Chapter 23 #2
Grace clears her throat and sets her fork down.
"You know what," she says, pulling out her phone with the sudden conviction of someone who has just received critical intelligence.
"The residential complex has a welcome tour at—" She scrolls.
Keeps scrolling. "—right now, actually. They just opened.
I should absolutely go check in with the housing coordinator. "
"On a Sunday," Jane says flatly.
"Housing doesn't take weekends off."
"Housing absolutely takes weekends off."
"Not this housing." Grace is already standing. Grabbing her bag. Her coat. She moves with the purposeful energy of a woman executing a strategic withdrawal.
She pauses. Looks at Jane. Abandons all pretense.
"I’ll take the car. You can leave with… Coach. You two need time that isn't a crowd and a Jumbotron. I am giving you that time. You're welcome."
"Thank you," I smirk.
Grace points at me. "I like him a lot."
She steps out of our booth and leans down and kisses the top of Jane's head. Then she straightens then looks at me with the direct, unhesitating assessment of a twenty-two-year-old.
"She doesn't ask for things," Grace says. Quiet enough that it's between us. "She just—rearranges herself to fit. She's been doing it her whole life."
Her eyes hold mine. "Don't make her do that."
She doesn't wait for an answer.
She's out the door twelve seconds later.
The table feels larger without Grace.
Jane is looking at her coffee. Turning the mug a quarter-rotation. The particular motion of someone whose hands need something to do while her brain is running two lanes of traffic.
"She's subtle," I say.
"She's a sledgehammer in a human costume." Jane looks up. The corner of her mouth pulls. "She's also not wrong."
"About which part?"
"All of it, probably." She turns the mug again. "I do that. Rearrange."
"I know."
"It's not—I don't do it to disappear. I do it because the geometry usually works better that way."
"Jane."
She looks up.
"You don't have to disappear in this," I say. "Whatever this is. Whatever it becomes. It’s why I didn’t say…"
She holds my gaze. Then the look that takes her a moment to produce—the one where she lets herself be seen instead of managing what's at the forefront.
"What do you want?" she asks.
I lean forward. Elbows on the table. Close enough that the noise of the bistro becomes irrelevant.
“You. Here. But not because of me. Not rearranging your life. Not performing. Not fixing something for someone else. Can you see a future here that belongs to you? Not for me. For yourself. Even if I wasn’t standing next to you?”
She stares at me.
"That's a lot," she says. The mug stops rotating.
She sets it down. Flat palms on the table.
"I’ve been thinking for a while," she shares. "Technically, I can structure my business so I work just from my laptop, but… I really like the human aspects of it. The community…"
"And Grace—"
"Is already here in her head. Has been since she opened the email."
Jane's exhale is slow and full.
"I was going to do this slowly," she says. "Road trip. Assess. Decide. Inform."
"And then you walked into me in the arena."
"You were in my way. Again."
"Occupational habit."
She laughs—the real one, startled out of her, the one that makes her eyes go bright and everything else stop. The sound I’ve been missing for the last few weeks.
I reach across the table.
Turn my hand palm up.
She looks at it. Looks at me.
Places her hand in mine.
I give her the moment.
Then she looks at me. "How about that mountain view now?"
I leave cash on the table before the check arrives. Enough for the meal, the tip, and whatever Grace ordered after I stopped paying attention. Jane watches me do it and laughs again.
The private elevator requires a key card.
I'm aware of her breathing. The specific cadence of it—slightly faster than normal, controlled, the rhythm of a woman who knows exactly where this is going and is choosing not to rush.
We don't speak.
I don’t touch her, because if I touch her in this elevator I won’t be able to stop before we reach the top floor.
I look straight ahead.
So does she.
The elevator hums.
Forty-five seconds to the penthouse. I count every one.
The penthouse door opens into a room I've occupied for two days and suddenly don't recognize.
The light is different now. Mid-morning February sun slanting through floor-to-ceiling glass, the mountains beyond it catching gold along their eastern faces, the whole panorama laid out like it was waiting for exactly this audience.
Housekeeping came while I was at the arena. The bed is made, the surfaces are clean, and I am specifically, profoundly grateful for the existence of hotel housekeeping services.
Jane steps past me into the room.
I close the door.
The click of the latch is the loudest sound in the space.
