Tennessee frowned down at her because it was that or put his hands on her, and he wasn’t going to do that.He wasn’t ready to do that.“I like animals, Matilda,” he said, reprovingly.
“I don’t know if it’s true.”He stared at her and she shrugged.“If I had to guess, losing your childhood dog broke your heart and you have no intention of ever repairing it.Or something like that.”
The accuracy of that was a little bit breathtaking.He cleared his throat.“Why would you say that?”
Matilda scrunched up her nose as she peered up at him.“You’re that sort, aren’t you?Growly, brooding, stoic, and alone.If I had to guess, I would say that the broken heart thing was pretty much your whole personality.Like the mysterious high school girlfriend.Right?”
That was such an unexpected sucker punch that he was surprised it didn’t lay him out flat.Or maybe it did, because she started looking abashed as she gazed up at him, like her own words were playing back in her head.
“My high school girlfriend?”he heard himself ask, still reeling.Still trying to understand how she could have struck him so hard and in exactly the place he’d stopped even considering a wound anymore.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.“I shouldn’t have said that.I forget that not everyone lives in my head, and might not enjoy how direct I am or the conclusions I draw with absolutely no evidence, or the things I decide I ought to be able to talk about with impunity.Really.I’m sorry.”
She shook her head, though it seemed to him it was aimed at herself, and then she turned and started toward the house.
And he felt…
Tennessee couldn’t have said what he felt, but that was the thing, wasn’t it?That hefeltat all.When he thought he’d turned that shit off in another lifetime, when he was another man entirely.
Or really, as he looked back on it now, just a boy.Trying so hard to be the man his own father never was.
“Hey,” he said, and maybe he sounded more stern than he meant to.He watched her stiffen, even as she stopped dead.
She didn’t turn around.Her head seemed to drop a bit and he thought her shoulders tensed, but she didn’t turn back to face him.
And maybe that made it easier, here beneath the tapestry of cold stars.
He found himself rubbing at his chest with the heel of his hand, as if that could make the pain dissipate.Or the memory of pain.Or whatever this was.
“Her name was Kacey,” he said.“Still is.”
Chapter Seven
There was somethingabout the way he said that name.
Kacey.
Matilda found herself leaning closer and keeping her eyes trained on Tennessee, because something about the way he held himself had changed, too.She thought that she ought to have felt some kind of jolt when he’d said it.Something like jealousy, but she didn’t.Instead, she felt the way she always did when she saw a creature wounded.
She just wanted to put her hands on him and see how she could help.Sometimes she couldn’t.Right now,helpappeared to be the simple act of listening.And she knew she could do that.
But first she led him back inside, winding through the gauntlet of overexcited dogs and the much warier cats in their hiding spots, and then made them all lie down somewhere other than the couch.
Matilda sat and waved to the cushion beside her, encouraging Tennessee to sit down with her.He frowned, and she wondered if he was going to make a run for it.He moved toward the door and she bit her lip to keep her disappointment inside, because she knew better.Sometimes you had to let the hurt ones find their own way, no matter how much you thought you could help.
Then, in the end, all he was doing was shrugging out of his jacket and taking off his boots, lining them up neatly in the entryway where she’d kicked hers aside.
A little Tennessee detail that made her throat feel tight.
“Kacey and I dated from the moment we hit middle school,” Tennessee told her when he came back to the couch and sat down, then turned to face her so slowly that she wondered if it actually caused him pain to open up.“Not that it was reallydatingin the beginning.She lived down in Marietta and we only saw each other in school.I’m pretty sure her parents hoped the kind of sweet we were on each other would fade, but it didn’t.”He blew out a breath.“We were each other’s first everything.We thought we’d be each other’sonlyeverything, too, and when we were sixteen we planned out our whole life.”
“I planned out my whole life when I was sixteen too,” Matilda offered.“It involved pop superstardom.Tragically, only the dogs like it when I sing.”
“We were very practical,” Tennessee said, and she couldn’t quite decipher his tone then.Was it self-deprecating?Or something laced a bit more with the kind of grief she supposed everyone had, at some point, about the things they’d imagined they’d do when they couldn’t really imagine what shape their lives might take?“I would start working in the store full-time at graduation.She would leave to get a degree, then come back so we could start building our family.We figured we’d be an unstoppable team.I started fixing up the house on the property that had been falling down my whole life for us because I had no doubt, ever, that we would do exactly what we promised each other we would do.”
He shook his head and looked away.And because he was quiet for a moment, she took the opportunity to breathe in the fact that he was reallyhere.Sitting on her couch, in her house, where she’d imagined him sitting a million times or more.
Though she’d never really believed a dream like that would come true.And now that he was not only here, but opening up about his life… She hadn’t bothered to dream about something like that.Her imagination only went so far.This was impossible.
