Cara
Jasper was easy to talk to. He’d been easy to talk to yesterday, too, but in my own kitchen, with the soup warm between us and the wildflowers on the table and Wentworth still gazing adoringly at his elbow, he was easier.
He sat in my chair like he’d been sitting in it for years.
He knew when to talk and when to let the pause hold.
He laughed in that small, quiet way that wasn’t really a laugh, and once, briefly, when I told him about Wentworth trying to eat the vacuum cord, he laughed out loud, and I had to look down at my bowl for a second because the sound did something ridiculous to my heart.
When we finished eating, he stood up before I could and started gathering the dishes.
I protested. He ignored the protest and started running water in the sink before I’d finished saying You’re the guest.
“I wash,” he said. “You dry. I have a system.”
“That’s not a system, that’s a division of labor.”
“Well, it is a labor lunch,” he teased. “Right?”
“Fair enough.” We stood side by side at the sink. The kitchen was small enough that standing side by side meant actually side by side—his arm was maybe four inches from mine, and every time one of us shifted, the distance got smaller.
He handed me a wet plate, and my fingers brushed his on the rim.
I didn’t pull back. Neither did he. His fingers rested against mine for just a second longer than they had any reason to, and then I took the plate from him, and felt the heat of where his hand had been on mine for a full ten seconds afterward.
A little later, he reached past me for the dish towel, and his chest brushed against my shoulder on the way, and I forgot how to breathe for a full half-second. When he pulled the towel back, the faintest, most deliberate amount of pressure trailed across my back as his arm passed behind me.
I did not look at him, and I could feel him not looking at me.
There was a small, pleased tilt at the corner of his mouth that I caught in my peripheral vision and refused to acknowledge directly, because I was pretty sure if I acknowledged it I was going to do something like drop a plate or say something I couldn’t take back.
“You’re doing that on purpose,” I said to the sink.
“Doing what?”
“You know what. Flirting. Trying to get me all—um…”
“Maybe I am.”
“I’m going to start dropping dishes.”
“I’ll catch them for you.”
I set the last bowl into the drying rack, he turned off the water, and I stepped carefully sideways out of his space before I could do anything embarrassing.
I made us more tea because I wasn’t ready for him to leave yet, and he accepted the second mug because I was fairly sure he wasn’t ready to leave yet either.
We carried them into the living room and sat down on my soft, well-loved couch with the mismatched pillows and the knit blanket I’d never bothered to fold properly.
He sat on one end. I sat on the other, not crowding him, but not hiding on the far arm either. Our knees were maybe six inches apart.
Knightley jumped up almost immediately and settled himself into the narrow space between us, arranging his paws like a small, dignified chaperone. I nearly laughed out loud.
“He does that sometimes,” I said.
“Chaperones?”
“He just likes to be in the middle of things.”
Jasper scratched Knightley between the shoulder blades, and Knightley tucked his head down into his paws and started to purr. And then, very quietly, Darcy jumped down from the bookshelf and padded over to the couch and hopped up onto the back of it, directly behind Jasper’s right shoulder.
I stopped breathing for a second.
Darcy had not, in the history of my knowing him, ever settled near a new person in the first hour of meeting them.
Darcy was a cat who took weeks. Darcy sometimes took months.
Darcy was currently a cat who was curled up on the back of my couch about three inches from Jasper’s neck, eyes half-closed, tail draped down against his shoulder blade as if it had always belonged there.
I did not comment on it. I was going to think about it later.
I was going to think about it a lot. But I did not comment on it.
Jasper’s mouth twitched, just barely, and I knew he’d figured out exactly what had happened and was also not going to comment on it, but I could tell he knew he scored points, both cat points and Cara points, and somehow his deliberate silence about it meant more than any comment would have.
We sat on the couch with my tea going slowly cold in my hands and the afternoon light shifting across the living room floor, and for a while neither of us said anything, which should have been awkward and wasn’t.
Knightley had claimed Jasper’s lap with the serene confidence of a cat who considered himself an excellent judge of character and had rendered his verdict.
Jasper looked down at him with an expression of mild surprise, then settled his hand on his back with the careful practicality of a man who had been assessed and was trying to pass.
