sound like people who'd landed somewhere fine.
I'd told myself that was enough contact to call the whole thing settled. Apparently it wasn't.
"Everything okay?" Priya asked, not looking up from the hose she was coiling.
"Fine." I set the regulator down and picked the wrench back up before she could look closer. "Old friend's in town for a wedding."
"You've got a face for somebody whose old friend just texted good news."
"It is good news." I meant it, mostly, and hated a little how much convincing that took.
Priya let it go, the way she'd learned to let most things go where I was concerned, and went back to coiling the hose in even, practiced loops, and I stood there a moment longer with the regulator half forgotten in my hands, thinking about how far she'd come from the rookie who used to ask permission before she breathed near a piece of equipment.
I finished the regulator on autopilot, half my head still back in a coffee shop I hadn't been in.
I kept picturing Rachel's easy warmth working on the room, and Leah hearing a name I still hadn't found a way to say out loud myself.
Two years of practice keeping Boston folded small enough to carry without anyone noticing the weight of it, and here it was anyway, walking into a coffee shop uninvited and handing itself to the one person I'd been most careful with.
I should have told her myself. I knew that the same way I knew fire climbed before it spread, an old instinct that didn't need explaining twice.
I hadn't, because every time I got close the words rearranged themselves into something smaller and safer than the truth, and because some stubborn, cowardly part of me still believed if I never said it out loud, it couldn't cost me anything else.
I'd already told her about the twenty third, that day among the half melted ice sculptures when the words had come out of me slower than I wanted them to, and she'd taken that much without ever once pushing for more, patient in a way I hadn't earned yet.
I'd told myself that patience meant I had time, that Boston could wait for whatever version of ready I was still working toward.
Rachel walking into a coffee shop and handing Leah a piece of a story I hadn't finished telling felt like proof I didn't get to decide when I'd be ready.
Sarge caught me staring at nothing near the end of shift and didn't bother pretending he hadn't noticed.
"You've been polishing that same six inches of chrome since lunch.
" He leaned against the rig, arms crossed, watching me with the specific patience he usually reserved for rookies working themselves toward a bad decision.
"Somebody want to tell me what's actually going on, or are we doing this the hard way? "
"Rachel's in town. For a wedding."
"And?"
"And she already met Leah. Today. Without me anywhere in the room."
Sarge whistled low, long enough to make his opinion clear without needing words to back it up. "That's not nothing."
"It's not anything either, necessarily."
"Derek." He said my name the way he said it when he intended to be listened to. "Go."
"Go," he said again, before I'd asked him anything else. "Whatever it is, go deal with it instead of scrubbing that same spot on the rig for the fourth time."
I peeled off my gloves and dropped them on the bench harder than I meant to, and Sarge caught the motion without saying anything else about it, the kind of quiet that passed for approval between men who'd spent years learning to read each other through smoke instead of words.
He'd never once asked me for the whole Boston story either, not directly, content to let me hand him pieces of it on my own schedule the way he seemed to understand I needed to.
I wondered sometimes if that patience was a gift or just Sarge being Sarge, the two things so tangled together in him I'd stopped trying to separate them years ago.
I went straight from the station without changing, three knocks on Leah's door before I'd fully decided what I was going to say, and one look at her face when she opened it told me Rachel's text hadn't oversold anything.
She had a look I recognized, the specific stillness of somebody working hard to seem fine.
"You talked to Rachel."
"Word travels fast in this town."
"She texted me. Said she met you." I stepped inside, shrugging out of my coat, watching her with the particular careful attention I only used when I already suspected something was wrong. "You've got a look."
"I don't have a look."
"You have several. This is a specific one." I reached for her hand, gentle, and led her to the couch, sitting close enough that our knees touched. "Talk to me."
"She was lovely, Derek. Genuinely. That's not the problem."
"Then what is?"
She hesitated, and I waited, patient in a way that cost me more than I let show, because some part of me already knew what was coming and dreaded it anyway.
"She has years of you I'll never have. History I can't compete with, even if she's not trying to make me.
