11. Hunter
Hunter
The PA system had been buzzing since February, and nobody had done a damn thing about it.
I let myself in through the back entrance of the community hall with a toolbox and a replacement capacitor, and I was three screws into the junction box when Jessica’s voice came through the wall.
"— and if we restructure the vendor layout along the south axis, we gain forty percent more foot traffic through the craft stalls and the food vendors get direct sightline access to the main stage, which means —"
I stopped. Screwdriver in hand. My body went still.
Through the plasterboard, I could hear everything.
Her voice — fast, sharp, the NYC frequency she ran at when she was presenting.
The shifting chairs of twelve or fifteen people who'd been running the Founders Day Festival since before we were born.
The click of her laptop. The cadence of a woman who knew her material cold and was delivering it like she was pitching to a boardroom on the thirty-second floor of a building in Midtown.
"The data from comparable county events shows a seventeen percent increase in vendor revenue when you —"
A pause. The wrong kind. The kind that hangs in the air when a room full of people who have been doing something their own way for twenty years decide simultaneously whether to be impressed or insulted. I could feel the temperature through the wall.
June Parker's voice. Careful. Measured. "That's interesting, Jessica. I wonder if we might consider —"
"Absolutely, and that's exactly what the secondary layout addresses. If you look at page three —"
She'd cut June off. My jaw tightened. June Parker had been running festival logistics for twenty-two years.
June Parker didn't get cut off. Not in that room.
Not by anyone. And the silence that followed — the specific, loaded, small-town silence of fourteen people deciding to stop contributing — pressed through the plasterboard like a change in air pressure.
Clara Mae Henderson said something diplomatic that nobody responded to. Dorothy Sullivan said nothing. Dorothy Sullivan's nothing was louder than everyone else's something.
Jessica kept going. More data. More vision. More of the relentless, brilliant, unstoppable force of a woman who was right about almost everything, and handling it in a way that was making it impossible for the room to hear her.
I stood behind the wall with the capacitor in my hand, my teeth clenched and the screwdriver doing nothing useful.
Chairs scraped. Footsteps shuffled toward the front exit. The meeting was over. I could hear it in the murmured goodbyes that were polite and nothing more.
Dorothy Sullivan came through the back corridor.
She saw me in the doorway. Her glasses dropped a quarter inch on her nose, and she looked at me over them.
The look said: your girl just walked into a room full of people who would have followed her anywhere and told them they'd been doing it wrong for twenty years, and I am going to need a very large glass of wine. Then she walked out.
I waited. Counted to thirty. Walked into the main room.
Jessica was at the front table. Her back was to me. She was shoving her laptop into her bag with movements that were too fast, too tight — her shoulders pulled up toward her ears, her spine rigid.
I leaned against the doorframe. Crossed my arms. Waited.
Her hands stopped on the bag. Her shoulders dropped a fraction. She'd clocked me without turning around.
"Don't," she said.
"Didn't say anything."
"You're about to. I can hear you loading up a sentence from here. You're standing in that doorway with your arms crossed and your stupid calm face and —"
"My arms aren't crossed."
I uncrossed them. Slowly. Put my hands in my pockets instead. Her back was still to me, and I could see the tension in her neck, the rigid line of muscle from her shoulder to her ear, the way her fingers had gone white on the strap of her bag.
She turned. A flush was climbing her neck. Spreading up from her collar, blooming across her skin like something surfacing. Her eyes were bright. Her jaw was set. Her hands had come off the bag and were balled at her sides, fingers curled into fists that wanted to be gestures.
Something turned over in me. The color on her skin.
The way her body was leaning forward like she was about to charge through me.
The brightness in her eyes that had nothing to do with tears and everything to do with the particular fire that Jessica ran on when she was frustrated and cornered and not ready to admit she was wrong.
"I don't need a lecture, Hunt."
"Wasn't planning on one."
"Good."
"Good."
The community hall was empty. The afternoon light came through the high windows and fell on the floor between us in long, dusty bars. Neither of us moved.
“I need a drink,” she blurted. “A huge one.”