“He doesn’t do that with everyone,” I said.
“Should I be flattered?”
“Knightley has very high standards. Wentworth will sit on anyone if he has the right motivation. Darcy sits on no one.” I tucked my feet beneath me. “I think you’ve been approved.”
“What does Wentworth think? He’s over there.”
I glanced over to where Wentworth was sitting on the arm of the chair across the room, staring at Jasper with the focused intensity of a cat who had opinions and was still forming them.
“He’ll come around. He always does. He’s very food-motivated. Do you have anything in your pockets?”
Jasper chuckled. “Nothing.”
“That explains the hesitation.”
He looked back down at Knightley, who had begun to purr with the low, steady rumble of a well-maintained engine. “So you named them after Austen characters,” he said.
“I did.”
“Knightley, Wentworth, and Darcy.” He looked at me with a grin. “No Wickham?”
“I would never do that to a cat,” I said, genuinely appalled. “That would be a terrible thing to do to a cat.”
He laughed—a real one, the kind that reached his eyes—and something in my chest responded to it immediately and warmly. “Fair enough,” he said.
We talked about the shop. About a customer who’d come in last week looking for a book whose title she couldn’t remember, the author she couldn’t remember, whose plot, when she described it, turned out to belong to six different books.
“What did you do?” he asked.
“I made her a cup of tea, and we figured it out together. It took forty minutes.” I smiled. “It was one of my favorite days this month.”
He shook his head slowly, not dismissively—more like he was filing something away. “Only you,” he said.
“She was eighty-three, and she’d read the book in 1987 and just wanted to find it again. How could I not help?”
“Did she buy it?”
“She bought three. One for herself and two for friends who she said would also love it.” I looked at my tea. “That’s the best part of the whole job, really. That’s what I love about it. You get to be the person who helps someone find the thing they didn’t know they were looking for.”
He was quiet for a moment, looking at me in that way he had. “You’re good at that,” he said. “More broadly than just books.”
I looked back at him and didn’t say anything, because sometimes the way he said things made responding feel unnecessary.
“Tell me about the trail,” I said, after a moment. “Past the old mill. You mentioned it once. A long time ago. Do you still like it up there?”
His face opened as he smiled at me, surprised I’d remembered.
“It goes up along the ridge above the falls. You can see three counties from the top on a clear day. I found it when I was a kid—I needed somewhere to go that wasn’t full of people asking how I was, and it was always empty.
” He looked at the window. “When I came back, I couldn’t run it for a long time.
Because of the knee. Just started walking it again on good days. ”
“Is it feeling any better? The knee?”
“Getting there.” He glanced back at me. “Slow.”
“You hate that,” I said. Not a question.
The corner of his mouth moved. “I hate that,” he confirmed.
“I’ll bet.” I turned my mug in my hands. “You’ve spent your whole adult life doing exactly what your body was told to do, on demand, without argument. And now it’s arguing.”
He looked at me for a moment. “That’s exactly what it is,” he said, like I’d described something he hadn’t found the words for yet.
We sat with that for a moment, comfortable in the way of two people who had stopped needing to fill every silence.
“What about you?” he said. “Where would you go if you could go anywhere. Right now, tomorrow, no obligations.”
I didn’t have to think about it. “Scotland,” I said. “Specifically, a very small bookshop in Edinburgh that I’ve been dreaming of for years and never managed to get to. I want to spend an entire afternoon in it and then walk along the water and eat something I can’t pronounce.”
“Just the bookshop and the walk?”
“And the thing I can’t pronounce,” I said. “That’s non-negotiable.”
He smiled. “What about after Edinburgh?”
“Somewhere with very old libraries.” I looked at the ceiling. “I want to stand in a room full of books that are older than everything and feel that for a minute. That kind of accumulated human thought, all in one place.” I paused. “That probably sounds strange.”
“It doesn’t,” he said. “It sounds like you.”
I looked at him. He was looking back at me with that steady, open expression that I was beginning to understand was just how he looked at things he cared about, and the afternoon light flowed quiet and gold across the room, and the cats were purring, and I had not once looked at the time.
“What about you?” I asked. “Anywhere.”
