Jasper
Tonight.
The word landed in my chest with a warmth I had not felt in any morning in a very long time, and I lay there in the gray light and let myself think about it for longer than I usually let myself think about anything.
Tonight I was picking Cara up at her apartment at seven o’clock to take her to The Hearthstone for dinner.
I had been thinking about it for the better part of two days.
I was now going to spend the next few hours thinking about almost nothing else.
My knee was a little better than it had been yesterday, which I took as the universe doing me a small favor.
I made the bed quickly and tightly, the muscle memory the Marines had given me that I had never been able to break and had stopped trying to.
I went to the kitchen and started the coffee.
Before I did anything else, I picked up my phone and dialed Emmett.
He picked up on the second ring.
“Brother.” I could hear the smile in his voice already. “How are we doing this morning?”
“I’m all right.”
He let a few seconds go by. “You are doing only all right on the morning of your first real date with Cara Darlington?”
“Yes.”
“Jasper.” His voice shifted. Quieter now, the teasing gone out of it. “Have you told her about the offer yet? The full scope of it. Everything.”
I closed my eyes at the kitchen window. “Not yet.”
A long silence on the other end of the line. Emmett was a man who could use silence the way some men used a raised voice, and he used this one fully, and I let him, because I had earned it.
“Emmett. What?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You are saying a great number of things. I can hear you saying all of them.”
“I’m just standing here in my kitchen drinking my coffee and thinking about how many days it has been since you promised me you would tell her.”
“It has been three days.”
“Four. It has been four, Jasper. I am counting them on my fingers as we speak.”
I set my coffee down on the counter. “I am going to tell her. I am going to tell her after our date. I’ll tell her this weekend.
” I heard how it sounded. I pushed through it anyway.
“I don’t want to walk into tonight with this sitting on top of it—I haven’t figured out how to have the conversation yet, and I don’t want to.
Not tonight. Let me take her to dinner first. I just want—I want this, okay? ”
Another silence. I could hear him drinking his coffee on the other end of the line, slow and deliberate. “Okay,” he said finally.
“Have dinner. I won’t be annoying about it tonight.” A pause. “But Jasper. I’m calling you on Monday. And if you haven’t told her by then, I’m going to drive to your cabin and sit in your kitchen and be annoying about it in person, directly, at close range, for as long as it takes.”
“Understood.”
“Good.” His voice warmed again. “I love you. I want you to be happy. Go be good to her tonight.”
“Love you too. I will.”
I hung up. I stood at the small table by the window with my coffee for a few minutes and watched the river.
The mallards were back. The light was the soft pale gold of a Friday in early fall in Oregon, and somewhere across town, a woman I was falling for was probably already at her bookshop opening up for the day.
I made myself eat something. Then I picked up the phone again to confirm the reservation. I picked up my coffee, drank the rest of it cold, and went to get on with my day.
The morning passed in pieces I would not entirely remember later.
I drove the half hour out to a small used bookshop in the next town over—a place I had discovered a few months ago on a long drive nowhere in particular and had been meaning to come back to.
I had been there exactly once. I remembered exactly where the book was.
Third shelf from the bottom, left side of the poetry section.
A signed edition of Devotions by Mary Oliver.
It had made me think of Cara—we read “How I Go Into the Woods” together a few days before I graduated.
I had picked it up that day and held it for a long minute, then put it back, remembering the look on Cara’s face after I’d read it aloud.
Buying it back then would have meant admitting something to myself I hadn’t been ready to face.
I picked it up now. It was still there. Nobody else had bought it in the months I had been gone. That felt like a small piece of cosmic permission.
I took it to the counter, and the shopkeeper rang me up without saying much. Then she wrapped the book in brown paper and tied it with kitchen twine.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re welcome.” She paused, her hands still resting on the parcel. “She’s going to love it.”
“How do you—?”
“Honey, men don’t buy hardcover Mary Oliver poetry for themselves. Especially rare, nearly impossible to find signed copies like this one.” She slid it across the counter to me. “Take it. Go home. Drive safe.”
