He started to walk away, but she stepped in front of him. “Wait, I’m sorry…what?”
“Your brother asked me to drive you home. I’ll be waiting for you outside when you’re ready to go.” He repeated, verbatim, the information he’d just told her.
“No, I caught all that the first time, I was asking for you to fill in the details for me. I sort of have whiplash from the sharp U-turn you just steered that conversation.”
The corners of AJ’s mouth tilted up in a grin, and he got the same look in his eyes that he’d had when she’d told him that she’d eavesdropped, it was like he was amused by her. Although Poppy didn’t know the man standing in front of her looking so good he had her mouth, and other parts of her body, watering like Niagara Falls, she found herself filled with pride at the accomplishment of making him nearly smile. Twice. She had a feeling that didn’t happen that often. He seemed very…controlled.
“My cousin got sick on your brother, and then my aunt slipped in it and punched him in the nose.”
“What?!” Poppy shrieked. “Is he okay?!” Her head spun around looking for Liam. She realized then she hadn’t seenhim the past thirty minutes or so, not since she’d gone over to ask Frankie about what was going on between the two of them but then got sidetracked when Karina Black and Lauren joined them.
“He was fine the last time I saw him. He left to go clean up, and he asked me to take you home.”
AJ paused, so she looked back at him.
He continued, “I don’t do well in crowds, so I'm going to wait outside for you.”
AJ began to walk around her, presumably out of the reception.
“I’m ready to go now,” she blurted out. Thankfully, her fire hydrant of admission didn’t feel the need to confess the only reason she came to the wedding was because of him. “I just need to get my coat.”
Without saying a word, AJ followed her to the coat check. Once she’d gathered her coat, they walked out to his SUV. There was a slight drizzle, and the air smelled like fresh pine and rain, two of her favorite scents. He helped her into the passenger-side door like a true gentleman, and her heart pounded as she waited for him to climb into the driver’s side.
The first thing he did when he started the ignition was ask for her address, deadpan and direct, like it was a trivia question on a televised game show.
Poppy recited, “One-oh-three Fernwood Lane, Pine Ridge.” As soon as she told him, a realization came over her.
“Where are you staying?” she asked.
“At the resort.”
Her eyes widened, and she shook her head. “You can’t drive thirty minutes to Pine Ridge and then thirty minutes back here just to take me home, that’s ridiculous.” She bent down to get her purse. “I’ll call an Uber, or walk, or hitchhike with a semi-truck full of potatoes.”
AJ reached over the console and covered her hand with his. It was so large compared to hers, it swallowed it up. She lifted her gaze to his, and both the look in his eye and his tone were a practice in calm authority. “I want to.”
“Are you sure? I don’t want to be an imposition.”
His voice was so matter-of-fact it anchored her to the seat. “I wouldn’t have agreed to take you home if I minded.”
There was a finality to his words, an almost mathematical certainty, or a promise that fueled her nervous energy with anticipation for what was to come the same way a teacher writing “See me after class” in the margin of homework would, except that was negative, and this was very much positive.
She settled back into her seat, the belt flattened across her chest, and had to resist the urge to insist he stay at the resort so she didn’t inconvenience him. He punched in her address, and then Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” began to play. She was instantly transported back to high school in the auditorium, slow dancing on the basketball court at a formal dance. A simpler time when her entire life felt full of promises and possibilities.
AJ’s SUV glided through the downtown heart of Hope Falls, its headlights sweeping the glossy, rain-dappled wooden sidewalks and striped awnings, the reflections bouncing from the old plate-glass storefronts. Main Street had always reminded her of a snow globe, twinkle lights strung across the avenue and casting a soft golden glow over the rooftops and eaves. As they passed Sue Ann’s Café—its neon sign haloed in the pale blue mist—Poppy pressed her palm to the cool window and watched a pair of teens huddle under the café awning, laughing and shaking the rain from their hair before darting across the street to The Sweet Tooth Bakery. The lamplight made their faces look momentarily immortal, preserved in the amber hush of small-town night.
She’d spent years fantasizing about living here, part of the perpetual hum of neighbors who knew your birthday and your dog’s name and the precise spelling of your last name on the Christmas card list. Volunteering for the annual festivals the town was famous for. She wanted to belong, to become one of the regulars who claimed the same bar stool at JT’s Roadhouse every Friday night, who could TP the mayor’s house without getting arrested—she might have outgrown that one—who made cakes for bake sales and held car washes for the booster clubs. She wanted roots, routine, and visible proof that she existed and was accounted for every day, not a secret to be kept. Her mother’s one bedroom apartment on the edges of Pine Ridge had always felt six degrees removed from people living full lives, like the dress rehearsal for a life she wasn’t sure she’d ever be brave enough to headline.
Now, with AJ next to her behind the wheel as they drove through, the town’s intimacy felt magnified, the storefronts and fairy lights blurring to a Morse code of longing. They passed Hope Falls Hardware Shop, Jenna’s salon, The Beauty Spot, and her brother’s medical practice, Hope Falls Family Medicine. Next door to him, The Secret Garden Flower Shop had pale violets drooping in a basket by the door, and even they looked inviting in the rain. Poppy tried to memorize the feeling, the sense of home she imagined radiating from each window, and the possibility that she, too, could belong somewhere for real, not just as a bystander.
She glanced over at AJ. He drove one-handed, his other arm sprawled across the console in a way that looked effortless but also slightly guarded, as if he were bracing himself against an unpredictable world. His jaw was tense, eyes fixed ahead, but he seemed less tense than he had earlier in the evening. She could feel the current between them, a low, steady hum, not the friction she was used to with other men. It was as if they wereboth moving in the same current, the aligning of their souls a deliberate inevitability.
The silence that stretched between them in the SUV was also so unlike any other silence she’d ever endured on a car ride that it was, in its own way, exhilarating. She wasn’t sure why he was being quiet, but she felt that was the vibe. She liked that he didn’t feel the need to listen to himself speak or ask her mundane questions that he wouldn’t actually listen to the answers of. She hoped he’d stay for at least a drink at her house, but if not, if this was all they had, she was going to enjoy the electrical flow between them as they drove through the winding mountain roads…she just wanted to marinate in it for as long as possible.
9
AJ couldn’t believethat Poppy was seated beside him and not speaking. Every other woman he’d ever been with who promised him they understood his need for silence to decompress after social events would inevitably get upset when he didn’t want to speak or be spoken to. They would argue that he listened to music, so he clearly didn’t require silence. But music was one of the tools from his toolbox. It soothed him.
Poppy was naturally doing what he’d asked of every person he’d ever dated, and none had done: just allow his mind to settle and return to his baseline.
