The heaviness was back in his chest. His heart seized. This was it. She was going to ask his name. She was going to know who he was. He hadn’t wanted the fantasy to break, and yet at the same time, he wanted her to know everything.
“Yes,” he said, running a thumb over her cheekbone. “You can ask me anything.” What he wanted to say was:You can have anything. Do anything. I am yours. You own me.
She hesitated, then bit her lip. “I know this is stupid?—”
“No, it’s not.”
“I haven’t even asked it yet,” she whispered, looking up at him through her dark, inky lashes.
“If you’re asking, I know it’s not stupid.”
She let out a breath that was half a laugh. “It is, but I just… why did you say my smile was dangerous?”
He looked down at her, unsure if he could be honest. He’d always hidden the soft parts of himself, the places that could be hurt. But this woman—this perfect, infuriating, fearless woman—she’d already found her way inside.
“Because as soon as I saw it, I knew it could either make my life or destroy it,” he said, his voice so low he barely heard it himself.
She didn’t roll her eyes, or scoff, or treat it like a line. She just leaned down, pressed a kiss to the center of his chest—right over his heart—and then tucked herself back against him, as if she belonged there. As if she always had.
Oh boy, he wassofucked.
8
EIGHTEEN MONTHS LATER
Jenna’s 100-year-old,lease-to-own Craftsman Cottage was a two-bedroom, one-bath located in the heart of Hope Falls with the kind of porch that made you want to sit and watch the weather change, if one had time for that sort of thing, whichshedid not. She’d painted the front door a color called “Frolic,” which looked suspiciously like turquoise but was, evidently,notturquoise at all.
When she moved in a year and a half ago, Grace, who was Asher, her ex-husband/baby daddy’s wife’s sister, and Jenna’s realtor, said the house “needed a woman’s touch.” Jenna still wasn’t sure if that was code for run-down-piece-of-shit or just small-town optimism. Either way, she’d hung string lights in the pack patio and a seasonal wreath on the front door and, for the first time in her life, let herself think about what “home” could mean without a man being attached to it.
In her first-ever solo main suite, she packed her makeup and hair kit with the precision of a field medic. One wedding party in Hope Falls at 9:00 a.m. Another in Silver Springs at 3:00 p.m. She double-checked everybrush, tube, and palette against the list she’d started keeping on her phone after the “Mascara Debacle” of last September. Jenna’s world was a clockwork of logistics. She ran on coffee and calendar alerts, a one-woman relay team whose baton was a rolling suitcase filled with powders and pins.
As she zipped up her rig, the hallway vibrated with the staccato pop of someone’s phone keyboard. Her daughter, Blake, appeared in the doorway, mid-text, hair bundled into an artful bun on top of her head, face scrubbed in that too-clean way that made Jenna’s heart pang, she was, as the Britney song said, not a girl, not yet a woman, and Jenna was perpetually behind the curve in figuring out which one she was talking to.
“Can I stay the night at Rayna’s?” Blake didn’t look up from her phone. “We’re doing a Dune marathon. It’s for her birthday. Also, they’re getting a chocolate fountain.”
“On a school night?” Jenna responded absentmindedly. Her brain was somewhere else. That had been happening a lot lately.
She knew the answer already. She’d seen the group chat notifications roll in at 1:00 a.m., had read the itinerary Rayna’s mother sent in a group email three days ago. She was briefed, operationally and emotionally.
Blake’s thumbs hovered, then she looked up. “It’s Saturday, Mom.”
Right,Saturday. Of course it was Saturday. That’s why she had weddings. Why did she think it was a weekday?
All Jenna’s days blurred into wedding weekends and custody hand-offs and whatever else the algorithm of divorce co-parenting produced. She wanted to say ‘no,’ not because of the chocolate fountain or the fact that she’d be alone on a rare shared weekend, but because shemissedher daughter,and the math of their final years together was stark. Out of 365 days, Blake split her time with her dad, so that dropped it down to 184. Then you have to factor in sleepovers with friends and activities, mood swings, homework, work work, errands, logistics, and tense, brittle silences as Jenna waited for the other shoe to drop. The “quality time” she had left with her only daughter was slipping away faster than sand through a colander. She’d be sixteen in a few months, and once she drove…forget about it.
Blake cleared her throat, and her eyes widened, which was universal teenage code for:well?
“Sure, peanut. Just text me when you get there.”
Blake offered a distracted, “Thanks,” already half-turned to leave, then stopped and glanced back. “Oh, and cheer is moving from Tuesdays to Wednesdays after this week.”
“It is?” This was the first Jenna was hearing about it.
“Yeah.”
“So Tuesday is the only night you’ll have free?”
“I don’t know. I guess.”