It's not about her. It's about everything I don't know, everything I wasn't there for, and some part of me that's been scared of exactly this since Denver, the part that always wonders if I'm just filling space until something more permanent comes along. "
I didn't answer right away. I looked at her instead, feeling something settle into place that had nothing to do with deciding what to say and everything to do with finally being certain enough to say it plainly.
"What I feel for you isn't an echo of anything." I said it slow, deliberate, needing her to actually hear every word of it. "It's not leftover affection from somewhere else, and it's not me settling for whatever's convenient because I'm tired of being alone. I need you to know that."
"Derek."
"I mean it. I've spent two years keeping people at a distance because I didn't trust myself to want something this much and still keep it safe.
You're the first person who's made that fear feel smaller instead of bigger every single day.
" I shook my head slowly, still working out how to say the rest of it.
"That's not history repeating. That's not me reaching for whatever's familiar because it's easier than being alone.
That's you, specifically. Nobody else would have done it. "
I thought about Boston then, about the version of this conversation where I told her everything instead of circling the edge of it, and felt the old fear rear up exactly on schedule.
Not tonight. I could give her this much honestly and still not be ready to hand her the rest of it, and some part of me hoped she'd understand the difference without my having to explain it out loud.
"Rachel's not competition, Leah. She's closure. There's a difference, and I need you to believe it." My hand found her jaw, careful, the way it always did right before something in me gave way. "You're not filling space. You're the whole reason I finally stopped being afraid of it."
Something shifted across her whole face at that, warm and unguarded, two years of careful distance giving way under the weight of how simply I'd said it.
"Okay," she said, quiet. "Show me."
I didn't hesitate. I kissed her slow, like I had all night and intended to use every minute of it, and when I finally pulled back long enough to look at her, whatever she saw on my face seemed to settle something in her too.
I carried the candles in from the kitchen myself, setting them along the windowsill and the dresser until the whole room glowed gold instead of the bright, ordinary light she usually left on.
I undressed her slowly, patient rather than holding back, my mouth following where my hands had already been.
Every so often I murmured low against her skin exactly what I liked, the curve of her shoulder, the sound she made when I found a particular spot below her ear, the way she said my name like it cost her something to say it steady.
I took my time with all of it. When my hands found hers I didn't pin them down so much as lace our fingers together, holding on rather than holding still, wanting her hands as close to mine as the rest of her.
Everything about that night was slow and careful rather than urgent, like I was proving something to both of us by refusing to rush.
"Still good?" I murmured once, forehead against hers, and she answered with her whole body instead of words, arching into me, pulling me closer, and I took that answer exactly the way she meant it.
I built her up deliberately, patient in a way that undid me faster than urgency ever could have, until it finally broke loose for both of us, her name breaking on my lips at the same moment mine broke on hers.
Afterward we lay tangled together under the quilt, breathless, foreheads touching, my hand tracing slow circles against her back like I still couldn't stop touching her.
I thought about Boston again in the quiet after, about the headline she'd never seen and the name I still hadn't said, and made myself a promise the same shape as the one I suspected she'd made herself somewhere in the last few hours, though neither of us said so out loud.
Soon. Not tonight, because tonight already held everything it needed to hold, but soon, before the silence around it turned into something that looked like a secret instead of just a wound still healing.
"I'm not going anywhere," I said into her hair, quiet and certain, feeling her heartbeat slow under my palm where it rested against her chest.
She was asleep before I finished saying it, trusting it enough to let go completely, and I lay there a long while after in the dark of her cabin, listening to her breathe, one hand still resting light against her back like letting go might undo something neither of us could afford to lose tonight.
I thought about Rachel's text again, about "go easy on both of you," and understood finally what she'd actually meant by it.
Not easy on Leah. Easy on the version of myself that still flinched every time somebody got close enough to see the whole shape of what I'd survived.
I wasn't there yet. But lying in the dark with Leah's heartbeat slowing under my palm, nothing waiting to pull me away, I let myself believe, for the first time since Boston, that I might actually get there before it cost me anything I couldn't stand to lose.