Chapter 16
ADELAIDE
The next day, Jaxon asked her out on a date.
Adelaide had been standing at the kitchen counter eating crackers and cheese from the board she'd assembled for herself.
Jaxon had called her, and the question made her laugh before she could stop it.
They had known each other since they were fifteen and kissed each other in the yard and he was asking her on a date as though they were starting from the beginning.
"Are you asking me out, Jaxon?"
"I'm trying to. You're making it difficult."
"Yes," she said, smiling. "You can take me to dinner."
"Tuesday. I'll pick you up at seven."
"It's a date."
"Yeah," he said, and she could hear the smile in his voice, the one she'd been thinking about since the yard, the one that changed the entire architecture of his face. "It is."
She hung up and stood in the kitchen and felt something she had not felt in so long she almost didn't recognize it.
Anticipation. A woman looking forward to Tuesday because a man she loved had asked her to dinner, and the asking had been clumsy and sincere and she would not have traded it for the smoothest reservation Grant had ever made.
They had not slept together. She told him she wanted to wait until she was truly free from Grant with the divorce, and he had understood. And she knew now that this date was Jaxon’s way of them truly having their fresh start.
"Okay," he'd said.
"It's not because I don't want to."
"I know."
She’d explained anyway, because she needed to hear herself say it aloud.
About needing it to be clean. About not wanting to be half in anything again.
She had spent years being half present in her own marriage, half committed to a life that looked right from the outside and felt wrong from the inside, and she would not begin this, whatever this was becoming, with the legal remnants of that failure still attached to her name.
Jaxon leaned back on his palms and looked out across the yard where the evening light was doing something unreasonable to the tops of the cedar stacks, turning them gold. "I waited ten years," he said. "I can wait a little longer.”
The simplicity of the sentence undid her more than any grand declaration could have.
She leaned her head against his shoulder and felt him accept the contact without adjusting, without pulling her closer or holding himself apart, just letting her rest against him with the ease of someone who had been waiting for exactly this and was not going to spoil it by reaching too fast.
The weeks that followed were unhurried, ordinary, accumulating time, and inside it she began to learn Jaxon the way you relearned a language you had once spoken fluently, recognizing the grammar even as the vocabulary surprised you.
He picked her up on Tuesday evenings in his truck.
They drove to Beaumont for dinner because Clarington had one restaurant and they'd already eaten there four times and the owner, Howard, had begun greeting them with a raised eyebrow and a conspiratorial smile that made Adelaide blush and Jaxon develop a sudden interest in the floor.
Le Jardin was nothing special. The terrace overlooked a small river.
The candles were stuck in wine bottles. The food was honest rather than impressive.
She loved it there because the place asked nothing of her.
No performance. No appropriate wine selection.
No awareness of who was watching from the next table.
She laughed more at Le Jardin than she had laughed anywhere in years.
She talked with her hands. She stole food from Jaxon's plate without asking, a habit she'd had at twenty-two that had apparently survived a decade of separation and a marriage to a man who would have found it undignified.
She told Jaxon about her old life in the city.
Not the version she'd offered at Grant's dinner parties.
The real one. The silence of the apartment.
The Wednesday afternoon cinema trips because Grant played squash and the empty apartment made her restless.
The watercolor class she'd taken at the community center and been terrible at and loved, the joy of putting color on paper with no skill and no agenda, just the pleasure of seeing what happened when blue met yellow on a wet page.
And then how she'd stopped, after Grant had dismissed her wanting to teach art, and because he had made a comment about paint stains on her fingers at a work dinner.
And she had put the paints away in a drawer and never opened them again.
She told Jaxon this story expecting sympathy. What she got instead was silence, a long silence, and then a single sentence.
"You should paint again."
"I was terrible at it."
"So?"
So? As though being terrible at something you loved was not a reason to stop doing it.
As though the point of the painting had never been the product.
As though the woman who put color on paper for the pleasure of it was someone worth recovering, regardless of what the paintings looked like when she was done.
"Yeah," she said. Her eyes were bright and she did not try to hide it. "So."
The next Saturday she went to the art supply shop in Beaumont and bought a set of watercolors, a pad of cold-press paper, and spent the afternoon at the kitchen table making a mess.
The paintings were terrible. She loved every one of them.
When she went to the shop later that day she had cerulean blue on her index finger and her thumb.
Jaxon looked at the stains and said nothing and she said nothing and neither of them needed to, because the paint on her hands was the loudest thing she had said since coming back to Clarington.
She enrolled in the teaching certificate program at the community college in Beaumont the same week.
The program ran two evenings a week, Tuesday and Thursday, which meant she and Jaxon shifted their dinner dates to Wednesdays, and the shifting felt like evidence of a life that was beginning to organize itself around her choices rather than someone else's.
The coursework was straightforward. The drive was long.
The savings account she'd kept hidden from Grant covered the tuition and the fuel and the textbooks without strain, and the fact that she could do this, could fund her own becoming from a reserve she had built quietly and deliberately over years of marriage, gave her a satisfaction that went deeper than the practical.
She had prepared for this without knowing she was preparing.
Her hands had been getting ready long before her mind caught up.
She kissed Jaxon often. On the step outside his house. In the truck after dinner. In the square, once, when she saw him carrying a crate toward the café and something in her simply refused to wait. She crossed the square and put her hands on his face and kissed him.
Jaxon had gone very still. Then he set the crate down on the pavement and kissed her back, properly, with both hands and his full attention, and when he pulled away he said, "You're going to get me talked about," and she said, "Good," and picked up the crate for him and carried it the rest of the way because his hands were shaking slightly and she loved that she could do that to him.
That this man, this steady, grounded, unshakeable man, trembled when she kissed him.
Grant had never trembled. Grant had received her kisses the way he received everything she offered, with smooth competence and the faint, practiced gratitude of a man accepting his due.
The kissing made the waiting harder. She had expected that.
She had not expected how much harder. Jaxon's mouth on hers was familiar in a way that went deeper than memory, reaching into a part of her that recognized him at a level she could not access through conversation.
When he kissed her she felt the years collapse.
She felt her body remember things her mind had spent a decade archiving.
The way his hand settled at the back of her neck.
The way he tilted his head slightly to the left.
The way he kissed slowly, without urgency, giving each moment its full shape rather than rushing toward the next.
She wanted him. She wanted him in a way that made the waiting feel like holding a position past the point of comfort.
There were evenings when he kissed her goodnight at the gate, and she stood on the other side of it watching him walk away.
She felt her whole body pull toward him, and the effort of not calling him back lived in her chest all the way up the path and through the door and into the narrow bed where she lay in the dark thinking about his hands, his mouth, the low sound he made when she kissed the spot below his ear.
A sound she had discovered two weeks ago and had been thinking about with alarming frequency ever since.
She wanted him. And she waited. Because the waiting was not about propriety.
It was about her. It was about the woman she was becoming inside this decision.
A woman who chose things deliberately. Who did not fall into the next life because the current one had cracked.
Who stood on her own feet long enough to know that the direction she walked was hers.