He thought about it genuinely, which I appreciated.
“Norway,” he said finally. “I want to see the northern lights. I’ve been in enough dark places to know that the dark isn’t always the same, and I want to see that particular kind.
” He paused. “And I want to be somewhere cold and quiet where nobody needs anything from me for about a week.”
“That’s very specific.”
“I’ve had time to think about it.”
“Norway,” I said. “And Scotland.”
“Could be the same trip,” he said, easily, like it was merely a practical observation.
I looked at my tea, which had gone entirely cold, and said nothing, and felt the warmth of the afternoon and the weight of what he’d just said sitting in the room together, and didn’t try to do anything about either of them.
At some point, I realized we had been sitting there for hours.
The realization arrived with a quiet, two-sided feeling I did not entirely know how to handle.
On one side, this is the best I have felt in a very long time.
On the other, this was happening very fast, and I did not yet know where it was going.
Jasper checked his phone. Something shifted in his face. Not much. Just the small, inward pull of a man remembering he had somewhere to be.
“I should head out,” he said, and he sounded genuinely reluctant about it. “I’m on the schedule at Paige’s tonight.”
“Okay.”
Neither of us moved for a second. Then I made myself get up, because if I didn’t make myself get up first, I was pretty sure neither of us was going to.
I walked him to the door. He stopped and turned back to me. The hallway was narrow, and he was close, closer than he needed to be for the space. I could smell the faint clean scent of his soap and something underneath it that was just him, and I had to tip my chin up a little to look at him.
“Thank you for lunch,” he said.
“Thank you for the flowers.”
He lifted his hand, slowly, and reached out and tucked a piece of my hair behind my ear.
His knuckles grazed the soft edge of the scarf as they passed, and then the backs of his fingers brushed along my cheek on the way down, and stayed there for just a second longer than they needed to. My heart stopped.
He was looking down at me, and I was looking up at him, and the moment stretched, and stretched, and I was about ninety percent sure he was going to kiss me and ten percent sure I was going to kiss him first, and the air in my little hallway felt very thin.
He didn’t kiss me. Instead, he leaned down—slow and deliberate—and pressed his forehead gently against mine.
I made a small sound I had not meant to make.
His hand was still warm on my cheek. I could feel his breath.
I closed my eyes because I had to. He smelled clean and solid and safe, and his forehead against mine felt somehow more intimate than a kiss would have, like he was giving me something instead of taking it.
“I’ll see you soon,” he said quietly.
“Okay.”
He pulled back. Slowly. His hand lingered on my cheek for another second and then dropped.
He smiled at me—the real one, the corners of his eyes doing the crinkle thing I’d begun to crave seeing—and he reached for the doorknob, and he was gone.
The door closed softly behind him. The cats emerged to see what the fuss was about.
I leaned back against the closed door and slid down it until I was sitting on the floor. I didn’t mean to. My legs just stopped wanting to hold me up, and the floor was right there, and I accepted the situation with as much dignity as I could manage, which was not very much.
Wentworth padded over almost immediately and climbed into my lap.
“I am in so much trouble,” I told him.
He purred.
I looked down the hallway toward the kitchen.
I could see the edge of the mason jar of wildflowers on the table, a sliver of the couch cushion with the faint indent where Jasper had been sitting, and the two empty tea mugs on the coffee table.
I pressed two fingers to my forehead, right where his had been.
And then, because I could not help it, I thought about the other thing.
There’d be travel. A firm I knew nothing about, a guy he’d served with, a decision he hadn’t made.
It could be a few trips a year. It could be months.
It could be nothing. It could be everything.
I had no way of knowing yet, and I didn’t get to ask, because I didn’t have a claim on the answer. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
Wentworth reached up with one small paw and patted my chin, which was what he did when he wanted my attention and couldn’t think of a better way to ask for it.
“Tomorrow,” I told him, “I am going to freak out about all of this.”
He patted my chin again.
“Today,” I said, “I am just going to sit here with you and let myself feel it.”
He seemed to find this acceptable. I sat on the floor with my cat in my lap and the scarf wrapped around my fingers and the ghost of Jasper’s forehead still pressed against mine, and I let myself feel it.