Walking her to her door shouldn't take any time at all. It takes longer than it should. The kitchen still smells like smoke, so I push the sliding door open and we end up on the back porch without discussing it, crossing the few feet to her side like we've done it a hundred times. The porch light is a pale yellow and it catches the loose ends of her hair, and she's still in bare feet and an oversized shirt, and I'm having a harder time than usual not looking directly at her.
She stops at her sliding door. Turns to face me. Up close, there's a warmth in her expression that has nothing to do with performing warmth for anyone's benefit.
"Thank you for dinner," she says, smiling at the absurdity of the word in this context — at the burnt pan and the smoke alarm button I panicked and forgot about. "Both attempts."
"Next time I'll get the reservation right," I say, which comes out like something a person who intends there to be a next time would say.
She goes up on her toes — the same reach as the smoke detector, the same complete commitment to it — and kisses me.
She doesn't make it a question. Her hand comes up and presses flat and warm against my chest, right over my sternum, and she tilts her face up and kisses me like she's made up her mind. She smells like peanut butter and something underneath it, warm and faint, that I'm going to be thinking about for the foreseeable future.
When she pulls back, her eyes are still closed for a beat. The porch light puts a soft edge on everything. Then she opens them and she's looking at me from close enough that I can see her deciding to speak.
"I figured out a while ago," she says quietly, "that if I waited for you, we'd both be old."
My pulse is doing something I'm choosing not to acknowledge.
"Gemma," I say, and don't get any further than that because I don't know what comes after it except that I mean it, whatever it is.
She pats my chest once, twice, like she's settling something into place. Then she steps back.
"Goodnight, Beck," she says, and disappears inside.
The door clicks shut.
I stand there longer than I should, hand on my own doorknob, the porch gone quiet around the space where her hand was. Whatever I thought I was managing — the careful distance, the coffee without being asked, the not-noticing — she ended all of it on a porch the size of a welcome mat.
Chapter 13
Gemma
The coffee maker gurgles and hisses in a way that suggests it has opinions about being operated by someone who isn't Beck, and honestly, fair.
His kitchen is a study in controlled order. Mugs lined up by size. The coffee beans in a sealed container with a handwritten label — the brand, the roast date, and the grind setting. There's a sticky note on the filter basket that just saysmedium-coarsein the handwriting of a man who does not trust other people to make his coffee correctly.
I made it medium-coarse. Pretty sure. The grinder has a lot of settings.
Last night I kissed Beck on the porch and then the stars were out and neither of us said anything about it, which felt right in the way that some things feel right before your brain catches up and starts asking inconvenient questions. I slept in the in-law suite listening to the quiet of a house I'd somehow stopped treating like temporary housing, and now I'm standing in his kitchen in an oversized Station 7 t-shirt and pajama pants with dinosaurs on them — Ivy's influence — waiting for coffee like this is normal.
It is not normal.
The kitchen smells like coffee and morning and something I don't have a word for yet. The light coming through the window over the sink is still low and soft, the kind that belongs to early hours before the day has any expectations. Outside, the mountains are doing their thing — solid, unhurried, not particularly interested in what happened on the porch last night.
Neither am I. Examining it. Not yet. Right now it just exists in the way a good thing sometimes does before you've had enough coffee to start worrying about it.
My phone buzzes on the counter. I ignore it. It buzzes again.
The coffee finishes with a last self-important gurgle.
Then Beck's tablet, propped on the counter, lights up with a FaceTime call.
Ivy
I should not answer that. The pipes are still running — Beck in the shower, which I can hear through the wall. This is absolutely not my call to make.
The tablet buzzes again. And again. Ivy has the persistence of a very small, very determined velociraptor, and I know from experience that she will simply keep calling until someone answers or the device runs out of battery, whichever comes first.
I answer.
