Chapter 18 TESSA
Tessa
I wake up smiling.
I lie there and catch myself doing it, alone in my own bed with the sun coming up over the water.
At my door he kissed me goodnight for a long time, and then he went to his own room across the hall, because there’s a line we haven’t crossed and last night wasn’t the night for it. I lay in the dark with sand still on my ankles, grinning like a teenager.
I’m in so much trouble.
I skip the swim. It’s the first morning in three weeks I don’t need the cold water, and that fact alone should scare me more than it does.
The kitchen smells like a bakery when I come in, which means one thing. Mrs. Vale is back.
She’s at the stove with her sleeves rolled, and there’s bread already going, and she takes one look at me in the doorway and then a second look, longer.
“Sleep well?” she asks.
“Very.”
She turns back to the stove. “There’s sand on the mudroom floor. And two blankets over the porch rail, smelling like woodsmoke.”
“The storm blew things around.”
“It certainly did,” says Mrs. Vale, and hands me a coffee.
Ronan comes in ten minutes later, showered, hair pushed back and wet, in a T-shirt, and the problem with the T-shirt is that I know exactly what’s under it now.
The chest. The arms. My hands spent half the night learning all of it, and they remember every inch.
He looks at me over Mrs. Vale’s bent head and everything in me goes warm and stupid.
“Morning,” he says.
“Morning.”
He crosses the kitchen, takes his coffee, and on the way back his hand comes to rest on my shoulder, just for a moment, warm through my sweater. I cover it with mine before it goes.
Mrs. Vale doesn’t turn around. “Eggs are nearly up.”
We eat breakfast trying not to look at each other, and failing. He catches me. I catch him. Around the third time a laugh escapes into my coffee, undignified, and the corner of his mouth goes up and stays up for the rest of the meal.
Shoulder work at ten is a disaster.
Not clinically. Clinically it’s his best session yet, full range, minimal guarding, and I’d chart it glowing if I could hold the pen steady.
“Stop it,” I tell him, halfway through the second set.
“I’m doing the exercise.”
“You’re looking at me.”
“You said eyes forward.”
“Forward is the wall. Not my face.”
“Is it?” he says, gravely, and does another rep, and keeps looking at me, and I put him through the whole protocol while blushing like it’s my first clinical rotation. At the end he catches my wrist and presses a kiss to the inside of it, right over the pulse he knows is jumping.
“Good session,” he says.
“You’re a terrible patient.”
“I’m your favorite patient.”
He is. God help me, he is.
Sadie calls at noon while he’s on with Frank.
“How’s my brother?” she asks.
I give her the report, and it’s a good one. She listens for the thing I’m not saying, and when I run out of milestones there’s a small pause on the line.
“And you?” she says. “You holding up? Living with him would send most professionals into early retirement.”
“I’m fine.”
“Uh-huh,” says Sadie. “You know, I’ve hired five nurses for that man. You’re the first one who’s lasted long enough for me to ask that question twice. You must be a saint.”
“You have no idea.”
She laughs. “Okay. Tell him I’ll come up soon to see this walking miracle myself.”
I hang up and stand there with the phone in my hand. I’m fine. It isn’t a lie, exactly. It’s just the smallest word I could reach for, standing in this kitchen with bread in the oven and his voice carrying down the hall. Fine is what I tell Sadie. It isn’t the half of it.
The letter is still in the bottom of my bag.
And with my whole body still lit from last night, my hands decide we’re done pretending.
I go to my room while he’s on his call. I unzip the bag, sit on the edge of the bed, and open it.
It’s short. Official letterhead, three paragraphs, language sanded down to nothing.
A review has been scheduled regarding the events of March fourteenth.
My presence is required. Failure to appear will be noted.
There’s a date at the bottom, typed, final, and I look at it for a long time, and then I look at the calendar on my phone, and the two of them sit there side by side saying the same thing.
The last week of August.
My lawyer has left two messages this week. Denise wants to start preparing. I haven’t called her back.
The same week my contract ends. The same week Petra flies in from Zurich. Everything in both of our lives is pointing at the same seven days. He talks about that week all the time. The deal, the room, the closing.
I fold the letter along its creases and put it back under the badge and the gait belt, and I sit there and feel it starting. The going quiet. The pulling away early so it hurts less later.
