5. Jessica #2
"And Maisie tells me — dead serious, arms crossed, genuinely furious — 'Nobody will teach me how to fight a bear, Uncle Hunt.' And then she looks me right in the eye and says, 'Bears are serious. They can run thirty miles an hour. I looked it up.'"
I lost it. Completely. The laugh that came out of me wasn't dignified.
It wasn't professional. It was a full-body, tear-streaming, can't-breathe explosion that bent me forward in the booth, and I could feel every person in Dottie's staring. But I couldn’t give a single fuck, because across the table, Hunter was gone too.
The silent, full-body laugh — his shoulders shaking, his eyes streaming, one hand over his face trying to hold it in and failing spectacularly.
The sound he made — that low, choked thing — was the sound I remembered from when we were teenagers.
The laugh underneath the quiet. The boy behind the man.
Hunt and Jess were back, and I fucking loved it.
Dottie herself looked over from behind the counter with an expression that said she'd seen a lot of things in forty years of running this place, but Hunter Blackwood laughing until he cried wasn't one of them.
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand.
He wiped his with his palm, his shoulders still hitching, his breath coming back in stages.
My ribs ached. My mascara was destroyed — I could feel it on my cheekbones, which meant I looked like a raccoon that had just received extraordinary news. I didn't care.
I reached across the table and wiped a tear from beneath his eye with my thumb without thinking.
His face went still under my hand. Not bad stillness.
Something else. Something that lasted a fraction of a second and then was gone, replaced by the steady, quiet expression I knew.
But in that fraction — in that single beat before the mask settled — I saw something in his eyes that I couldn't name, and that made my stomach drop through the floor.
I pulled my hand back. Picked up my coffee and changed the subject to the next story like my fingers hadn't just been on his face and my pulse hadn't just tripled.
The bell above the door chimed.
Mayor Penny Calloway walked into Dottie's the way she walked into every room — polished, precise, expecting the space to notice her arrival and adjust accordingly.
Cream blazer. Gold earrings. A smile that had been calibrated for public consumption and deployed with the efficiency of a woman who had been in office long enough to make pleasantness look effortless.
Behind her was a man I hadn't met. Late twenties, maybe early thirties. Good-looking in a way that had been worked at — the hair styled just so, the clothes a careful step above casual, the smile arriving a half-second too fast.
Penny spotted me immediately.
"Jessica Williams." She gripped my hand with both of hers — the political handshake. "I have been dying to meet you properly. Ed and Evelyn's daughter, back in Copper Creek running our events calendar — I just think that's wonderful.”
“Nice to meet you, Mayor Calloway.”
“Penny. Please." She turned to the man behind her. "Jessica, this is my son, Garrett."
Garrett Calloway stepped forward and took my hand.
Held it a beat longer than necessary, said all the right things — my reputation, welcome home, the usual.
Pleasant. Practiced. I smiled, said thank you, and slid my hand back.
He didn't register much beyond that. I'd met a thousand men in New York, and the polite ones blurred together after a while.
Penny, on the other hand — Penny, I was reading like a contract.
Across the table, Hunter had gone still.
Not the stillness I knew — the comfortable one that meant the silence was full.
This was different. His jaw set by a fraction that nobody else in the room would notice, but I'd been reading this man's body my whole life.
His eyes moved from Garrett's hand on mine to Garrett's face, and something passed behind them — quick, dark, locked away before it fully formed.
He picked up his coffee. Drank it. Set it down.
When Penny turned to greet him, he was polite, steady, gave nothing away.
But I saw it. That half-second where his whole body changed register. I filed it in the drawer where I kept everything about Hunter — the one with no label, the one I'd been filling for years without ever looking at what was accumulating inside it.
Penny settled into the conversation without being invited, and within three minutes, she had steered it toward work.
And now I was paying attention — not to Garrett, who had settled into the background with his pleasant smile and his rehearsed attentiveness, but to his mother, whose every word was a chess move disguised as small talk.
She had ideas — each one delivered as though she'd just thought of it, each one clearly polished weeks ago.
She mentioned Garrett's name four times in three minutes, each time connecting him to something I needed — a venue, a permit, a landowner.
She was building a bridge between her son and my calendar, and she was doing it brick by brick with the calm precision of a woman who had been engineering outcomes her entire career.
"I think it would be wonderful," Penny said, with the casual authority of a woman accustomed to her suggestions becoming policy, "if Garrett worked directly with you on logistics."
There it was. Not a question. Not even a suggestion. A placement. A mother installing her son in the orbit of a woman she'd decided was suitable and wrapping it in professional language so clean you could eat off it.
My contract ran through this woman's office. Every permit, every venue approval, every county resource I needed for twelve months had Penny Calloway's signature on it.
"That sounds wonderful," I said. I smiled. I meant none of it.
Garrett handed me his card. His fingers brushed mine as I took it. I pulled my hand back a fraction faster than politeness required — not because of him, but because his mother was watching the exchange with an expression of quiet satisfaction that made my skin prickle.
They left. The door swung shut, and Dottie's settled back to its normal frequency.
I picked up my cup and looked at Hunter across the table. He was staring at the door Garrett had just walked through. His coffee sat untouched.
"Well," I said. "Penny's subtle."
He almost smiled. The corner of his mouth lifted and stopped, like the smile had hit something on its way out.
"Should I be worried about the Mayor's golden boy being assigned as my professional shadow?"
Hunter looked at me. Really looked — the full weight of his attention, the focus that made me feel like the only solid thing in the room. He picked up his coffee. Took a slow drink. Set it down.
"Just be careful with that one."
Six words. No explanation. His voice was the same quiet register it always was, but something underneath had shifted — a tectonic plate moving, slow and deep.
I opened my mouth to push. To pull the sentence out of him the way I'd always been able to — one word at a time, because nobody else had ever managed it.
Something in his face stopped me. He wasn't being casual. He was telling me something and the weight of it sat in the air between us like weather.
I closed my mouth. Picked up my coffee. The diner hummed around us, and Hunter sat across from me with those words hanging between us and a stillness in his body I had never seen directed at another person in my life.
I should have pushed. I should have leaned across that table and said, Tell me what you know, because Hunter didn't waste words, and when he said, Be careful, it meant the careful was earned.
This man had never once in his life told me to be careful about anything — not when I climbed the water tower at sixteen, not when I raced his horse down a rocky creek crossing — and the fact that he was saying it now should have told me everything I needed to know.
But the morning was warm, and ten minutes ago we'd been laughing until we cried over Maisie's bear safety program and I didn't want to let Garrett Calloway's polished handshake crack the golden thing sitting between us in this booth.
So I let it go. I picked up the last piece of his bacon — mine now, by the established laws of a friendship older than either of us could remember — and I ate it and the morning moved on, and Hunter's words stayed in the booth after we left.
They sat in the cracked vinyl and the morning light and waited for me to come back to them.
I would. Just not soon enough.