Jasper #3
“That,” she said, “is exactly the problem.”
I squeezed her hand gently. “Your food is getting cold.”
She looked down at her plate like she’d forgotten it existed, which I was fairly certain she had, and picked up her fork, and I watched her collect herself and felt something I wasn’t ready to name pressing outward from behind my ribs, warm and insistent, and kept it where it was.
She took a bite, chewed, and looked at me with the expression of someone who had decided to be okay and mostly was. “Your turn,” she said. “The book that wrecked you. I told you mine.”
“East of Eden.”
Her eyes lit up. She remembered. “So you did read it.”
“You didn’t exactly give me a choice,” I said.
She sat up slightly. “I gave you a choice.”
“Cara. You put it on the table in front of me and said if I didn’t read it, you were going to have serious concerns about my character.”
“That’s a choice,” she said. “That’s clearly a choice.”
“That’s an ultimatum delivered by a fifteen-year-old.”
“An effective one,” she said, completely without remorse, and pointed her fork at me. “You’re welcome.”
I laughed—a real one, the kind that caught me off guard—and she grinned at me across the table with the unrepentant satisfaction of someone who had been right about something and was only now getting to enjoy it properly.
“And?”
“And I read it in four days and didn’t sleep much.
” I took a bite of my steak, chewed, and swallowed as I watched her try not to gloat.
“So, the fifth time I read it, I was on deployment. Small paperback I kept in my pack until the spine gave out completely. Cover went soft as cloth.” I looked at her.
“I’ve read it five times. I’ll read it five more times before I’m done with it. ”
She had stopped eating again. Her fork was resting against the edge of her plate, and she was looking at me with that expression—the one that made the rest of the room recede.
“What’s the part that stays with you?” she asked.
I thought about how to say it right. “There’s a line near the end.
About how trying to be perfect is what keeps you from being good.
That once you let go of perfect, there’s room to actually be good.
” I looked up at her. “I’ve needed that line at different points in my life for different reasons. It keeps being true in new ways.”
She went very still across the table. Not the stillness of politeness or patience—the stillness of someone who has just heard their own private thing said out loud by someone else, unexpectedly, in the middle of a restaurant, and needed a second to absorb it.
“I have three different colors of ink underlining that passage in my copy,” she said.
I looked at her. “Three colors?”
“One for each time I needed it to mean something different.”
I thought about myself sitting in a school library while she told me, with complete conviction, that this book was going to matter to me.
I thought about the deployment paperback with the ruined spine.
I thought about all the years between that library table and this corner booth and the strange way certain things kept finding you when you thought they were lost.
“We’re going to have to compare copies,” I said.
Her mouth slid into a radiant smile. “Come over, and I’ll show you all three colors.”
I shook my head slowly. “You keep inviting me to your apartment. Or asking to come to mine,” I teased.
She closed her eyes for one long second, and when she opened them, she had the expression of a woman who had decided not to be embarrassed about something and was committing to that decision fully. “I’m going to keep doing it,” she said. “I’ve accepted this about myself.”
“Good,” I said. “Don’t stop.”
She looked at me across the table and smiled, and I picked up my glass, looked back at her, and felt the thing behind my ribs pressing outward again, warm and patient, waiting for the right moment.
It wasn’t yet. But it was coming.
She looked at me across the table, and I looked back at her, and somewhere in the middle of that, the conversation had run its course—not emptied out, just arrived somewhere that didn’t need more words put on top of it.
The restaurant crowd had thinned around us without either of us noticing, the evening having done what good evenings do and gone faster than it should have.
The check came, and I took it before she’d registered it was there.
“Jasper—”
“No,” I said pleasantly.
She pressed her lips together in a way that meant she had opinions about this and had decided to keep them to herself for now, which I appreciated.
She reached for her coat, and I stood and helped her into it, and she stilled slightly when my hands settled briefly at her shoulders, and I let them rest there for just a second before I stepped back and let her have her space.
We walked out hand in hand through the dining room, and the room was warm behind us and the night air outside was cool and crisp, and Cara turned to look up at me on the sidewalk with her hair down and her cheeks slightly pink from the warmth of the restaurant and I thought about Eric Michaelson bringing her here and making it feel like something to endure, and I thought that some people did not understand what they were standing in front of, and I was not going to make that mistake, not ever, not once.
“That was the best dinner of my life,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Same,” I said. “Nothing close.”
She looked up at me for a moment, something in her expression open and unguarded in a way she wasn’t always, and then she said quietly, “I’m not ready to say goodnight. I know we have to eventually. I just—tonight was something, and I’m not quite ready for it to end.”
I looked at her standing there on the sidewalk outside the restaurant where someone else had made her feel like a problem to be managed and felt everything I hadn’t said all evening press forward at once, and held it where it was, because tonight wasn’t the night for it, but let myself feel everything else without apology.
“Then it won’t,” I said. “I’ll drive you home the long way. We can talk, or you can just look out the window. Either way, I’m not in any hurry to get you home.”
Her face went completely soft. She looked at me like I’d said exactly the right thing, which I supposed I had, and squeezed my hand.
We walked to the truck, and I opened her door, and she looked up at me one more time before she got in, and I thought that I had spent most of my adult life leaving this town and that standing here in the dark outside a restaurant in Willowmist Falls, I could not imagine wanting to be anywhere else on earth.
I closed her door. Walked around to the driver’s side. Sat for a second before I started the engine, hands on the wheel, the night quiet around us.
Then I pulled out onto the road and drove her home slowly, the long way, and she looked out the window at the passing streets, and neither of us said anything for a while, and it was the best silence I had ever experienced.