She walks toward the windows. Stops in the light. Her coat is still on. Her hair catches the sun at the edges, turning the brown to something warmer—amber, honey, the color of late afternoon in Anguilla when everything went gold before it went dark.
She turns.
We're a foot apart. Neither of us is pretending this is about mountains.
"Give me a moment," I say.
Her expression shifts. Curious.
I step past her. Into the bathroom. My luggage sits where I left it this morning, open against the wall.
The Costco box is where I packed it—tucked inside the interior pocket, the cardboard slightly crushed from travel. I pull it out. Walk back into the room.
Jane is standing in the center of the floor. Waiting. Not casually. Deliberately. Feet planted, chin up, the posture of a woman who has decided to stand exactly where she is and let me come to her.
My brain goes quiet all at once.
The running commentary, the strategic calculations, the internal catalog of every detail about this woman I've been compiling for three weeks—all of it drops into silence.
Because she's standing in the light in the middle of a room in Cedar Falls and she's real.
I hold up the box.
She looks at it. Looks at me. Looks back at the box.
"Our Costco stash?"
"My next stop was Boston."
Her face changes. Not immediately—the words take a second to travel from her ears to wherever she processes information that matters. Then something behind her eyes opens.
"Your next stop—"
"After Cedar Falls. After the interview. My bag was already packed with a Boston itinerary. I was coming to you." I hold the box steady. "Regardless of how this interview went. Regardless of whether the contract made sense. The next flight I had booked was DIA to Logan."
She stares at the box. At me. Her mouth opens. Closes.
"You packed condoms for Boston."
"I packed everything for Boston."
Her eyes are bright. Not tears—something more electrical than that. The look of a woman absorbing the fact that a man made a decision about her before she entered the equation.
"You were already coming," she says. Quiet. Almost to herself.
"I was already there."
She presses her hand flat against my chest. I feel the pressure of her palm through my shirt, the heat of it, the weight of Jane Cooper deciding something.
"Cedar Falls," she says.
Not a question. I go still.
"Coaching position,’ her voice has shifted—lower, clearer, the register she uses when she's finished gathering information and is now presenting findings.
"When the arena announcer called you by name, West. After I recovered from the shock, it took me about thirty seconds to realize you might want to stay here in Cedar Falls."
I stare at her.
I had spent the entire night rehearsing how to tell her. Drafting and redrafting the conversation in my head. Timing, framing, context.
She solved it in thirty seconds from an arena seat at seven-thirty in the morning.
"Of course you did."
"I'm a fixer. I fix things. I also figure things out." Her hand is still on my chest. "Were you going to mention it?"
"I was building up to it. Just like you. Trying to make sure."
"Over breakfast?"
"After breakfast. In this room. With visual aids."
She glances at the Costco box. "Those visual aids?"
"Different visual aids."
Her laugh breaks the tension in the room like a crack in a frozen rink.
I set the box on the bed.
I look at her.
"Come to Cedar Falls. Be with me, Jane."
She doesn't answer immediately.
Her eyes search my face.
"There's always going to be a gap," she says. Her voice is steady. Not apologetic. Factual.
"Between your world and mine. Between Prescott money and my spreadsheets. Between the way you grew up and the way I'm still growing up." She doesn't flinch.
"I'm not embarrassed by it. But I need you to see it. All of it. The bucket under the ceiling leak and the four-month emergency fund I'm so proud of I could frame it. If I come here—if I do this—I'm bringing all of that with me."
The room is quiet.
She is looking at me directly while she says this. Not defending herself. Not apologizing. She is handing me the whole picture and asking me to look at it with my eyes open.
"I know," I say.
"You can't—"
"I'm not asking you to stop being who you are."
And I pray she hears everything I can't arrange into sentences.
That I don't want a woman without duct tape and audacity. That my world got sharper and louder and better the day she walked into it with a negative bank balance and volunteered to be my beard.
After a while, something in her expression settles. Like a knot she's been carrying loosened one thread at a time and finally slipped free.
Then, she groans, grabs the back of my neck and pulls me down.
Jane kisses me hard.
Both hands on my jaw. Her mouth finding mine urgently.
And when her hands touch my shoulders, I feel the difference. Possession. She knows what she wants.
The taste of her—coffee, lip balm, something underneath that is just her, the chemical signature I've been craving since Anguilla—hits my bloodstream like a direct line.
I'm done being patient.