Cara #3
So I did. Paige listened—fully, without interrupting, her wine glass held loosely in both hands. When I finished, she was quiet for a moment, looking at me with an expression that was warm and careful at the same time.
“You’re different when you talk about him,” she said. “I don’t mean that in the way people usually mean it. I mean you’re more—” she paused, choosing it carefully, “—present. Like you’re actually inside your own life instead of managing it from a slight distance.”
I looked at my wine. “Is that what I usually do?”
“Sometimes,” she said, without judgment. “Not with us. But with other things. Other people.” She tilted her head. “He doesn’t make you feel like you have to manage anything, does he?”
It wasn’t a question. I answered it anyway. “No,” I said quietly. “He doesn’t.”
She nodded like she’d known that already and was glad to have it confirmed. I did not tell her about the moment before the kiss, the held breath, the stairwell, and what he’d said after. That was mine.
Paige looked at me over the rim of her glass. “He kissed you good,” she said.
I pressed my face into Wentworth’s fur. He tolerated it with dignity.
“Not asking for details,” she said. “Just observing. You have the face.”
“I don’t have a face.”
“You absolutely have a face, and it’s a very good face, and I’m happy for you.” She took a sip of her wine. “He’s a good man, Cara. I see him every shift. He doesn’t pretend to be a good man—he just is. That’s rarer than people think.”
I looked at her. “I know,” I said softly. “Especially now.”
My phone rang from the coffee table. We both looked at it. Jasper’s name on the screen, and the warmth that moved through me at the sight of it was immediate and embarrassing, and I didn’t try to hide it from Paige because there was no point.
She was already uncurling herself from the couch.
“Go to your room,” she said, in the tone of someone issuing a reasonable directive.
“And remember what I said. He’s one of the good ones.
Let him be good to you. Don’t talk yourself out of it.
” She picked up her wine and her crackers and pointed at the bedroom door. “Go.”
I got up with the phone in my hand and walked into my bedroom, and pulled the door closed behind me. Stood in the dark without turning on the light. Let it ring once more.
Then I answered.
“Hi.” His voice. I had not heard it since the landing, and hearing it now was like finding something I had been misplacing all day without knowing I’d been looking. “How was your day?”
“Long. I’m tired.” True enough. “The shop was busier than I expected.”
“Yeah?” A small pause. “You okay?”
I closed my eyes. The dark bedroom. The phone against my ear. Three miles of Oregon night between us. “I’m okay. Just a long day.”
“Okay.” He accepted it without pushing. “How was the morning, before the long day got started? Did you open all right?”
My heart kicked up a notch. He had been paying attention to what my Saturdays looked like. “The morning was really good,” I said, and let a little of the truth into my voice.
I could hear the smile in the silence before he answered. “Good.” Another beat, quiet and warm. “I went to the hardware store. Bought some lumber.”
“For what?”
“I’m going to build a bookshelf. Somehow, I’ve accumulated some books in the last few weeks. They’re in a stack on my dresser. It’s an embarrassingly large stack. That many books require solid shelving.”
I laughed—small and involuntary. “How embarrassing?”
“Come see for yourself. Tomorrow, if you want. I’ll be here all day. I’ll feed you and show you the river and show you the most embarrassing, sloppy pile of books you have ever seen in your life.”
I held the phone a little tighter. “I want to. I’ll come tomorrow.”
A breath on the other end of the line. Just a breath, but I felt it. “Good. I’ll be here all day. I’m off work.”
“Goodnight, Jasper.”
“Goodnight, sweetheart. Sleep well.”
We hung up. I stood in the dark bedroom for a long moment, the phone warm in my hand. Sweetheart… I wanted to be his sweetheart in the worst way.
Tomorrow I was going to see his face. I was going to sit at his kitchen table with coffee and the sound of the river through the window, and I was going to tell him about Eric. I wanted to see his face when I did. Paige was right; it was better this way.
I went back out to the living room. Paige was on the couch with a paperback from my shelf open in her hand. She held up one finger until she finished her sentence, then looked up. “Well?”
“I didn’t tell him.”
“Good. Tell him when you aren’t freaked and do it face-to-face.
” She shifted Knightley over and lifted her arm, and I settled back into my spot beside her, and she let the arm come down around my shoulders the way she had been doing since I was a little kid.
The lamp threw its soft yellow pool across the two of us.
She turned back to her book without moving her arm.
I closed my eyes.
I was still happy. Even now, with Eric in the middle of the day behind me, I was still running on that same low, warm current.
I had not expected that. I had expected today to take something from me, and instead I was sitting in my apartment with my sister’s arm around me and a plan for tomorrow that felt like a door left open—light coming through the crack of it.
I fell asleep on Paige’s shoulder somewhere in the middle of the next hour, between one thought and the next.
When I surfaced briefly much later, the lamp was still on, and Paige was still reading, and Darcy had migrated to my lap. Paige looked down when I stirred.
“Still on guard duty,” she said quietly. “Go back to sleep.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too. Even though you’re crushing my arm. Sleep. You’re safe. I’m here.”
I closed my eyes, and the last thing I was aware of before I went under properly was the feeling of the kiss still in my mouth—and the thought of the cabin, and the river, and tomorrow. And how lucky I was to have a big sister like Paige.