That night, I took her to the Silver Spur.
Ben and Rosie's place was packed — the jukebox fighting with three conversations, peanut shells on the floor, the particular warmth of a room where everybody knew everybody, and half of them were mad at the other half about something that happened in 1997.
Jessica was beside me at the bar. My hand was on her waist. The spot had become familiar enough that my palm found it without thinking. The contact was constant now. My hand went there. Her body received it without question. Welcomed it, even.
The space between us had been closing for weeks, and the closing was the problem because every inch it shrank made the ache worse. My fingers rested against the fabric of her jeans, and the warmth of her skin came through and settled into my palm and stayed there, humming.
Wyatt and Ivy were at our corner table. Maggie and Jack stood at the end of the bar. Clay spun Callie on the dance floor, while Mom and Dad stayed home with Maisie.
Jessica leaned against the bar with one elbow on the counter and her beer in her hand and said, "You know what kills me?
I had them. I had that room. The data was solid, the timeline was airtight, and they just — they sat there.
Like I was speaking a different language.
Like I'd walked in with a PowerPoint, and they'd expected a potluck.
Dorothy Sullivan looked at me over those glasses, and I swear to God, Hunt, that woman could end a war with that look.
She didn't say a single word, and I could feel my entire presentation collapsing.
" She took a drink. "These people don't understand what I'm trying to build for them.
The caliber of what this calendar could be if they'd just —"
"You came in too fast." I picked up my beer. Took a drink. Set it down. “Too hot and too fast.”
Her glass hit the bar. The sound was sharp enough to turn two heads three stools down.
She pivoted toward me, her face flushed with the same fury it held after the meeting. She squared her shoulders, eyes narrowed in a way that told me I’d just started something I’d have to finish. "I'm sorry — did you just tell me I came in too fast?"
“You know you did, Jess.”
Her voice dropped. Went pointed. She leaned in — close, too close. Close enough that I could smell her perfume mixing with the heat coming off her skin. "I didn't leave New York and a career that would make your head spin to be told to slow down by a man who has never left the county line."
My hand tightened on my glass. She'd aimed for the one place she knew it would land, and her aim was perfect. That was the only downside to friendships that spanned decades: they knew exactly where to place the knife and how to twist it just hard enough to bring you to your knees.
I put the glass down. Turned to face her fully.
My shoulders squared. My weight settled.
My body shifted the way it shifts when I stop being still and start being present, and the difference was visible — Jessica's eyes widened a fraction, her weight rocked back half an inch, her lips parted on an inhale she didn't finish.
"You are the most capable person in every room you walk into.
" My voice came out low. Carrying weight.
"Every single room. And that is exactly why you're getting this wrong.
You're presenting instead of listening. You're showing these people what you can do when what they need is to be asked what they know. "
Her lips stayed parted. Her chest rose and held. A strand of hair had come loose from behind her ear and was stuck to the damp skin of her neck, and she didn't brush it away because her entire body was locked onto me.
"June Parker has been running the logistics for this festival for twenty-two years.
Clara Mae Henderson has a mind for spatial design you'd have killed for on your New York team.
Dorothy Sullivan has opinions about crowd flow that are smarter than anything in your data deck.
" I leaned in. Half a step. Close enough to see the pulse hammering in her throat.
Close enough to watch her pupils blow wide.
"And you walked in and talked at them instead of with them, and they shut down because nobody — nobody, Jess — wants to be told they've been doing it wrong by someone who hasn't been here to do it at all. "
The Blackwood corner went quiet. Clay's voice cut off mid-sentence. Maggie's glass stopped halfway to her mouth. Wyatt's head turned.
My pulse was hammering behind my jaw. I'd said more words in thirty seconds than I'd said in a month. The space between us was three feet and closing by the second. Jessica was breathing hard, gripping the edge of the bar behind her so hard her knuckles went white.
"You think I don't know that?" Her voice cracked. The brightness in her eyes shifted from fire to glass. "You think I don't know I fucked it up? I've been replaying every goddamn second of that meeting."