“Oh! Sorry, no, I just meant ...” She trailed off, eyes narrowing, mouth puckering. “Yeah, I’m surprised. I expected a lot more plaid and animal heads mounted on the walls. It doesn’t even smell bad in here. Very impressive.”
“Wow, the bar is in hell.”
She grimaced. “It really is. In my defense, all I hear from my unmarried friends are dating horror stories. You wouldn’t believe how many single men in this town put their mattresses right on the floor.”
I leaned down to unlace my boots. “Not even a box spring?”
“Nope.”
“Heathens.”
I kicked my shoes off, and she followed suit.
“Come on,” I said. “I’ll show you where the bathroom is.”
We headed upstairs, and I held the door open for her, thankful, again, that I’d recently scrubbed everything down and it was clean. “Want me to show you how the shower knobs work?”
“Yes, please,” she said in a small voice. She looked like she was starting to retreat into herself, like she was reliving bad memories, or was too overwhelmed by everything that had happened to be present in this moment.
I spoke slowly, my voice soft as I got the water going and showed her how to adjust the temperature before pointing out where the towels and extra toiletries were. Afterward, I headed toward the door.
“I’ll get dinner started while you’re—”
She grabbed my arm. “Wait.”
I turned back to see her staring up at me with wide, terrified eyes.
“Please . . . don’t leave me.”
Shit.
I pulled her into another hug, my arms banded around her shoulders, my heart breaking for her all over again. “I’m not leaving,” I told her. “I’ll just be downstairs. Hell, you’llprobably hear me banging around down there the whole time.”
Emma shook her head against my chest. “Can you just ... stay in here?”
I stiffened, and she must have felt it because she scrambled to correct herself.
“I’m sorry. You don’t have to. God, you must think I’m such a baby.”
“I don’t. And I’ll stay,” I told her. “It makes sense you wouldn’t want to be alone. I was just worried you’d end up feeling uncomfortable with a strange man loitering out here.”
She pulled back enough to look up at me. “You’re not a strange man.”
“I am, though. Like you said, we haven’t spoken since senior year of high school when you thanked me for handing you a pen.”
She blinked.
Whoops.Probably shouldn’t have gone into that much detail. It made me sound like a stalker.
“But ... that doesn’t mean I don’t know you,” she said. “As much as this town talks? I’ve never heard a word spoken against you aside from you being labeledcreepybecause of your job. Even Maisie said good things after you broke up.”
A surprised exhale gusted out of me. Maisie and I hadn’t ended on the best of terms, even though the breakup had been mostly amicable. She wanted out of our small town, wanted to start a family and move to the city where there was more work and better schools, while I was happy right where I was and didn’t know if I even wanted kids. We’d decided the right thing to do was call it quits before we got in too deep and ended up really hurting each other, but that didn’t make it any easier.
Emma blew out a breath. “I promise I’m not trying to, like, hit on you. I just ... I thought I was going to die alone down there, and now I’m worried that if I’m left alone again, I’ll feel like I’m right back in that coffin.”
I held her tighter. “I know I keep saying it, but I am just so fucking sorry, Emma.”
She sniffed. “Thank you.”