I stopped at Pine & Pages on my way back to the cabin. I had not planned to. I just couldn’t quite drive past it.
The bell over the door made its small, soft sound when I pushed it open.
Cara was behind the counter, ringing up a customer—an older man buying a stack of three books—and she looked up when the bell chimed.
Her face did the small, private thing it always did when it was me coming through the door instead of a stranger.
The shopkeeper’s smile slid in over the top of it a half second later, but I had seen the first version. The first version was mine.
“Hi,” she said, in the warm public voice she used for customers, except the hi was tilted just slightly toward me in a way the older man would not have caught.
“Hi.”
I went and stood by the new releases table near the front and pretended to look at books while she finished the transaction.
After he left, she came around the counter.
She was wearing a cream cardigan over a soft gray t-shirt and the same jeans she’d had on the day we had lunch, and her hair was pulled back at the nape of her neck with a small clip, and she was looking at me with an expression that meant she was trying very hard not to give everything away before tonight.
“You’re not supposed to be here until seven,” she said. But she kept walking toward me when she said it.
“I know.” I turned from the books to face her. “I just wanted to see you for a second.”
She stopped close enough that I could smell the faint trace of vanilla and old paper coming off her sweater. She closed her eyes.
“Jasper. I’ve been thinking about you all morning.”
“Yeah?”
“I have been completely useless today.” She said it with the fond exasperation of someone reporting a disaster they are not actually upset about.
I looked at her for a second before I said anything.
Not because I didn’t know what to say, but because I wanted to take it in properly—the fact that she’d said it at all, that she’d walked up to me and just told me, without hedging it or wrapping it in something safer.
Cara, who chose her words carefully and kept the tender ones close, stood in front of me telling me plainly that I’d been on her mind.
I huffed a small laugh. “Useless how?”
“I mislabeled an entire box of mysteries as romance.” She opened her eyes. “Which, to be fair, is arguably a reasonable categorization, but it’s not the system.”
I lifted my hand and brushed two fingers along the edge of her jaw, slow and deliberate, watching her face while I did it.
Her breath caught—a small involuntary thing—and I felt it register all the way through me, that she was affected, that being this close to her and watching her respond to my touch was doing something to my ability to think in anything other than very immediate terms. She was warm and beautiful and looking up at me with those eyes that had always seen the real me, and she’d spent her morning thinking about me, and I was done pretending any of that wasn’t exactly what I wanted.
“Good,” I said quietly. “Me too.”
I leaned in and pressed my mouth against her cheek, just to the left of the corner of her mouth, the way I had done before.
When I pulled back, her eyes were a little glassy, her hand half-raised toward my arm without quite having decided to reach for it.
“I will be at your door at seven,” I said quietly.
“Okay.” She breathed it more than she said it.
I held her gaze for one more second, and then I made myself step back, and I made myself walk to the door, and I made myself push it open and step out onto the sidewalk before I could lose my nerve and stay.
I drove back to the cabin slowly, the book of poems on the passenger seat, my hands a little less steady on the wheel than they had been an hour ago.
I showered and shaved. I stood in front of my closet longer than usual, even though I had pulled the shirt out two days ago and set it aside, and knew exactly what I was wearing.
The shirt was dark blue, soft cotton, a button-down I had owned for years and never worn out because I never had occasion to wear it.
I put it on. Tucked it into the nicest pair of jeans I owned. Put on my best pair of boots.
I looked at myself in the small bathroom mirror and tried to see what Cara might see when she opened the door and found me standing there, and I was not entirely sure what I saw, but I hoped it was enough.
I picked up the book of poems from the kitchen table, still wrapped in its brown paper. I put on my jacket. I grabbed my keys. I stood in the middle of the cabin for one long, quiet second, examining my small, ordinary life.
The drive into town was quiet and empty, the roads cool and dim under the early-evening light, the sky doing its slow Oregon-fall thing, where the gold turned to lavender, then to a soft, deep blue at the edges.