I go back out to the kitchen. Through the window over the sink I can see him on the terrace, phone to his ear, and he laughs at something Frank says, head back, easy, a man coming back to his own life one piece at a time. I did that. Some of that is mine.
And I decide, in a house I’ll be leaving, that I’m not doing it again.
The letter can have the last week of August. It can’t have today. It can’t have the twenty-nine days between now and then, and if spending them like this makes the ending harder, then so be it. I’ve survived worse.
He comes in off the terrace, phone away now, and steals bread off the cooling rack while Mrs. Vale threatens him with a spatula, and when he sees my face he goes still for half a second, reading me.
“Okay?” he asks, quiet, under the kitchen noise.
“Perfect,” I say.
It’s half true, which is the most truth I have. He looks at me a moment longer. Then he holds out the stolen piece of bread, an offering, warm from the rack, and I take it, and Mrs. Vale mutters something about wolves in her kitchen.
* * *
We take the walk at four. The beach again, because it’s ours now, and neither of us says that either.
The tide’s out and the sand goes forever, and he’s stronger than yesterday, I can see it in the stride, less cane and more leg.
Halfway down the beach his hand finds mine, and it isn’t new anymore, and that’s the sweetest part.
We walk like that with the water coming in flat and silver.
“Frank’s driving up Thursday,” he says. “Claims there are papers to sign. There’s nothing that can’t be signed from a phone. He wants to see me standing up.”
“He’ll take one look at the two of us and know.”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t mind.”
“No.” Just that. No. And I have to look at the water for a second.
“Sadie says she’s coming to see the walking miracle,” I tell him.
“God help us all,” he mutters.
I laugh, and we keep walking.
At the turn of the beach, where the sand runs out against the rocks, he stops and draws me in close, his fingers still laced through mine.
He looks down at me, the wind pushing his hair loose across his forehead, the scruff along his jaw catching the last of the light, the scar cutting through it.
His gaze moves over my face while mine stays fixed on his mouth—the mouth I know entirely too much about now.
His eyes find mine, then drift back to my lips, and the look on him is the same one from the fire, banked now, warm, aimed entirely at me.
I know exactly what’s about to happen.
There’s no storm this time. No fire. No reason at all.
I don’t step back.
He kisses me.
He never rushes. One hand cradles my jaw, tipping my face where he wants it. My hands curl into his shirt. My whole body goes quiet.
You would never know. That’s the part I can’t get over. Somewhere out there is a paid interview with an ex swearing this man doesn’t kiss anyone, and I believed it. I still do. None of it explains this.
Like he’s been saving it his whole life.
When he finally pulls back, his mouth lingers against my bottom lip, one last soft tug before he lets me go. Neither of us moves. His hand stays in my hair. His breath is still against my mouth, and he looks at me with all the wanting he isn’t trying to hide.
Then the smirk arrives, slow and criminal.
He takes my hand and turns us up the beach.
My legs take a moment to remember how to work.
* * *
Dinner is Mrs. Vale’s roast chicken and baby potatoes, and a bottle of wine I set on the table like a prize, because his anticoagulant course finished yesterday and I have been sitting on this bottle ever since.
He looks at the bottle. Looks at me.
“You’re done,” I tell him. “As of tonight you are, medically speaking, an ordinary man.”
“I’ve never been an ordinary man.”
“Drink your wine, Ronan.”
We touch glasses over our plates. And he tells me about Zurich and Petra and what happens in a room when a deal this size closes, his hands moving, his voice easy.
I sit there with my chin in my hand and watch him come alive as he talks, and I realize that in another five weeks I’ll only be able to imagine where he is.
Boardroom. Terrace call. Corner office I’ve never seen.
It’s supposed to be comforting, imagining someone where they’re meant to be.
After the dishes he catches me at the sink, arms around me from behind, and he bends and tucks his face in at the side of my neck, and when he speaks it’s low, right against my ear.
“You went somewhere today,” he says. “While I was on with Frank. You went to your room, and you came back different.”
Of course he noticed. He notices everything. Someday, someone is going to love being known this well.
The thought hits me like a dropped plate. The someone I’m imagining is me.
“I’m here now,” I say.
His arms tighten. He doesn’t ask. He never promised out loud. He keeps it anyway.
“Yes,” he says, against my neck. “You are.”
I lean back into a man I can’t keep and let him hold the weight of me, all of it, every pound, because he wants to, because I’m letting him.
August will come.